Creating successful business clusters is the philosopher's stone of developers. Locals thank the weather. But the same weather has hardly turned South Central Los Angeles into a business Mecca. They are also full of praise for the University of California's Irvine campus. But UCI is hardly Stanford or Berkeley.
Transport has a lot to do with it.
The company could have made a killing when LA began to sprawl southwards into its land. But instead it decided to create something as different from LA as possible. Donald Bren, a billionaire who took control of the Irvine company in 1983, is second to none in his enthusiasm for the Master Plan. The Spectrum is one of the company's three successful business parks. In LA Tudor manor houses jostle with mock Byzantine temples, in Irvine you can find yourself in the wrong house unless you check the number first.