As a retired Real Estate professional with four decades of experience on the Westside in Lending, Appraisals, and Property Management, I am 100% in agreement with the December 15 letter from Mark Smith about the need to reverse the closure of Santa Monica Airport. Mr. Smith's arguments are all perfectly on point. However, there is one point that he does not mention: In Real Estate, there is a principle known as doing your due diligence. Essentially, that means that before you buy a property, it is your responsibility to study the neighborhood, see what is there, and if there is anything you don't like - such as an airport that has been there for over 100 years - then you forget that neighborhood and look somewhere else. You do not have any right to buy your property, move in, and then demand that the airport be closed.
What we've got is: A corrupt city that wants all of the tax dollars it can get, has never seen a development proposal that it didn't like, and doesn't mind if it has to destroy our quality of life to get those tax dollars; a group of greedy developers, who also don't care if they have to destroy our quality of life to get the huge amount of money that is on the table here; and a group of corrupt homeowners, as Mr. Smith mentioned, who want to force the closure of SMO to unethically raise their property values.
The proposals that Mr. Smith makes are all good, ethical, workable solutions to the question of what to do with SMO.
Dean Wahls
Venice