SANTA ANA HEIGHTS--THE NEW SURFRIDGE?
See those streets on the left of the photo? There used to be more than 800 homes in that neighborhood called Surfridge.
Great location, right on the beach in tony Playa Del Rey in Los Angeles County. It's now a ghost town. Wonder why? That's Los Angeles International Airport on the right. Get it?
Meanwhile, down the coast in Orange County,the folks in Santa Ana Heights got their wish and are now part of tony Newport Beach. That's the good news for them.
The bad news is that Santa Ana Heights may go the way of Surfridge.
The problem for Surfridge was that it was under the landing and takeoff flight paths at Los Angeles International Airport--just as Santa Ana Heights is under the flight paths of John Wayne Airport.
Folks in Surfridge didn't worry much, though. Hey, they could cap flights out of LAX and do other things to keep their area safe from the airport. Why, they could even stop LAX from expanding by writing letters to the newspapers.
In truth, they were just whistling past the graveyard.
The inevitability of bigger airplanes and more air traffic caught up with them. It's a shame, too, because, given their ocean close location, even tear down shacks in that area (sans an airport) would now probably sell for more than a million dollars each.
The people in Surfridge--more than 2,000 of them--didn't have much of a chance of stopping the expansion of LAX, even though they apparently didn't know it or wouldn't accept that fact.
That's because there was no alternative location available to replace LAX.
The folks in Santa Ana Heights do have a chance of stopping the expansion of JWA. That's because there is an alternative location available to replace it--a relatively small part of massive Camp Pendleton.
Unfortunately, about the only people talking about the possibility of building an LAX size airport on a tiny portion of Camp Pendleton are those of us in the CM PRESS skyscraper.
We've watched some of the others involved in trying to keep JWA from expanding. To us, some of them look like a bunch of chickens running around with their heads cut off. Their only ideas seem to be to keep trying to cap flights out of JWA or to use some sort of fast trains to Ontario, or to a former airforce base in San Bernardino that they think could be turned into an international airport.
We think those choices are bad ones and that some are just wasting time and effort that could be put into a focused campaign to build an airport on Camp Pendleton that will serve the area's needs for the next hundred years and which will head off the necessity of JWA growing.
Don't buy our arguments above? Well, here's our axioms. Prove us wrong:
1. Demand for air travel will continue to grow.
2. Planes will continue to get larger.
3. To accommodate both the demand for air travel and for larger planes, airports will have to grow.
4. If no alternative airport is found to take the pressure off JWA, it will continue to grow.
5. Santa Ana Heights is to JWA as Surfridge was to LAX.
So, what's to be done? Residents of Santa Ana Heights (or whatever they now call their area) need to get better organized and start contacting politicians at all levels of government to get them on their side, and they need to present them with an alternative to JWA. And, they need to speak with one voice about one alternative. They also have to make their case to others in Newport Beach and Costa Mesa who are not as directly affected by JWA.
Again, our belief is that the most viable alternative to JWA would be a new airport on a tiny part of Camp Pendleton. That's the location we would push if we lived in Santa Ana Heights.
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Those are our opinions. Thanks for reading them.
