El Toro Housing Prospect

While the jockeying continues over the future of the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station, partisans have angled for various immediate uses on or around the base. Most of these proposals are better off waiting for a clearer sense of what the future will be, but there is one that offers a short-term solution to the area’s affordable housing crisis.

Among those that can wait is new development around the base. The Airport Land Use Commission recently declined to allow construction of homes and offices in large areas near the base, and with good reason.

Opponents of an airport want to bring in more people to expand their constituency. Some officials in surrounding cities have been clear that they want new warriors to join the fight against the airport. But the commission was right to protect the base’s 18,000-acre buffer zone until the resolution of the airport debate is clearer.

If the anti-airport forces win their argument, there would be ample time to plan for uses around the base that are compatible with the Millennium Plan. If the airport goes in, that buffer will prove important.

Landowners understandably want to get on with the planning for the future, but this area has gone decades without homes or schools in a 14,000-acre area outside the base. A longer wait would not impose an undue burden. Lake Forest wisely has waited to do its rezoning so that those who might come in are not misled or later turned into unhappy campers.

The county wanted to install cargo flights early on in a move that surely would have facilitated a commercial airfield at the base. Cargo flights were described as setting the stage by bringing on immediate economic benefit. Last year, the plan for those flights fell apart because the county was not able to get the master lease to manage the property, and the deeding of the base to the county isn’t supposed to occur for a year or two.

On both questions--development around the base, and the cargo flights on it--the best approach is to wait.

Nothing is simple when it comes to starting El Toro’s base reuse engine, and everything is interrelated.

A plan to rent the officer’s club for banquets and weddings fell apart because the Navy wouldn’t authorize the sale of alcohol. That turned on failure to get state approval to turn over police authority on the base.

Transferring police power has been a routine matter at other closed military bases, but not El Toro. In December, the State Lands Commission accepted the argument of airport opponents that approving the transfer would allow the cargo flights before all the necessary federal and state environmental studies were done.

While the future of the base is in limbo for now, there is an argument for making temporary use of the 5,568 homes at the base. The county has a critical affordable housing shortage, at the same time it has a phenomenally low unemployment rate. What that means is that to find affordable housing, many low- and middle-wage earners in the high-powered economy have to live elsewhere. Topic No. 1 on the county’s agenda has been this so-called jobs-housing imbalance.

It likely is going to be a while before the El Toro mess is sorted out. It would make sense to allow short-term leases for workers, with the understanding that they would have to move on once a reuse plan is implemented. The federal and county governments could work together to make this happen, perhaps enlisting the assistance of a housing management firm. This housing is needed now, not later. Even if the units were rented at $500 per month, it would generate millions in income.

The airport-versus-nonaviation-use debate is going to play out eventually. Making the right decisions for the interim period is in everyone’s best interest.