California Real Estate News

On Friday, May 13th, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is expected to announce the bases that will be closing.  Among the list of potential closings is the Naval Base in Ventura County - the Navy's only deep-water port between San Diego and Washington state.

The down side would be the thousands of lost jobs as the Naval Base is Ventura's largest employer.  On a positive note, many real estate professionals are seeing this as a potential opening of new land that could become prime real estate if used wisely.

L.A. Daily News reports on this subject:

"We can definitely use additional land area and even wharves wherever we can come up with them," said Oxnard Harbor District Executive Director William Buenger. "We have never advocated the closing of the Navy base. In fact, it's very advantageous having the Navy sharing the harbor with us."

Mark Schniepp, director of the Santa Barbara-based California Economic Forecast, said even complete closure would not be an economic disaster for Ventura County because the base sits on prime real estate that could bring in more money, jobs and taxes if it were quickly developed in other ways.

"It's prime California real estate. That kind of land is extremely rare and in high demand," he said.

"The big 'if' is how quickly can we develop a plan to reuse that land," he said. "If the base closes and we sit around for 10 years and lose 10 years of economic activity, we could never recoup that."

So for now we will wait to see if the base is closed and what the county decides to do with the land...

Related Sites:

http://www.nbvc.navy.mil/

http://www.dailynews.com/Stories/0,1413,200~20954~2864672,00.html