There was recently an agenda item for the City Council to discuss potential leasing arrangements for Long Beach’s municipally-owned airport. The agenda item was quickly tabled from the closed-door session for which it was originally proposed, to be discussed publicly at a future date.
Though the agenda item was left open-ended, a popular narrative soon formed: the City Council discussion would probably revolve around sales and leasing options for the Municipal Airport property, possibly leading to a land sale or even a privately-operated airport. While this might provide the city with additional capital to fill a growing budget gap, it might ultimately prove short-sighted.
No matter how it is structured legally, if the city sells the Long Beach Airport, it will lose significant regulatory control. This is an urban airport with flight restrictions in place to protect surrounding neighborhoods, but at the same time the pressure of growing regional air travel and shipping will pressure local airports to expand capacity. Control of the airport must thus remain in the hands of an elected government, accountable to the local citizenry. Such control is necessary to allow the airport to properly adapt to changes in air travel.
The airline industry will continue to evolve as it adapts to user trends, advancements in technology, and shifts in the global environment: airports will have to keep pace or become obsolete. High-speed rail to northern California and Nevada could significantly reduce the demand for regional air travel. The creation of planes that are quieter and can take off and land with shorter distances could both expand the airport’s capacity and shrink its footprint. Security restrictions and environmental regulations might further burden urban airport operations. The introduction of larger planes could make smaller airports obsolete. When looking at all of these potential developments, the very existence of the Long Beach Airport in its current location is not a forgone conclusion.
Long Beach Airport might go the way of those in Austin, Denver, and Sacramento. In all three of these cases, communities grew around the airport to a point that expansion was impossible. As a result, these cities shut down their urban airports to develop larger airports on their outskirts. With this history in mind, it bears noting that the Los Alamitos Army Airfield, just east of Long Beach, could someday be decommissioned and converted into a municipal airport. This airfield features open spaces at either end of its landing strips that are two to three times those surrounding the landing strips of Long Beach’s current airport. This means that the impact of air traffic upon surrounding residents would be far less severe. One recent candidate for the 5th district seat on Long Beach’s city council suggested developing a floating airport off the coast, an idea that actually has precedents in other parts of the world. Others advocated converting the Long Beach Naval Station and Shipyard into a seaside airport facility back when it was decommissioned in the 1990s. My fantasy is for the port’s Pier J to become a downtown-adjacent airport, an airport that could provide increased economic benefits for convention and visitor business in the downtown area. Were this Pier J location used for an airport, landings would take place over water and take-offs would take place over six miles of port, industrial, and refinery facilities, rather than residences. But that is perhaps a discussion for another day…
If the current airport were to someday cease operations, the value of the land in which it is located would be incredible, and developing it would ideally be framed in terms of a regional plan including not just Long Beach but the adjoining communities of Signal Hill, Lakewood, and Paramount. The site currently occupied by the airport comprises nearly one-twentieth of the city’s area, second only to the Port of Long Beach in land mass. The nearly 1,200-acre site would represent the largest urban “infill” development site in the Los Angeles area, larger even than the Playa Vista city-within-a-city development near Marina Del Ray. To put this in perspective, this site could fit three UCLA campuses, enough farm land to feed a quarter percent of the city’s population (not a lot) or sufficient housing for over 10,000 people at a density like that of the California Heights neighborhood (near the airport) or 50,000 people at a density similar to that of Alamitos Beach (near downtown). Currently the airport is, in effect, a large gaping hole in the city’s fabric. Were there housing or some other kind of development on this site, it could help connect the neighborhoods of California Heights and Bixby Knolls to eastern Long Beach, Signal Hill, and Lakewood.
It is, in short, of the utmost importance that Long Beach maintain control over the airport’s operation, including helping decide questions regarding the future of this large parcel of land in the city’s heart. To sell the airport out of desperation during an economic downturn with limited current land-use opportunities will not provide Long Beach with the best value for one of the largest contiguous parcels in the region. City staff should continue seeking new options, including asking questions about the broader future of the airport, but to make major decisions now just to raise revenue would be unfortunate. I can see a future where the land upon which the airport land now sits might be sold, but that future is not today.