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In the neighborhoods surrounding the Santa Monica Airport, homeowners know little peace. Every few minutes, the whine of a jet engine intrudes on the suburban soundscape. But relief is coming. In 2017, locals won a more than seven-decade fight to close the airport. It’s scheduled to shutter once and for all on Dec. 31, 2028. Santa Monica residents voted in 2014 to build a park on the site of the airport. But as the 2028 closure date approaches, some residents, councilmembers, and pro-housing groups are calling for the construction of affordable housing on the site in addition to a park. With an organized contingent of development opponents determined to stop them, the airport site is shaping up as the latest flashpoint in Southern Californias battles over housing construction. Neighbors of the airport say living beneath the jets is maddening and dangerousmany of the smaller planes that land there burn leaded fuel, spraying toxins on the homes and schools below. But some of the airports neighbors are so opposed to housing construction that they would consider keeping the airport open until the threat of development is quashed. A lot of the risk could be reduced simply by delaying closing, said Marc Verville, who lives near the airport. To protect ourselves, we should keep the airport open until we can address the political landscape and correct it, said Tricia Crane, chair of Northeast Neighbors of Santa Monica, a neighborhood association. The closure of an airport presents a rare opportunity in any urban environment. Spanning more than 200 acresand comprising around 4% of the citys landthe Santa Monica Airport is poised to become available for redevelopment all at once. Centrally located and publicly owned, it offers a rare chance to address the citys acute affordable housing shortage. In Santa Monica, where average rent is nearly $4,000 a month, such a moment may never come again. Building housing would be a win for everybody, said Rev. Joanne Leslie, a Santa Monica resident and a deacon in the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles. Leslie is part of a group advocating for a 3,000-unit affordable housing development on the airport site called Cloverfield Commons. Leslies group imagines their development amidst the larger park, with buildings arranged around smaller, so-called pocket parks, connected by winding paths. Building a large amount of housing on the site would likely require voter approval through another ballot measure, according to City Councilmember Jesse Zwick, who supports building some form of mixed use, mixed income housing on the site alongside a park. But he says the housing crisis in Santa Monica is so great that another referendumeven if it means a difficult fightwould be worth having. For every four or five new jobs created in Santa Monica over the past 45 years, the city added just one home, he said. The citys failure to build housing has led its population to stagnate during that time period, he added, while Californias population has nearly doubled. Will it be a fight? Sure, he said. But is it one that I think can be won? Definitely. Since the 1970s, anti-development groups have largely blocked the construction of new housing across the stateand especially in Santa Monica, where the city has permitted roughly 4,500 units of new housing in the last 20 years. Given the statewide housing shortage, state officials are asking cities to build more housing than they used to. Every eight years, cities are required to submit a plan to the state showing how they intend to meet its increasingly ambitious housing development targets. If they dont adequately plan to meet those targets, they could face penalties including the notorious builders remedy, in which developers are allowed to build whatever they want, regardless of zoning, as long as 20% of the units are affordable. Verville and Crane are worried Santa Monica will designate the airport site for housing in its next state-mandated housing plan, due in 2029. Thats why they are floating the idea of pushing to delay the closure of the airport until after that deadline as a way to keep the airport out of conversations about meeting state housing targets. The residents want to stop the airport conversion process until this kind of risk is addressed and mitigated, said Crane, and we can fulfill our vision of a park. * * * Leslie was drawn to the fight to build affordable housing on the airport site because of her work as a deacon in the Episcopal Church advocating for workers and immigrant rights. Leslie is a member of Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice (CLUE), which recently participated in the Home Is Sacred rally in support of affordable housing development on the airport site. In a place like Santa Monica, so much of the homelessness is directly related to the high cost of housing and rents, she said. We put people in a situation where they cant help themselves, and then we blame them for it. Crane and Verville say theyre not opposed to affordable housing, but that the city, facing a budget deficit, cannot afford to build any and that no subsidies exist to support buildings with lower rents. My kids want a lot of things too, said Crane. If I dont have the money for it, they dont get it. Leslies group contends that subsidies do exist to build affordable housing on the site, including funds raised by Measure A, the countys new half-cent sales tax, approved by voters in November and aimed at funding homelessness solutions and affordable housing. Verville and Crane think thats not realistic, and that the development at the site will be exclusively luxury apartments, which they say will make the city more expensive, not less. They arrived for their interviews at the airport armed with more than 90 pages of readings, including an academic working paper they said debunks the idea that building market-rate housing lowers rents and home prices. (The National Bureau of Economic Research study finds that higher housing costs are tied to a regions income growth, not to how tightly its housing supply is regulated.) Its becoming a city of rich people, Crane sighed. Santa Monica City Councilmember Zwick says that building housing, including luxur housing, does lead to lower rents and housing prices in the surrounding community. About 80% of the time, new apartments are filled by people already living nearby, he said. And when those people move into those new housing units, they open up housing in the spaces where they used to live, creating more available supply and creating downward pressure on prices. Every credible study Ive read indicates that thats how it works, he said, speaking with Capital & Main in an empty office at UCLA, where he is studying for a masters in urban planning. Besides, Zwick argued, parks and housing belong together. Apartments lacking backyards need open, public space. And parks need those who live nearby to use them. A lot of people like to say we need our Central Park, he said. But if Central Park in Manhattan had a perimeter entirely of single family homes, it wouldnt function and be as great as it is. Jack Ross, Capital & Main This piece was originally published by Capital & Main and KCRW.
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As the Trump administration funnels money into fossil fuels and the country largely retreats on climate efforts, New York City is trying to ensure its pension funds take the climate into consideration. In 2021, New York City officials announced that the citys pension funds divested an estimated $4 billion from fossil fuel companies, a landmark move in the effort to divest money from polluting industries. But divesting directly from these companies only covers a small portion of how the markets support the continued development of oil, gas, and coal. Major asset managers like BlackRock still invest in fossil fuels; so if a pension fund is invested in BlackRock, its still essentially funneling money into oil, gas, and coal. Now, those asset managers will have to show the city that their investments align with New Yorks climate goals, or they could risk losing the pension funds business. New York City Comptroller Brad Lander recently announced new climate standards for pension fund asset managers, including clear net-zero goals that decrease their scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions. Asset managers have until June 30 to submit their climate strategies to the city. Officials will evaluate those net-zero plans to ensure that they’re “real and actionable.” If an asset managers plans fail to meet those climate standards, theyll be sent to a rebid process, meaning theyll have to bid again for the pension funds business, and the funds could then move their money to a different, cleaner asset manager. As part of any new bidding process, Lander will recommend evaluating an asset manager’s corporate-level climate behavior as well. What were doing is getting the New York City pension funds to use their buying power to shift money from dirtier money managers like BlackRock, who are bad on climate, to cleaner money managers, says Pete Sikora, climate campaigns director with New York Communities for Change, a nonprofit that campaigned for these new standards. Activists hope that by taking business away from the less climate friendly asset managers, those companies will be forced to clean up their portfolios in order to get back the pension funds business. New York Citys five pension funds have nearly $300 billion worth of investments, with a few hundred asset managers. The largest is BlackRock, which holds nearly $60 billion of the funds investments. (In total, BlackRock has more than $11 trillion in assets under management.) The citys pension funds include the New York City Employees Retirement System (NYCERS), Teachers Retirement System (TRS), and Board of Education Retirement System (BERS), which have all historically been progressive on climate action; TRS is also the largest investor with $109 billion in assets. (The other two funds are the New York City Police Pension Fund and the New York City Fire Pension Fund.) Already, since 2019, New York Citys pension system has reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by 37%. It aims to be net-zero by 2040. This move to require climate plans from asset managersand to stop investing with them if their climate plans arent strong enoughis crucial to reaching that goal, Sikora says. Its a more impactful move than just divesting directly from fossil fuel companies, he notes, because it pushes the entire financial industry to be cleaner. Theres no way to stave off global climate catastrophe unless finance as a whole flees from oil, gas, coal, and deforestation, he says. The move is also a direct response to the Trump administrations efforts to funnel money into the fossil fuel industry, and to push back the entire countrys climate progress. We will not retreat from our strong climate action, a position that remains consistent with our fiduciary duty. Climate risk is financial risk, Lander said in a statement. Some may cave to the Trump administration and reverse their climate commitments, but we will not be deterred from jointly prioritizing our climate goals and financial responsibilities. (Lander is running to be the Democratic candidate in New York City’s mayoral race, and has made standing up to Donald Trump a tenet of his campaign.) New York Communities for Change has been advocating for these climate standards for years, Sikora says, and was talking to Lander about the possibilities before he was even elected as comptroller in 2021. Before that role, Lander was on the city council, where he sponsored a resolution calling on BlackRock, JP Morgan Chase, Liberty Mutual, and other financial institutions to stop lending to and investing in the fossil fuel industry. That hinted to activists that he would be supportive of these efforts. Though this effort was years in the making, it’s becoming more urgent as the financial industry backslides on climate commitments at large. In January 2025, weeks before Trump took office, six major banks left the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, a group that was setting net-zero targets for the financial world. Still, some funds are trying to hold banks to account. In February, the People’s Pension, one of the United Kingdom’s largest pension funds, said it was “prioritizing sustainability” by pulling a majority of its money out of State Street; the fund moved 20 billion to a different asset manager, Amundi, which it says has stronger climate standards. Changes to New York City’s pension funds wont happen immediately, though. After asset managers submit their climate plans to the city, officials have to review them before they make recommendations on whether to put the business up for rebid; those recommendations will likely start to happen in the summer or early fall. New York Citys move to divest its pension fund from fossil fuels did face a lawsuit from oil and gas companies in 2023; in 2024, the city won. These additional climate requirements may also face criticism or legal pushback, particularly from the Trump administration, but Sikora is confident it will hold up in court. Investing in fossil fuels is no longer a sure route to profitability; thousands of oil and gas assets are at risk of becoming strandedmeaning they would be unprofitable or forced to shut down years before plannedbecause of the impacts of climate change. New York City pension funds have an interest in a healthy world, he says. You dont have New York City pension funds in a dead New York City that is submerged under rising seas. . . . On a basic, prudential level, you shouldnt be furthering your own destruction with your investments.
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Perus decision to shrink its archeological park home to the famous Nazca Lines by around 42%an area roughly the size of 1,400 soccer fieldshas sparked alarm among conservationists, archaeologists and environmental advocates. Critics say the rollback paves the way for informal mining and weakens decades of cultural and ecological protection, while the government says the adjustment reflects updated scientific studies and does not compromise the UNESCO World Heritage status or the sites core protections. The reduction not only removes protectionsit does so precisely where extractive activity is expanding, said Mariano Castro, Peru’s former vice minister of the environment, adding that the decision could cause very serious risks and cumulative damage, as it excludes zones with active or pending mining claims. Castro added that safeguards for archaeological heritage during the formalization of artisanal mining are already limited. This is made worse by the ministry of cultures failure to consider the cumulative impact of dozens or even hundreds of mining operations on sensitive archaeological zones, he said. The area in question forms part of a UNESCO-recognized World Heritage Site, home to the Nazca Linesmassive geoglyphs etched into the desert thousands of years agoand one of Perus most fragile desert ecosystems. Peruvian environmental lawyer César Ipenza, who has closely followed the decision, said the resolution has already been approved and that it reduces the Nazca zone by more than 1,000 hectares. This is a weakening of both environmental and cultural protections, Ipenza said. The state should be upholding its commitments under international agreements, not yielding to private interests. Ipenza and others say the rollback reflects a pattern of regulatory concessions to mostly informal gold miners. Theres an alliance between the current government and informal mining sectors, he said. The legal framework continues to be relaxed to benefit them. Peru’s ministry of culture, which decided on May 30 to reduce the Nazca reserve from about 5,600 square kilometers to roughly 3,200 square kilometers, declined to answer specific questions from the Associated Press. Instead, it sent a press release saying the adjustment was based on updated archaeological studies and does not affect the UNESCO World Heritage designation or its buffer zone. The ministry said it remains committed to preserving the sites cultural heritage through regulated management. A day after the May 30 decision, Fabricio Valencia, Peru’s minister of culture, acknowledged that illegal mining exists within the reserve. Unfortunately, informal mining is an activity present in this area, but the measure we have taken does not mean it will be encouraged, nor that the likelihood of any harm from informal mining will increase. That will not happen, Valencia said on RPP, one of Peru’s largest radio programs. When asked for more details about the presence of illegal activity in the reserve, Valencia said, there are some mining deposits, but I dont have exact information on what type of mineral is there. UNESCO did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Castro, the former vice minister, warned the move could violate Perus own laws. It contravenes Article 5(h) of the Environmental Impact Assessment Law, which mandates the protection of archaeological and historical heritage, he said. Ipenza said the government is enabling illegality under the guise of technical adjustments. It is shameful to forget our ancestors and our heritage, and to disguise decisions that pave the way for sectors seeking to impose illegality, such as illegal and informal mining,” he said. “This decision benefits those groups and harms all Peruvians. The Associated Presss climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find APs standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org. By Steven Grattan, Associated Press
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