Santa Monica offices get unexpected tenants: Children from five fire-ravaged schools

Yahoo

01-04-2025

Light jazz played from unseen speakers in a grassy landscape ribboned with walkways and dotted with drought-tolerant shrubbery. The idyll was hemmed in by immaculate office buildings housing high-profile Hollywood and tech tenants including Amazon, Oracle and AMC Networks.
Down by the lawn, some of the newest occupants at the Santa Monica complex, called the Water Garden, reclined in Adirondack chairs with books in hand.
Class was in session at Calvary Christian School.
It's one of five schools from the Pacific Palisades area that has relocated to Santa Monica office properties — or will soon do so — in the aftermath of the January inferno that destroyed nearly 7,000 structures and burned more than 23,000 acres.
Thousands of K-12 students will inhabit more than 200,000 square feet of space, positioning schools as an unexpected boost to Santa Monica's office leasing market, which, like so many others, remains challenged by the aftereffects of the COVID-19 pandemic. The health crisis emptied buildings and later caused many companies to shift to hybrid or fully remote work schedules.
"It wasn't on my bingo card this year to be doing school leases, but here I am — and you roll with the times," said Alex Cameron, Los Angeles regional director at BXP, a commercial real estate company that has welcomed Village School and Seven Arrows Elementary School to two of its Santa Monica properties.
Unlike at other landlords, Cameron said, his company's developments, the Colorado Center and Santa Monica Business Park, have few vacancies, and it took creative solutions to accommodate the new school tenants.
But not every owner in Santa Monica's roughly 8.4-million-square-foot office market is so lucky: The vacancy rate in the fourth quarter of 2024 was about 31%, compared with about 25% a year earlier, according to data from JLL, a commercial real estate brokerage.
Jennifer Taylor, Santa Monica's economic development manager, said the influx of schools "has been such a great way to reactivate some of our larger commercial districts and office campuses. It has created this whole new sense of vibrancy."
If there has been emblem of the market's weakness, it is the long-vacant former Sears building near the Third Street Promenade. Soon, though, it will teem with teens: Palisades Charter High School is expected to reopen there in late April.
The moves are meant to be temporary. For school populations still processing the traumas of the deadly Palisades fire, an expedient return to classrooms has been important. The leaders of Village School and St. Matthew's Parish School — both of which had relocated all or part of their schools to Santa Monica by the end of January — said their new homes aren't the same as their Palisades campuses, but the cheery settings and welcoming neighbors have made the transition easier.
"It could best be described as a collective triumph," said John Evans, head of Village School, which relocated its roughly 250 students to Colorado Center. Though the move hasn't been without its challenges for the K-6 community: The new space doesn't have permanent interior walls, requiring the use of temporary dividers.
He said other tenants at Colorado Center — companies with space there include Hulu and Roku — have offered to help with the transition. "They're [asking], 'What can we do for your graduation? Would the kids like to have a career day over here?' " Evans said. "It's just been overwhelming."
Located across from the Santa Monica Place mall — and within sight of the historic neon sign welcoming visitors to the Santa Monica Pier — the old Sears building has been vacant for the better part of a decade.
New York developer Seritage Growth Properties, which took control of struggling Sears and Kmart stores in 2015, closed the Santa Monica store two years later. The developer then launched a $50-million makeover of the property, built in 1947 and designated a historic landmark in Santa Monica, to turn it into a destination office project supported by restaurants or stores.
The upgrade — completed in 2020 just as the pandemic was throttling office leasing — was intended to attract a creative-industry tenant willing to pay top rent at a time when Google and other tech and entertainment firms were leasing hundreds of thousands of square feet on the Westside.
Seritage and its partner Invesco had been unable to find a tenant. Then Pali High was ravaged by fire in January. About 30% of its campus was damaged or destroyed, including some classroom buildings and athletics facilities. A new home was needed.
Pali High resumed classes online Jan. 21, but that was always viewed as an imperfect short-term solution for the 2,445-student school.
The former Sears site spans more than 100,000 square feet and includes a sizable parking lot, making it the rare property that could accommodate Pali High's large student body, which school leaders were intent on keeping together. Pali High signed a six-month lease for the space and holds options to extend the deal; the cost of the lease and construction work to transform the building into a school will total about $11 million, Principal Pamela Magee said.
The bulk of the money is coming from Pali High's insurance policies and is required to be spent on its relocation, Magee said. "This is a 'use it or lose it' situation," she added.
Seritage did not respond to requests for comment.
Read more: A magnetic pouch is key to enforcing school cellphone bans. Kids are getting around it
Pali High is scheduled to welcome students to the building on April 22. "These kids have been remarkably resilient and in spite of that they are suffering," Magee said. "I know they want to be together."
The hope is that it will be a short stay in Santa Monica: Pali High might return to its Palisades campus as soon as August for the start of the next school year, Magee said, and would hold classes in a "portable village" assembled on site. But it could take longer.
"Due to the uncertainty of when the Palisades will be considered a safe environmental space, the investment [in the former Sears site] provides assurance that school will open in person either in the Palisades or at Sears this fall," Magee said.
In some ways, the former Sears building may never feel like a campus: Unlike the Water Garden and Colorado Center, which are across the street from each other, there is little greenery at the 10 Freeway-adjacent site — to say nothing of a grassy field.
Magee acknowledged the challenge and said it is something school officials are discussing. "Fortunately there are lots of open spaces in Santa Monica and the city has been very accommodating to help us find locations for outside activities," she said.
The old Sears building offers other benefits. It stands at the terminus of the E, formerly Expo, light rail line and close to many restaurants, shops and other attractions.
Stewart Wilson-Turner, whose son Aiden is a sophomore at Pali High, is excited he will be able to get back to in-person learning, but noted the possibility of an infamous L.A. scourge. "I think traffic might be a bitch, pardon my French," he said. But "I think the energy is going to be very good. ... It's going to be very cool to have the school there. "
Even as the Palisades fire was still raging, city officials in Santa Monica foresaw that it might become a haven for displaced schools. On Jan. 10, the City Council adopted an emergency ordinance that allowed for a streamlined and expedited permitting review process for schools.
Roxanne Tanemori, deputy director of Santa Monica's community development department, said the action allowed for some schools to open in the city within weeks of the fire.
Read more: Schools opening near fire zones are safe, district officials say. Parents aren't so sure
One that took advantage of the emergency rules was St. Matthew's, whose 29-acre campus in the Palisades was damaged. Among those personally affected was head of school Alley Michaelson. She and her family lived in a residence on the property, and it burned. Even so, she said, work began immediately on a relocation plan for St. Matthew's.
"That was the focus on Jan. 7, in the afternoon," said Michaelson, a graduate of the school. "As emotional as it was, I just knew I had to put my head down and focus on returning to in-person learning. I think we learned from COVID — learning [online] was so, so, hard."
St. Matthew's partly reopened in a 30,000-square-foot space at the Water Garden on Jan. 27. The property houses the school's third- through eighth-grade students — 134 in total. Younger kids, including preschoolers, are attending classes nearby at a facility on Stoner Avenue. But some of those students will soon be coming to the Water Garden: St. Matthew's has inked a deal for an additional 21,000 square feet at the property. In the fall, Michaelson said, the kindergarten through second-grade classes will be able join the older students there.
Mark Yoshitake, a parent of St. Matthew's first-grader, is looking forward to that moment — because he works at the Water Garden.
Yoshitake, an executive at Amazon, said the move is an unexpected delight during a dark time: His family's home was damaged in the Palisades fire, forcing their relocation to West L.A.
"Some grace of God happened," said Yoshitake, who attended St. Matthew's and serves as a trustee there. "Out of all of that craziness there was this really interesting benefit that came out it that allows me to be even closer to my daughter."
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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.