Santa Monica Buys Rand Property for Civic Center Project

The city of Santa Monica has purchased most of the 15-acre home of Rand Corp. for $53 million as part of an ambitious plan to enlarge the beachfront town’s Civic Center with new housing, office space and parks.

The famed think tank will retain a four-acre portion of the site across from the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium and build a five-story headquarters with proceeds from the land sale.

Rand, city officials and residents have struggled for more than a decade over development proposals for the site, which is bounded by Ocean Avenue on the west, Main Street on east and the Santa Monica Freeway on the north.

“It’s a critical link between the city’s downtown and its Civic Center,” Assistant City Manager Gordon Anderson said. “It’s an exciting opportunity.”

Rand officials decided to accept the city’s offer because the nonprofit said it lacked the financial resources to build a new headquarters and meet the city’s requirement for large amounts of public open space, affordable housing and other improvements that would be required to earn construction permits.

Many of the real estate firms that the research group had considered teaming up with to develop the site had also expressed concerns about the viability of any project, Rand spokeswoman Iao Katagiri said.

“The city had a fairly elaborate vision of what could be done on this land,” she said. “The economics proved to be impossible for us to meet.”

Katagiri said it will be at least a year before Rand can begin construction on its 310,000-square-foot headquarters, which is subject to final approval by the city and the California Coastal Commission. Once it completes its new building, Rand will demolish its old, sprawling headquarters, where it employs more than 1,000 people, to make way for the development on the property purchased by the city.

The deal excludes a small parcel on Ocean Avenue owned by Los Angeles-based developer Maguire Thomas, which plans to erect a four-story office building on the site of a former motel. Construction is set to begin this summer.

City officials will soon begin a planning process for the site that could take several years, Anderson said. The process will include the selection of real estate firms to develop all or portions of the site.

Under a previous Civic Center master plan, the Rand property would have included the new headquarters building, 250,000 square feet of additional office space, 20,000 square feet of retail space, 350 residential units and about four acres of public space.