PURE FREE MARKET FORCES DO NOT EXIST
At its meeting tonight (3/20), the City Council will vote on enacting a moratorium to stop the conversion of multi-tenant industrial parks into industrial condominiums.
The CM PRESS supports enacting such a moratorium because such conversions might frustrate the intent of the Council in putting in a residential overlay on top of the industrial zoning on the Westside bluffs so that the bluffs can evolve to higher and better uses.
Expect to hear some freshly minted laissez-faire industrialists claim that the City should let the free market work and not do anything. Of course, most of these folks don't live in Costa Mesa and they'd never allow the very buildings and businesses that they own in our city be on bluffs in their own cities.
Furthermore, the problem with the pure free market argument of those who don't want the bluffs to evolve away from industrial uses is that the City has actually been protecting the industrial uses on the bluffs for decades, so to simply now say that the City should not do anything to give a boost to the Westside revitalization gives an unfair advantage to the industrial uses.
Look at it this way. The industrial uses have a built in inertia and inertia is overcome by doing something to change that inertia, not doing nothing.
As you may recall, Newton's First Law--the Law of Inertia--states that a thing at rest will remain at rest unless an external force is applied. In other words, that rock on your lawn isn't going to move unless you do something to move it. If you walk out on your lawn and say: "Okay, rock, you can either move or not move because I believe in free market forces," you can count on it never moving. You have to overcome the inertia.
That's where we are in trying to revitalize the Westside. We have to do something or it will not revitalize itself. We have to encourage the building of homes.
Homes with ocean views and ocean influences command higher prices than those that don't have these things. Those who can afford to buy such desirable homes often have higher discretionary incomes that they can spend in our local stores. Their presence in our city will encourage more upscale stores to locate on the Westside.
Such homes, in other words, can lead the Westside into being the great part of our city that it should be. They will reverse the present downward spiral and turn it into an upward spiral.
With homes on the bluffs we will see a lower crime rate, fewer gangs, better schools and a better quality of life in Costa Mesa as our city joins other ocean close communities that have homes on their bluffs.
Yes on the moratorium.
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