How Airplanes Can Lower The Cost of Housing
There isn’t a lack of affordable housing in Los Angeles, the affordable homes are just too far away
Depending on where you are within Central Los Angeles, the following cities are likely 40–60 miles from you: Ontario, San Bernardino, Long Beach, Riverside, Corona, and Oxnard to name a few. Stretching a bit further are Palm Springs and Bakersfield at about 100 miles.
Most anyone who works a 9-to-5 job in the epicenter of Los Angeles wouldn’t live in any of the above areas due to the horrendous daily commute:
Santa Monica to Ontario would be two hours driving during rush hour.
Van Nuys to Bakersfield would easily be ninety minutes. Hawthorne to Corona would be every bit of that.
The point is, while some “super-commuters” commute over two hours a day, holding a regular office job in Los Angeles usually requires one to live in the city of, well, Los Angeles. This likely requires you to buy a home in one of the following markets:
Culver City
Santa Monica
Burbank
West Hollywood
Downtown
Silverlake
Studio City
Encino
Van Nuys
Pico-Robertson
The median home price in one of these areas is as follows (according to Trulia and Zillow’s most updated values): $1,156,900; $1,722,000; $827,500; $822,000; $617,800; $1,197,300; $1,309,200; $974,000; $581,600; $1,380,600.
That’s about a million dollars for a home, not to even speak of what you get for that property (square foot, parking, etc.).
Here are the median home prices for some different areas: $288,300; $409,900; $425,700; $497,800; $592,400; $241,000; $504,100.
Those numbers are for the following markets:
San Bernardino
Riverside
Ontario
Corona
Long Beach
Bakersfield
Oxnard
The cost of buying a home outside of Los Angeles is about half, and why shouldn’t it be—it’s too far from Central LA to meet the demand for home-ownership.
But what if it wasn’t?
What if you could feasibly commute between these areas without sitting in your car for 90–120 minutes, questioning the meaning of life while a freeway designed to move the military, not Mazdas, sat choking on your car?
Enter SkyCommute, an initiative to generate government funding for commuter air travel throughout the Greater Los Angeles region. You could wake up in the inland empire at 7am and get to your office in West LA by 830a. It’d be less expensive than traveling by car, and even better, you could be sending emails, working on your presentation, or whatever activity driving an automobile doesn’t allow, all while in the air.
We know driving from Ontario to Santa Monica and back is roughly a 100-mile trip. At $.50/mile, that’s fifty bucks round-trip.
How much would SkyCommute cost? Here’s an initial analysis.
A recent expansion of the 91-interstate cost $1.4 billion to presumably reduce the congestion caused by the roughly 300,000 cars per day. Experts say the freeway would need a few more lanes to handle that number of travelers:
“We need 22 lanes to handle traffic on that corridor,” said Anne Mayer of The Riverside County Transportation Commission. “That’s not physically possible on the 91 itself.”
So use that $1.4 billion as a baseline for the SkyCommute program. Assume about 1,000 people would be interested in this program to start, utilizing the following routes:
RAL-SMO — 4x daily
ONT-HHR — 2x daily
MIT-SMO — 2x daily
MIT-HHR — 2x daily
CNO-SMO — 2x daily
CNO-HHR — 2x daily
MIT-BUR — 4x daily
SNA-SMO — 4x daily
SNA-HHR — 2x daily
AJO-HHR — 2x daily
[ONT = Ontario; RAL = Riverside; SMO = Santa Monica; HHR = Hawthorne; MIT = Bakersfield; CNO = Chino; BUR = Burbank ; SNA = Orange County; AJO = Corona]
That’s 24 flights per day, moving 80 people each way, shuttling around 1,000 people who presumably moved out of LA apartments to buy a $500,000 home in the Inland Empire or neighboring LA area.
To begin this program, the most efficient aircraft to move these 80 people would likely be either the ATR-72 or Bombardier Q400. I’ll use the Q400 as an immediate example but note the point of this program is to re-invent commuter travel in major metropolitan cities, which ultimately requires the construction of a commuter aircraft (more on that below).
The Q400 is a dual prop aircraft with relatively low fuel burn. It’s not a jet meant to get you to 35,000 feet (cruise altitude) as quickly as possible. To fly the above routes, IFR flight plans (meaning they couldn’t exclusively rely on Visual Flight Rules) would put the aircraft between 4,000 to 5,000 feet AGL (above ground level) depending on where they are in their routes and what airspace they’re entering/leaving. This would allow for air travel between all of the above airfields in roughly twenty minutes wheels up to wheels down, with MIT in Bakersfield being the exception (that’d be roughly 30 minutes).
(NOTE: SMO would likely require a runway length expansion, which is probably the most challenging aspect of the SkyCommute plan).
To allow for immediacy into the airport and onto the airplane, there would be no checking of bags, no usage of the overhead bins, and no beverage service on the airplane. There would be wi-fi onboard all planes.
This pathway onto and off of an aircraft would require the construction of unique FBOs (fixed based operators) for all of the above airports, which allows for swift security checks, a place for vendors to offer people a bite to eat, and lounges for people to get their work done whenever aircraft gets delayed. Imagine a co-working space but instead of people working remotely, they are waiting to get on an aircraft to get them to their physical work location.
How much would this cost to operate? Assume we have that $1.4 billion:
$1 billion would go towards the leasing of 40 aircraft.
$9.5 million a year would go towards fueling and maintenance.
$15 million a year for maintenance professionals (AMP), pilots/crew, and parts.
$100 million towards FBO construction and storage costs.
$65 million for insuring the 40 planes in the fleet.
Send me a message and I can show you my work for these numbers if you’re terribly interested, but in short, that’s $1.2 billion; with $200 million left to hedge the budget for any items not initially factored in.
Given this, I’m positioning the SkyCommute program to cost $75/month per participant and $10–15/trip per traveler. That is egregiously low. So low that it would bankrupt any commercial or private charter airline before you started designing the logo.
That is the point — this is not a commercial airline business, this is a housing program. HUD spends $1.4 billion a year (there’s that number again) on its HOME investment program to subsidize housing that has been lost or to reduce homelessness. While I can’t speak to the return on that investment, it does offer a comparison as to where a similar sum could be spent in a major metropolitan area. The SkyCommute program would be resetting the housing market in a major city, at the cost of investing in mass transit. SkyCommute shifts people off the road and into the air.
That’s not to say there aren’t creative mechanisms to generate revenue to pay back some operating expenses of this program. Charging a subscription fee, ticket fee, and a licensing fee for a vendor to sell items in the FBO could generate about $3 million per year. The last of those is how airports like LAX and Heathrow make some of their money back, averaging about 20 bucks per passenger in fees to vendors, drivers, and services who operate out of their airport.
And there’s the $1 billion in aircraft that could be leased and sold off upon phase two of the program.
This leaves us with the following questions:
Is it safe to introduce these new routes into LA airspace?
Los Angeles has one of the most complex airspaces in the country: you have a Bravo airspace (the busiest classification) surrounding LAX stacked on a Charlie in Ontario and Delta in Santa Monica and Hawthorne…just to name a few. So yes, adding 25 or so flights on vectors that are at a low altitude would pose some challenges, but by and large, these routes would fly underneath or around the shelf of these airspaces.
For some immediate context, about 2,000 flights a day come and go out of LAX.
How do I commute from an airport to my office (not all of us work at airports you know)?
Another great question that likely banks on ride-sharing becoming autonomous and therefore cheaper in the near future. Most of the airports I’ve mentioned are within 2–4 miles of their respective city centers. I’ve also left $200 million free in the original $1.4 billion proposals to potentially subsidize the usage of rideshare.
This still seems like an awfully big airplane to go 20–30 nautical miles …
This is correct. Phase two of this program would be the creation of a commuter aircraft with no pressurization system, no cargo bay, no overhead bins, one restroom, and considerably more efficient and quieter engines that don’t require an aircraft to carry seventy-thousand tons and climb at 2,000 feet per minute to reach seven miles into the air.
Given the plane’s mission is to fly at a low altitude, this also offers the added benefit of not needing to be pressurized. The lack of pressurization greatly reduces the mechanical complexity of the aircraft in addition to removing the weight of a bleed air system (the Dreamliner just did this and according to them, this allows for numerous efficiencies that basically boil down to “the engines don’t have to work as hard” and the “airplane weighs less”).
So yes, the point is to get people accustomed to commuter flying. Once we prove the market exists, then we can develop the aircraft and begin to scale.
Do we expect people to actually do this?
Many of us in Los Angeles have been trained to believe travel must be done by car. This program nixes that perception and moves us forward into a modern age where air travel becomes synonymous with mass transit. Admittedly, it’s a big investment in order to move around 1,000 people, but again this is a start. If you can efficiently commute 1,000 people a distance of fifty miles, you now have more information on how to commute 10,000 people that same distance, and possibly further.
At that point, you’re talking about buying a home in Fresno, going to Yosemite on the weekends, and commuting to the South Bay during the week.
Do we want to buy a fleet of aircraft opposed to leasing, particularly when the future of commuter aviation requires a commuter aircraft different from the aircraft I’m proposing?
This is a great question thatI likely don’t have an immediate answer to; it likely depends on the nature of the original financing deal, but at this juncture, it’s easier to lay out a plan where the aircraft are all purchased opposed to a complex leaseback deal.
Would these planes be loud flying at 3,000 feet?
Depends on what you mean by loud—louder than 1,000 cars driving through interstate 10 every hour?
Is this a Federal, State or Local Government plan?
Admittedly, I’ve meshed federal programs with state highway programs with local property taxes; the short answer is I’m not a bureaucrat so I don’t know. The programs are mainly presented as context to show, by and large, the money for the SkyCommute program exists, and has the long-term potential to generate more revenue than it spends not through the commercialization of air travel, but through the expansion of the housing market.
Los Angeles has responded to its housing problem by trying to control the pricing and availability of the rental market—if the expansion of homeless encampments throughout LA has shown us anything, it’s that strategy might not be entirely working. I believe Southern California is one of the most forward-thinking cities in the country. If that’s true, then the most recent proposals and actions to fix our housing issues sell us short.
When it comes to housing, our tendency has been to price control. When it comes to transit, our habit is to build wider and to dig deeper.
Why aren’t we climbing higher?
For a city famous for its ambitions, blue skies, and the belief that anything can happen, why haven’t we looked to the skies to answer one of our most challenging problems?
The sky is no longer the limit. It could very well be the answer.
For more information on SkyCommute and to express your interest, visit SkyCommute.
