Office and Retail Converting to Schools in Santa Monica
Five schools that were displaced by the Palisades fire are relocating to converted office and retail space in Santa Monica.
Thousands of K-12 students will occupy more than 200,000 square feet of space in Santa Monica, the Los Angeles Times reported.
“It wasn’t on my bingo card this year to be doing school leases, but here I am. You roll with the times,” said Alex Cameron, Los Angeles regional director at BXP, which has welcomed Village School and Seven Arrows Elementary School to two of its Santa Monica properties.
Unlike many of the office landlords in Santa Monica, BXP’s developments, the Colorado Center and Santa Monica Business Park, have few vacancies and it took creative solutions to accommodate the new school tenants.
The vacancy rate of the 8.4M square foot office market in Santa Monica hit 31% in the fourth quarter of 2024, up from about 25% a year earlier, according to JLL.
At the Water Garden, an office complex housing high-profile Hollywood and tech tenants including Amazon, Oracle and AMC Networks, classes are in session for the Calvary Christian School.
Santa Monica’s economic development manager, Jennifer Taylor, told the Times that the influx of displaced 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,” she said.
The second floor of a long-vacant former Sears building near the Third Street Promenade is being converted into classrooms for Palisades Charter High School. The redevelopment is expected to be ready to welcome the students by the end of this month.
The moves are meant to be temporary, but for school populations still processing the trauma of the Palisades fire, a quick return to classrooms has been an important part of the recovery.
Also, two schools, the Village School and St. Matthew’s Parish School, relocated all or part of their schools to Santa Monica by the end of January, as firefighters were still containing the embers of the Palisades fire, which destroyed nearly 7,000 structures and burned more than 23,000 acres.
“It could best be described as a collective triumph,” said John Evans, head of the Village School, which relocated 250 K-6 students to Colorado Center.
Tenants at the Colorado Center, including Hulu and Roku, have offered to help the school with graduation ceremonies or career days, he said.
NY-based developer Seritage Growth Properties took over the vacant Sears building in 2015 and invested $50M with partner Invesco in a renovation that was completed in 2020.
The 100K square foot property is large enough to accommodate Palisades Charter High School’s 2,445 students. The school has 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 learning center will total about $11M, most of which will be coming from the school's insurance policies.
Source: GlobeSt/ALM