In Denver, the former Lowry Air Force Base was redeveloped as a high-end new urbanist neighborhood called … Lowry. Fitzsimmons Army Medical Center in nearby Aurora is being redeveloped as the new home of the University of Colorado medical school and hospital.
having attended said RTC and NTC for a year and a half, I was just back there visiting friends a few weeks ago. I wasn’t around for the apparent boondoggle, but I was impressed with what was being done with the property. As I looked around, there were only two or three buildings still left from the old installation. Plus, the Bluejacket park was a nice touch. I thought it slightly amusing that where I once received blisters doing 8-count bodybuilders on a 150-degree+ piece of asphalt is now a nice grass lacrosse/soccer field.
Update: Tampa’s MacDill Air Force Base, concern over which prompted me to start this thread, has survived the latest round of military base closings and its role and personnnel will, in fact, be expanded. http://www.tampatrib.com/MGBBWU5BP8E.html
However, the Pentagon has decided to close 33 other major military bases located within the U.S. http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/B/BASE_CLOSINGS?SITE=FLTAM&SECTION=US If you live anywhere near one of them you’ve probably heard the news already. What plans is your community making to deal with the loss of that element of your local economy? And are there any plans to convert the base to some kind of civilian use?
In 2002 I stayed in a hotel in what used to be the Naval Communications Station Harold E Holt in Exmouth, Western Australia. And very pleasant it was, too.
Mather AFB here in Rancho Cordova, CA was closed in the early 90’s. It languished for a while, while folks tried to figure out what to do with it.
Now it’s split, with a business airport, commercial business center and all that open land being developed into housing. It’s working out well, but in the interim the economy of Rancho took a pretty severe hit.
If you are in an area of high demand and rising house prices, a closed military
base can be a huge boost. On the other hand, what do you do with a place like MINOT AFB (Minot, ND). People aren’t exactly busting down the doors to move to North Dakota.
Catch-22. If there were middle-class work there, I’d be thrilled to move there. Now I gotta go find a cost-of-living comparator…
i would move to north dakota.
here in philly they are still trying to figure out what to do with the naval complex. some of it has been taken over by businesses (ship building), some is still with the navy.
a huge portion of it is still waiting for something to happen.
Which is exactly what we’ve got here in Tampa, yet our AFB is one they chose to spare.
In fact, the new airport was needed so bad (there had been talk of moving or expanding the airport for years) that when Bergstrom made the cut list, there was almost no effort on the part of the city to keep it open. They began making plans to move the airport right away.
I can’t find a cite at the moment, but on Countdown with Keith Olbermann Friday night they said that the savings vs keeping the bases open from the last round of closings amounted to $300 million, with closing the bases costing something like $6.1 billion and leaving them open would have cost $6.4 billion. No doubt environmental clean up costs were a big factor in that.
Part of the problem, I’d imagine, with the base closings is that a good number of manufacturing operations have moved overseas, and many cities already have more office space than what they need, so finding new people to take over the bases can be difficult.
Frankly, if there was a base where I could have a big hanger and a place to live dirt cheap, I’d move there in a heartbeat, but I’m sure I’m in the minority.
Some of the large buildings making up CFB St-Hubert (about 30 minutes south-east of Montreal) have been converted into soundstages for film production.
The city of Concord was all but begging (and they were successful) to put the Concord Naval Weapons Station on the closure list.
The Bay Area as a whole is an area of high demand for housing at high prices. (It’s not terribly uncommon for homes to sell for 20% or more *above * the advertised listing price.) There’s a commuter rail (BART) station about half a mile away.
I just bought a house in a small enclave at the edge of the CNWS. Ground floor <ding> Going up! 
That’s a smart purchase, gotpasswords. Even so, it may take a while to clean CNWS up because some really nasty stuff may have been stored there.
My sister and her family have lived a few miles from there for much of the last 30 years. They always used to say that if there was ever a nuclear war with the then-Soviet Union, at least they would never have to worry about the lingering effects of radiation sickness, since several Soviet ICBMs would have CNWS hard-coded in their guidance systems, and would be in the first wave of any attack or counter-attack. At four miles from Ground Zero, you don’t really have to sweat the fine details of survival. :eek:
And, in a real-estate chain reaction, the old airport became available for a spiff new mixed-use redevelopment, not far from downtown. In the interim, some of the (civillian) airport’s hangars are being used to house Austin Studios, a bustling location for moviemaking here in town. Much of what you see in some Robert Rodriguez films has its origins there.
What’s the status o Governor’s Island in NY Harbor? It’s been closed for, what, 13 years now?
That’s “status of” though I suppose o is a suitable alternative.
It’s only being used for recreation. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Governor’s_Island:
Ahh… You have confirmed what I considered in another base closing thread:
While reading that thread, I decided to take a look at satellite/aerial photos and found this:
Before:
Navy Nuclear Power School in Orlando as it was (the two “Y” shaped buildings).
After:
Totally unrecognizable empty land, being prepared for jiggs’ McMansions.
Kind of makes me want to shed a tear – I’m not that old. Hell, they had just finished building that skinny building to the left of the two Ys when I got there – it’s where they had the “pre school” where you got up to speed on math and physics before getting into the good stuff.
It’s like finding out that they tore down your high school 
Oh man as a one time nuc, and having gone to boot camp in Orlando that bums me out too.
I also spent time in Philadelphia at the shipyards. I know that the one end of the base with the huge drydocks (big enough for an aircraft carrier) was sold and is in operation as a private shipyard.
Not positive but from what I heard there is still a roundy round going with what to do with the rest of the base along prime waterfront property. I remember that there was some toxic messes to be attened to that nobody wants to pay for. And every body has a different idea for what to do with the land and so nobody can get anything done.