Santa Monica Coalition for a Livable City

The Papermate Project:
It's Massive, It Will Bring Horrendous Traffic, and It's Poorly Designed

On the abandoned PaperMate factory site, in the heart of Santa Monica, (26th and Olympic) an out-of-town developer wants to build a massive project of 770,000 sq. ft. --- right across the street from the Water Garden (now acknowledged by city planners as a planning disaster, tying up traffic mornings and evenings for miles around it). Because the project is overwhelmingly commercial, it could bring 15,000 additional car trips per day to this already impenetrable area. To date the developer has ignored residents' calls for a reduced project with a greater mix of residential and far less commercial. With your help, that's about to change.

When the owners of Santa Monica Place proposed a huge, new development to add 1,000,000 square feet on that site, residents like you came together to say "no." Residents knew that the larger the project, the more traffic it would bring. Today, thanks to you, SM Place was redesigned with no increase in square footage.

We won that fight and we can win this one. It's all up to us – the residents who live here and in our surrounding communities who understand that by banding together we can successfully scale down mega projects like this one.

How can we make this project more reasonable and lessen its impacts?

The Papermate Project's developer is preparing its Environmental Impact Report (EIR) now. After the EIR is delivered to the city, we will have just 45 days to weigh in. It's important for us to have a real voice in this process, so we're hiring our own land use experts and attorneys to analyze and respond to the EIR, especially as to the regional traffic impacts. And we're asking our neighboring cities and communities to join us.

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