Bay Area Workers Swell Central Valley Towns

A strange thing is happening along the back roads of such San Joaquin Valley towns as Patterson, Ripon and Riverbank: They are becoming home to workers from the bustling cities of the San Francisco Bay Area up to 90 miles away.

The “tomorrow” that local planners in this rural, mainly agricultural area have talked about and in many cases warned of for years is here today.

“The northern part of this valley has suddenly, without much fanfare, much less protest, become part of the Bay Area,” said Wade Bingham, mayor of Patterson.

The community’s population has increased 50% during the last three years to 6,000. The growth was caused by commuters and retired people, Bingham said.

Across Coast Ranges

In unprecedented numbers, they have trekked across the two ridges of the Coast Ranges, the traditional great divide separating the Bay Area’s sprawling suburbia from the vast California interior to the southeast.

By 1995, the population is predicted to grow 30% to more than 1.1 million people in the northern valley counties of San Joaquin, Stanislaus and Merced.

Communities that for generations were dominated by farm families suddenly have found their populations swelling with a different kind of folk.

“They come to the country, but they bring the city with them,” said longtime Lathrop resident Tom Montgomery, 57.

But although brutal to the landscape and life styles, the growth has also sparked an economic renaissance in many of the small towns.

The phenomenon is similar to the now-classic Los Angeles urban sprawl, where residents of the Inland Empire cities of Riverside and Fontana in the east and the Antelope Valley in the north commute 70 to 90 miles each way to work.

Increasing industrialization in the Livermore Valley and Contra Costa County in the East Bay have been the catalysts for expansion into the valley.

“Enormous creation of jobs is going on, and the people are coming over, spilling over, into the Central Valley to find affordable housing,” said Mike Zagaris, a Modesto real estate broker.

Like circling boxers, pro- and anti-growth forces are tracking each other’s doings.

Typical is Ripon, a once tidy community of Dutch immigrants that in 1980 had a population of 2,500. Now almost 7,000 live there, with most of the new people coming from San Jose, to where they still commute.

The difficulties began when developers started advertising in San Jose, offering homes in Ripon at less than half the cost of similar ones in the Santa Clara Valley.

“They came in droves,” Mayor Ed Feichtemeir said.

Many homes for middle-income people can be purchased for less than $100,000 in the San Joaquin Valley, some with built-in swimming pools. Homes near that level have been extremely hard to find in the Bay Area since the inflation in housing prices in the late 1970s.

Anti-Growth Efforts

Some valley communities are already putting on the brakes to sudden growth.

In Modesto, voters last November refused to approve expanded sewer service to accommodate an additional 20,000 residents. Since 1979, citizens have held advisory votes on sewer trunk expansions, a ploy anti-growth groups used to restrict development.

A Manteca group is trying to qualify a measure for the local ballot that would strip the city of its ability to annex unincorporated land without first submitting it for voter approval.

To head off citizen unrest, Manteca and several other cities are developing “growth-management plans.”

“Many of us are Bay Area refugees,” Manteca City Manager Dave Jenkins said. “We want to maintain the quality of life we’ve found here. That’s the dilemma.”