Sunset Park

Sunset Park is the part of Santa Monica south of Pico Boulevard and east of Lincoln Boulevard, running to the city line with Los Angeles on the south and east. The city's neighborhood map gives this area to the Friends of Sunset Park. Santa Monica Airport fills the southeast corner, Santa Monica College's main campus sits at the northwest corner, and Clover Park is in between.

It's one of Santa Monica's two big single-family districts, with slightly more houses on the county's parcel map than North of Montana: about 2,600, plus about 3,150 apartment units and about 750 condo units. R1, the single-unit zone, covers about 54% of the zoned land inside our map, and R2 another 16%. Census numbers for the three tracts that make up the neighborhood show about 55% of households renting, against about 71% for Santa Monica as a whole.

Ocean Park Boulevard runs through the middle to the airport, with a short strip of cafes and a bakery around 17th Street and a shopping center near 29th. Pico Boulevard, the north edge, has more restaurants and the college.

Pilots were landing on this mesa by 1917. The Army named it Clover Field in 1922 after Greayer Clover, a local pilot killed in the First World War, and the city bought the land in 1926 with a parks bond. In 1924 four Douglas World Cruisers took off from Clover Field on the first flight around the world, and Douglas flew its DC-1 prototype here in 1933. Today the airport covers 192 acres, about 3.5% of the city's land.

In December 2017 the city shortened the runway to 3,500 feet, and jet traffic fell hard: the city counted 2,973 jet operations in 2025, against 17,338 in 2016. Propeller traffic went the other way. Total takeoffs and landings reached 78,693 in 2025, up 39% from 2024, after a new flight school opened in April 2025. Since December 2025, JSX has flown scheduled service to Las Vegas on 30-seat turboprops under a lease that ends in November 2028.

The city's rules ban takeoffs from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. on weekdays and until 8 a.m. on weekends, ban touch-and-go training on weekends, holidays and weekday nights, and fine aircraft that go over 95 decibels at the runway-end monitors. Planes take off toward the west about 95% of the time and are asked to turn north at the shoreline or south at Lincoln. One of the city's noise monitors sits on 18th Street between Dewey and Navy.

Air-quality studies from 2009 and 2010 found higher ultrafine-particle levels downwind of the runway, to the east in Los Angeles, and elevated lead near the tarmac. Both predate the runway cut. In 2022 the city switched its self-serve pump to unleaded fuel, though leaded avgas is still sold at the field.

LA County's airport land use map for Santa Monica Airport, dated 2003, covers the airport and the runway protection zones off each end, and the western zone reaches over Sunset Park blocks roughly between 18th and 23rd streets near Dewey Street. The map predates the 2017 runway cut. If a house is inside that airport influence area, state law puts an airport-in-vicinity notice in the Natural Hazard Disclosure. Most of Sunset Park is outside it, and the address decides.

Rent control works the same as elsewhere in Santa Monica. About 90% of the neighborhood's apartment units are in buildings from before 1979, so most are controlled, and the September 2026 increase is 2.6%. Most houses and separately sold condos can be rented at market rates under the state's Costa-Hawkins Act, but the city's just-cause eviction rules still apply.

The city's liquefaction map touches a few blocks at the far east end, mainly along 34th Street and Centinela Avenue. There's no state earthquake fault zone and no FEMA special flood hazard area in the neighborhood.

Our Sunset Park map had 9 houses for sale on September 25, 2026, asking about $2.0 million to $4.0 million, with a median around $2.8 million. There were also 6 condos from about $715,000 to $1.5 million, 2 townhouses, and 8 small income properties from about $1.56 million to $3.95 million.

On a Sunset Park house I spend time on the street at different hours, because the airport, the college and Pico traffic all show up at different times. Then the permits on any additions, since a lot of these houses have grown over the years, a sewer line and foundation inspection on the older ones, and the Natural Hazard Disclosure for the airport notice. If you're buying with a rebuild in mind, have an architect run the R1 numbers first.