The Santa Ana City Council recently wrapped up another round of historic hand-wringing. With great fanfare, city officials unveiled a memorial and pattons on the back following their formal apology for the 1906 burning of Chinatown.
Let’s be entirely clear: what happened in 1906 was a tragedy driven by xenophobia. But the current council had absolutely nothing to do with it. No one alive in Santa Ana today did.
If this council is truly determined to apologize for the short-sighted blunders of their institutional predecessors, they need to stop digging through the 20th-century history books to find easy symbolic victories. Instead, they should apologize for a catastrophic error that actually crippled Santa Ana’s modern economy: the rejection of South Coast Plaza.
The Blunder of the Century
Decades ago, when the Segerstrom family was looking for a home for what would become an international shopping destination, Santa Ana city leaders famously dropped the ball. Driven by a lack of vision and bureaucratic hesitation, a previous council essentially rejected the massive development…