RAND's Santa Monica's Recent Economic and Social Trends: A Case Study with Regional Comparisons was initiated and paid for by RAND itself, not the City. It covers business revenue, homelessness, crime, commercial property and housing against Beverly Hills, Culver City, West Hollywood and Venice. This page charts the numbers the report prints, and rebuilds its crime chapter from the City's open data, the same police records RAND used.
| Category | 2015 ($M) | 2025 ($M, 2015 dollars) | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Clothing and accessories | 436.3 | 108.7 | -75.1% |
| Other retail | 394.7 | 192.5 | -51.2% |
| Food services and drinking | 637.2 | 485.5 | -23.8% |
| All other outlets | 784.3 | 585.4 | -25.4% |
| Home furnishings and appliances | 102.9 | 34.1 | -66.9% |
| Motor vehicles and parts | 538.5 | 479.1 | -11.0% |
| Gasoline stations | 104.1 | 54.1 | -48.0% |
| Food and beverage stores | 120.3 | 107.8 | -10.4% |
| General merchandise | 46.1 | 41.9 | -9.1% |
| Building materials and garden | 72.4 | 85.9 | +18.6% |
| Total | 3,236.9 | 2,175.0 | −32.8% |
Real taxable sales in Santa Monica were at about 60 percent of their 2015 level in early 2026, while Beverly Hills and West Hollywood were 10 to 15 percent below 2015 and Culver City 25 percent below (pp. 4 to 6). Every category fell except building materials and garden. Clothing lost three quarters of its 2015 volume.
Retail vacancy has been the highest of the four cities since late 2021, and at least 45 percent of it is on the Third Street Promenade and at Santa Monica Place; the Promenade's 37 CoStar properties were 31 percent vacant in August 2026, and the buildings over 30,000 square feet 47 percent (p. 8 and p. 12). Office vacancy passed 20 percent in June 2026, second to Culver City (p. 8).
Occupancy reached 76 percent by March 2026, the highest of the submarkets compared, yet real short-term lodging revenue recovered by FY2022 and has declined since, and hotel revenue fell a further 13 percent in 2025 (p. 10). The authors read this as hotels cutting real prices to fill rooms. Tourism employment fell 16 percent in 2024, against 5 percent in West Hollywood, and annual visitors stand at 58 percent of the 7.5 million pre-pandemic baseline (pp. 11 to 12).
| City tax, April 2026 | Santa Monica | Peers (Table B.2) |
|---|---|---|
| Hotel tax | 15% | Beverly Hills 14%, Culver City 14%, Los Angeles 14%, West Hollywood 12.5% |
| Home-share tax | 17% | Los Angeles 14% |
| Parking tax | 18% private, 10% public | Los Angeles 10%; none in the other cities listed |
| Utility users tax | 10% | Culver City 11%, Long Beach 5% |
| Sales and use tax | 10.75% | Culver City 10.75%, West Hollywood 10.5%, Beverly Hills 9.75% |
The 2019 and 2026 bars are printed in the report; the other years are read from its chart and are approximate. RAND's weighted count peaked at 1,026 in 2019 and was 793 in the preliminary 2026 count (p. 15), concentrated in the downtown census tract. Only Venice is at a similar level; Culver City, Beverly Hills and West Hollywood are far lower (p. 17). Every private-sector interviewee asked ranked disorder and crime tied to homelessness as the top downtown problem (p. 20).
RAND used twenty years of SMPD records for eight offenses. Three findings carry the chapter: aggravated assault more than doubled from 2013 to a 2018 peak and stayed high, robbery roughly doubled over the same years, and both increases were almost entirely downtown, ZIP 90401, while in the rest of the city violent and property crime are as low as in two decades (pp. 21 to 23). Vehicle theft rose citywide around 2020, as it did nationally.
Source: the City's open incident file, 164,424 UCR-coded reports, placed on the block and assigned to a ZIP by the nearest City address point. The file ends in 2024-05, so RAND's 2024 and 2025 points are not here, and it runs below the department's published totals after 2022 (the open file has 3,956 Part I reports for 2023 against SMPD's 4,884). Downtown aggravated assaults went from 35 in 2013 to 208 in 2018; the rest of the city went from 114 to 222.
RAND covered the city in 500-foot hexagons, 1,144 of them, and found the top 5 percent held 50.6 percent of aggravated assaults and 71 percent of robberies in 2023 to 2025 (p. 23). The same grid over the open data gives 1,160 hexagons; the top 58 held 55.6% of aggravated assaults in 2021 to 2023.
| Offense | Top 5% of hexagons, 2021 to 2023 (this site) | Top 1% | RAND, 2023 to 2025 | Reports placed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Larceny | 42.6% | 19.9% | about half | 7,139 |
| Grand theft auto | 31.9% | 11.6% | about 30% | 1,514 |
| Burglary | 33.3% | 9.8% | about 30% | 1,972 |
| Vandalism | 37.0% | 12.9% | about 30% | 2,189 |
| Simple assault | 52.4% | 22.7% | about half | 2,094 |
| Aggravated assault | 55.6% | 23.8% | 50.6% | 1,167 |
| Robbery | 67.3% | 33.1% | 71% | 447 |
The hotspot hexagons sit next to each other downtown, mostly west of Lincoln Boulevard between Wilshire and the freeway. They are drawn on the 3D map, with the top 1 percent in red. Burglary has a second cluster in western Wilshire-Montana and vandalism several in Ocean Park, as RAND reports (p. 24).
The comparison with Venice and West Hollywood (Figure 4.2, LAPD and Sheriff's data, 2010 to 2023) found Santa Monica's trends unexceptional: Venice had a larger proportional rise in aggravated assault, West Hollywood none; burglary and vehicle theft rose earlier and more in Santa Monica (p. 22). The report checked 911 call volumes against recorded crimes for assault, robbery and burglary and found they track, so the trends are not an artifact of recording (p. 25, Figures D.2 to D.4). It counts overdose deaths only countywide (1,123 in 2016, 2,298 in 2025) and uses no statistical model, so it does not test what caused any change (pp. 24 to 25, p. 40).
A Santa Monica housing project takes over six years from application to final permit, against 4.9 years in the West Los Angeles planning area, and the gap is in the City's entitlement and permit stages (pp. 29 to 30). Inside the Coastal Zone, entitlement takes 701 days against 396 outside (Table 5.1). Sixteen builder's remedy applications for 4,260 units were filed in 2022 and had not reached permit issuance by 2024 (p. 28). New construction pencils only at $3,500 to $4,500 a month for a one-bedroom (p. 34).
The authors' bottom line: the challenges are concentrated downtown, so the effort should be too (p. 38).