There are very few places along the Pacific Coast of the US that are reasonable as ports.
Puget Sound, the San Francisco Bay, and southern California are pretty much it. Portland is 100 miles from the ocean; only smaller ships can reach it. Astoria and Eureka have terrible connections on the land side.
You could think about starting a new port at, say, Santa Monica or San Clemente. It could be done. You'd have to build a breakwater, a bunch of piers, and you'd have to buy a huge amount of land for facilities.
How much would it cost to buy, say, 10,000 acres and 20 miles of waterfront in Santa Monica? Yeah, that's why nobody has done it.
Expanding San Diego is about the only workable option.
There’s plenty of options. Southern CA is actually a longer trip from China than Seattle Washington so basically any west coast port can be expanded. It’s really the infrastructure outside the port that makes Southern California ports appealing.
It was mostly sarcasm. I just don't like the argument that it's regulatory capture because it's fallacious to blame capture when you refuse to compete. This also ignores the fact that there is competition between existing ports. Outlawing unions would just be another form of regulatory capture anyways.
Puget Sound, the San Francisco Bay, and southern California are pretty much it. Portland is 100 miles from the ocean; only smaller ships can reach it. Astoria and Eureka have terrible connections on the land side.
You could think about starting a new port at, say, Santa Monica or San Clemente. It could be done. You'd have to build a breakwater, a bunch of piers, and you'd have to buy a huge amount of land for facilities.
How much would it cost to buy, say, 10,000 acres and 20 miles of waterfront in Santa Monica? Yeah, that's why nobody has done it.
Expanding San Diego is about the only workable option.