COMMUNITY COMMENTARY -- Tom Egan

Costa Mesa doesn’t look very broken at first glance, but it is. And

Newport Beach has its problems.

The basic problem is that Costa Mesa has run out of room. Our frontier

attitude has told us there was always time and space to fix problems

later, but “later” is here and our initial resource -- cheap land -- is

spent. There are few green fields left on which to build more shopping

malls, tilt up more office parks and plant more subdivisions.

Overnight, it seems, we’ve become a real city. Rapid development has

made us a small city with many of the nasty problems of a metropolis.

We’ve even achieved a certain notoriety: We are recognized by the Fannie

Mae Foundation as one of 53 so-called “Boomburgs” in the U.S. -- suburban

cities that face extreme degrees of development-related problems.

We’re swamped with urban problems: traffic congestion; gangs;

crumbling, overcrowded housing stock; creaky business stock; shoddy

streets and alleys; and schools that don’t measure up. The fact that we

still have tough problems proves that the well meaning “If you don’t

build it, they won’t come” approach hasn’t really paid off.

The problems suggest that we break out of the mold we’ve been in for

50 years and think afresh. And any such fresh thoughts had better start

from the reality that it takes resources to fix problems. A way to get

resources to fix growth problems is, paradoxically, to keep on growing.

Growth expands the tax base and brings in more municipal revenue. But

growth must be done cleverly so that problems are solved, not worsened.

And this is where systematic and comprehensive planning becomes

important.

To get the ball rolling, some logical, albeit outrageous, ideas: If we

can’t expand horizontally, then we expand vertically. Let’s plant some

40-story high-rises in the industrial area of Westside. This would allow

us to keep existing businesses while adding new ones. We could focus on

new kinds of businesses that aren’t so traffic-intensive and whose

workers value alternative forms of transportation, such as walking,

bicycling and mass transit.

A new class of high net worth individuals would be attracted by the

penthouses and the sweeping views from upper-story units in the

high-rises. A bonus: high rises in the city on a hill might forestall

expansion of flights out of John Wayne Airport.

Proper infrastructure would support the growth. This might include a

free shuttle/jitney that runs every 10 minutes down the spine of

southtown -- West 19th and East 17th streets -- connecting Newport

Terrace on the west to Westcliff on the east. Free package delivery to

the customers, as in subway-dependent Manhattan, would be part of the

infrastructure.

We could reduce traffic while improving mobility. Low-income residents

would have more freedom of choice and wouldn’t need shopping carts. We

can go down, as well as up. If the rest of the Costa Mesa Freeway were

built underground and branched out, we would immediately reduce southtown

traffic problems to nil. We could reclaim our downtown, and Newport Beach

could reclaim its Mariner’s Mile from the hordes of commuters. Traffic

that now creeps through Eastside would speed underneath it. West

Newport’s traffic problem would disappear under Costa Mesa’s Westside and

the Santa Ana River, emerging at Brookhurst Street.

Cost? High, but what’s the cost of not doing it?

Let’s grasp the nettle. It’s time to be bold -- as bold in solving our

developed city problems as Costa Mesa’s early leaders were bold in

finding ways to attract developers.

* TOM EGAN is a Costa Mesa resident and Westside activist.