Emigrants to Sleepy Suburbia Overrun a Lot of Dreams

As I watch the dozen yellow Caterpillars crawling around hillsides near my house in Carlsbad, I see the neighborhood where I grew up, in Long Beach--a neighborhood that was perfect for 10-year-olds before the earthmovers erased it.

Our cardboard-and-tumbleweed clubhouse was leveled by a Cat’s single swipe and buried beneath the Bellflower Boulevard off-ramp of the San Diego Freeway. Our shortcut through an empty lot to the ball diamond was blocked by new apartments. The rickety bait shop on a vacant stretch of Pacific Coast Highway near Seal Beach fell to a parking lot. The field where we fought mock battles with dirt-clod missiles was swallowed by an expanding Cal State Long Beach. Now earthmovers are in my neighborhood again, eating away at brush on empty fields as voraciously as caterpillars in a tomato patch.

Anyone old enough to remember passing orange groves on the way to a newly opened Disneyland would have a sense of deja vu driving through San Diego’s North County today. Just as the suburban expansions changed Los Angeles and Orange counties 25 years ago, the rush to develop North County is changing the face of local communities almost daily.

Carlsbad harbors enough dirt fields to put up new condos and houses for 85,000 more people to join the 52,000 already living here. New offices and light industry are hot on the heels of residential building. Even Texas’ Hunt brothers, burned in the silver market, are in the real-estate gold rush, planning a resort complex for 1,000 acres along the shores of a local lagoon.

These aren’t in-fill projects, occupying the last available lots in an urban area or replacing older buildings with new ones. This construction is covering acres of empty fields that allowed North County to retain a semi-rural flavor in the middle of the Los Angeles-San Diego urban corridor.

This year Carlsbad residents, rattled by the pace of change, did what Californians in 40 other cities have done: They put growth-restriction proposals to a vote. On Tuesday growth won, in a sense, with voters approving the less-restrictive of two proposals: setting a cap of 33,500 new homes, rather than 5,750, after which the city will be declared filled up. The voters also declined to pay $5.9 million to save a eucalyptus grove; after commercial buildings and 104 condos are planted on the site, 37 acres will remain of a grove that covered 200 acres when it was planted in 1907.

In Long Beach during the ‘60s, paving over fields (regardless of clubhouses and shortcuts) was no big deal. The supply of homes and businesses was expanding to meet booming families’ demand for the good life. In Carlsbad today, many residents want to put the brakes on the good-life market by cutting off the supply. “Look at L.A.” is the password for opportunity that now looks like a threat.

Carlsbad old-timers have the most legitimate gripes. Twenty years ago nobody could imagine people “up the coast” moving down here for equity buildup, tax shelter and appreciation.

Now the newcomers are quick to lend weight to yanking up the drawbridge once they’ve settled in. To build the two-year-old housing development where I live, the city extended a cul de sac that ended the peacefulness of an established neighborhood. Faded car bumpers in the old neighborhood are reminders of the fight to block ours--which immediately protested a street extension to accommodate an even newer neighborhood behind us. Caterpillars are tough creatures to stop; the street was extended.

Long before a community gets together to have its say on growth, the issue is being won or lost in such little scrimmages. There was no referendum to save Carlsbad’s landmark chickens.

The two six-foot plaster chickens stood outside a roadside dinner house once popular with residents as well as travelers between Los Angeles and San Diego when only the old coast highway existed. Then the freeway bypassed the restaurant and took away the highway business. Local tastes changed as the city grew. Champagne brunches replaced Sunday family dinners. The restaurant was converted to an upscale bistro that gets a good summer crowd from weekenders at the new time-share resort across the street. The plaster chickens didn’t fit in.

I hardly recognize my old neighborhood in Long Beach. I wonder what Carlsbad will be like 20 years from now, with 33,500 more houses filled with people who won’t know what they’re missing.