Sunday, May 01, 2005

Los Angeles Times: OK for Oxnard High-Rises a Tall Order
Fred Pilot claims this is a real news story and not the first page of a script treatment for a disaster movie. A 48 story condo building in Southern California? Can you spell S-A-N-A-N-D-R-E-A-S-F-A-U-L-T, boys and girls?

If San Diego high-rise developer Doug Austin has his way, three condominium towers up to 500 feet tall will form a new urban skyline above the agricultural Oxnard Plain in the next few years. Austin's plan calls for more than 1,000 condominiums in three slender towers — two of 31 stories and one of 48 — nearly twice as high as Ventura County's tallest building, which is itself an aberration in low-rise suburbia. "Frank Lloyd Wright had a concept of a mile-high city as a way to save the plains and open space," said Austin, who is also an architect. "And if you're looking out into Oxnard's future, and you are truly interested in saving the farmland, this is an alternative. The growth has to spread somewhere."

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