There are plenty of people who live and breathe airplanes, but it may not be too long before 37 California families get to live with their airplanes. Bob Banman and Bill Lindsay, a couple of aviation buffs, have navigated the regulatory waters to create a 37-condo development on the airport at Santa Paula, Calif., a quiet farming community about 60 miles north of Los Angeles. Now there are plenty of residential air parks where owners have their homes and hangars on the runway, but in the Sky Lofts of Santa Paula, their $800,000 home is their hangar.
In the Sky Lofts, the ground floor is all for the airplane, while the living quarters, complete with observation deck, are on the top floor. Lindsay admits there’s a narrow market to draw from in the already-tough real estate market but he’s upbeat about the project. “I think it is enough of a supply-and-demand type of thing, enough of a niche, that we’ll be fine,” Lindsay told the Associated Press.
