An aviation friendly community

As you drive South on Zinfandel you pass a large banner proclaiming "an aviation friendly community." You think to yourself....oh yeah....Mather Field is right nearby. But if you are out scouting neighborhoods during the weekend, you quickly forget.

Rancho Cordova has changed a lot since I last lived there (right out of college)...so we went inside the Elliott sales office to take a look. We were very tempted by the location, size and price (compared to what we had seen in Folsom and EDH). The houses were being offered way below list. In addition a new elementary school had just opened up within the development.

The spec home we looked at was a very basic model with only upgraded insulation. Here is where things get interesting. Having forgotten about the nearby airport in our excitement, we asked why, of all things, the insulation was upgraded. She dodged the question by making a remark about noisy kids or something, making sure not to bring our attention to the real reason!

As we left the community, I was already picturing myself in a new home. But true to form, my head finally took over, so I decided to do a bit more research. After all it was a very large chunk of $$, considerably outside the range we had set (amazing how easy it is to start to justifying these things).

I had several major concerns, 1) will the air traffic levels increase significantly, 2) what are the noise contours of the current arrival and departure paths, 3) how are the schools, and 3) given the slow pace of sales, how will the neighborhood mature if they change the master plan. All the sales reps we talked to were not sure about future building plans since they were just focused on selling what they had. This made us very wary of the fate of the development.

I was able to find answers to both my aviation questions in the following document:
http://www.sacairports.org/mather/planning/Files/mather_revised_draft_feb2004_boarddirected.pdf
At a glance it did not appear that they were planning to develop Mather as a reliever airport for passenger traffic. So that was good, since low cost carriers tend to prefer less crowded airports closer to the city (like Midway in Chicago). But Mather still gets at least 4 flights an hour (and that only counts the IFR traffic).

However it looked like the noise contours go right over the development! Any remaining spark of interest we had was now DOA.

When looking at the noise map, we noticed that the community of Mather was well out of the traffic pattern, even though it was close to the airport. Again, the size and price were much better than Folsom or EDH, so 2 weeks later I went for a drive. Nice looking community, but way too isolated and difficult to get to.