Quote:
Originally Posted by Quixote
^ Many airports around the world are surrounded by open fields or greenery. Transforming this into a man-made urban forest would also create a buffer for the nearby residential communities, raising their property values.
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In an ideal world, the construction of highrises would be completely unrestricted for the entire LA basin, and then your idea could potentially work. However, the reality is that, due to
NIMBYism + really shitty state and local building codes + byzantine approval processes, single-family housing is usually the only thing you can build in SoCal.
So because of all this single-family housing, SoCal has a massive housing shortage, and, ironically, the only immediate solution for this housing shortage is to build even more single-
family housing. This housing takes up a lot of cheap land that would otherwise be free for commercial and industrial use, which has caused a cascade of shortages in commercial and
industrial land. So now, they can either relieve this shortage by redeveloping land which has already been developed (such as this land here), or they can develop undeveloped land,
meaning they have to clear even more wild forest and mediterranean scrub land. Which would you choose?