OCtoSV said:
The Wall St banks advise on many of these deals, not to mention all the debt offerings being done by the big tech companies with money so cheap. They all have major offices in the Bay area.
SJC airport was like SNA when I moved here, but the business environment pushed the growth into an intl airport. ETIA was more of a field of dreams approach but nevertheless it seems very likely it would have generated business growth.
SV demographics are pretty close to Irvine. My kids high school is 50% white/50% Asian with 40+ NM scholars named this year. I see OC -> LA as similar to SJC/Peninsula -> East Bay, and Caltech/Harvey Mudd/Pomona College/USC/UCLA stacks up to Cal/Stanford. Bay area commerce is greatly facilitated by 3 int'l airports (OAK, SFO, SJC) within 50 mi of each other, and with 5x the population you'd think metro LA/OC would have benefited from a second int'l airport. oh well.
With the high number of execs that likely have to do frequent coast to coast and intl travel that live in NB they would probably be thrilled if SNA was an intl airport.
Venture capitalists are closer to tech mentality than Wall Street/Banker mentality. They don't fly in and fly out to make a deal. Wall Street and lawyers help but VCs are fundamentally different. Of course they have offices in the BA...that has nothing to do with SJC.
SJ has tried to make SJC an international airport for years. They tried it in the 1980s/1990s when they were selling direct flights to Japan from SJC...eventually they failed. SFO is still the dominant international airport. Peninsula is so much closer to SFO than it is SJC, especially factoring in traffic.
LA/OC is not being held back by a lack of airports. LA/OC is fundamentally different from the BA culturally. SV has a young/single demographics while OC is a family based demographics. Irvine is attracting the tech people who settled down and want to buy a place in a good neighborhood with good schools. It goes way beyond racial demographics.
Regardless...the original conversation was about an Irvine airport. If that did exist, it would wreck the home value of Irvine and half of Southern OC. You may think that it is worth it but that does not change the fact that Irvine would be fundamentally different than what it is now.