How LAX is Slowly Turning Manchester Square Into a Ghost Town

If you're looking for some place spooky and abandoned to hold your seance on Halloween, maybe try Manchester Square, just east of LAX: "Once a thriving community with its own elementary school, the working-class neighborhood that sprang up in the postwar building boom is now an urban void of unkempt buildings, desolate streets and residential lots scraped bare where thousands used to live," says the LA Times. Anticipating expansion, the airport's been buying up land in Manchester Square since the nineties, but it's doing it in kind of a weird way: instead of using eminent domain, which might a) switch over all of the property at once and b) give sellers some legal leverage or recourse, it's just negotiated individually with homeowners (and the airport's the only buyer, obviously). And so the neighborhood gets blightier and blightier, but the airport still doesn't have all the land it needs. (Things are bad when you're neighborhood's so easily used as a disaster film set: "Filmmakers simulated a helicopter crash in the neighborhood and shot scenes in the rubble of homes being demolished, residents said.")

Meanwhile, there's no actual plan to build anything on this land, although officials are looking into a car rental facility, parking, or possibly a transit hub for that LAX people mover we're totally getting. There's already a ghost town called Surfridge to the west of the airport.
· Near LAX, a once thriving community now stuck in economic limbo [LAT]
· LAX-Adjacent Ghost Town Could Be Torn Up and Planted [Curbed LA]