Penturbia: The New Great Migration

For more than 20 years, Susan Woods enjoyed the pleasures of cosmopolitan life. The bedroom window of her Manhattan Beach home opened onto the Pacific. Her dresses came from Rodeo Drive boutiques. Weekends were spent sailing a 30-foot sloop out of Marina del Rey.

At night, after grazing through nouvelle haunts west of Sepulveda, the former model and part-time actress would join her husband, who worked for Southern California Edison, on their balcony and watch the lights of downtown Los Angeles twinkling in the distance.

‘It Was Time to Leave’

Sometime during the early 1970s, however, she began to sour on the city: “The yachts near us in the marina were only used for cocktail parties. My 10-minute walk to the beach just put me closer to drugs. I knew it was time to leave when two of my neighbors hired attorneys and went into court over a 6-inch property dispute.”

Woods’ realization that a great life style doesn’t necessarily produce a satisfying life was a veritable epiphany. In 1976, after her youngest child graduated from high school, she sold the sloop and, along with her Steinway baby grand, headed to the Sierra foothills of Amador County 400 miles north of Los Angeles.

“Privacy and more space were what I really wanted,” she remembers. “I needed to get away from the condo people in Gucci shoes who kept asking, ‘Where did you buy that?’ at every cocktail party.”

Today Susan Woods, 53, lives in a smaller house, has to drive 20 miles to the supermarket and measures haute cuisine by what is served at the annual Italian Benevolent Society picnic. But she has never been happier.

Though her rustic home fronts on an evergreen forest, she has no feeling of isolation. San Francisco is 125 miles to the west; Stockton is less than an hour away. Once a month she drives to Sacramento for a board meeting of River Island Lands, an agribusiness company for which she is a director.

“I’m even back in the theater,” says Woods, who recently directed Lillian Hellman’s “Watch on the Rhine” for the Volcano (population 96) Pioneer Community Theater Group. “The only difference between our little theater and those in Los Angeles,” she claims, “is that ours operates in the black.”

Booming Rural Counties

Susan Woods, one of about 13 million people who abandoned suburbia during the 1970s, is part of a dramatic exodus from metropolitan areas. Indeed, the massive shift in population, the fifth great American migration since the Revolution, is gaining momentum.

Based on California census data gathered over the last five years, the leading counties in percentage growth during the next three decades will be rural Amador and Sierra, closely followed by Modoc and Siskiyou along the Oregon border.

The flight to counties like Sierra and Amador appears to be caused as much by fear as by expectation, experts say. Confidence of the early 1980s has given way to concern over trade imbalances, the budget deficit and a stock market subject to inexplicable fluctuation. The gloom is seemingly everywhere.

Some years ago, “I’m OK; You’re OK” was the hottest literary property; this summer’s best sellers were “The Great Depression of 1990,” “Blood in the Streets” and “Closing of the American Mind.” The belief in an ever-expanding economy upon which the suburban mortgage was based has been replaced by a desire to preserve those assets that remain.

New Social Values

Jack Lessinger, professor emeritus of real estate and urban development at the University of Washington and author of the 1986 book “Regions of Opportunity,” says the outward spiral of America’s middle class toward the region he calls “penturbia” (meaning the fifth urban migration) results not only from a changed economy now dominated by service and information, but also from an emerging agenda of new social values.

“During the first half of the 20th Century, Americans migrated to the suburbs to preside like little kings and queens over one-sixth-acre domains,” says Lessinger. “Now the little kings and their mass consumption ethic are being supplanted by people I call ‘caring conservers,’ whose will to conserve extends to energy, investments, clean air and cultural artifacts.”

Driven from the suburbs by increased crime, congestion and inflated housing prices, caring conservers make perfect penturbians. They like front porches, septic tanks and vegetable gardens, says Lessinger, especially when all are included in a bargain-priced five-acre package.

The migration to penturbia is no back-to-nature movement. Those forsaking the municipal fringe are not survivalists or commune dwellers. Neither do they resemble the “small planet” minimalists of the late ‘60s, who chanted mantras while baking pumpkin bread. The majority are middle-class property owners who are reinvesting suburban equity, and their final years of employment, in a region with established services and growth potential.

“I guess we qualify as penturbians,” says Lucille Jerand, who six months ago moved to Sutter Creek from Pismo Beach with her 62-year-old husband, Harold. “It’s nice not having to worry about vandalism or thievery, but I wouldn’t say we came here to escape,” she says. “We just like the old Victorian houses and the antique atmosphere.”

During the first great migration, America’s population spread out from the original Colonies like Massachusetts and Virginia to northern New England and the Carolinas. The economic depression that arrived in 1817 and persisted throughout most of the early 19th Century prompted a westward expansion through the Mississippi and Ohio river valleys.

After the Civil War, Americans began moving again, this time toward industrial centers like Chicago, Minneapolis and San Francisco. The Golden Age of the American city, which began with the Industrial Revolution, was ended by the Great Depression. Freed from the dominance of the railroads by mass-produced automobiles and newly constructed highways, Americans began moving again in 1929. For the next 40 years, opportunity was found in suburbia.

Population Growth

Many municipal areas will continue to be major population centers. Los Angeles County, for example, is expected to add 3 million new residents by the year 2000. But demographers caution that since most will be foreign immigrants, and not salaried taxpayers, gross population growth will not necessarily produce a more vigorous economy.

“For the avant-garde the suburb is a symbol of the past,” insists Lessinger. “Like the ’65 Cadillac, it is becoming a symbol of decadence and overconsumption.”

Rapid Population Growth

Lessinger’s logic may be arguable, but the population shift to penturbia is beyond dispute. Since 1980, the populations of penturban counties have grown by 9%, nearly twice the national average and over four times as much as urban counties like Alameda in Northern California.

In Amador, the influx of “flatlanders” has nearly doubled to 25,000 the county’s population in 12 years, much to the dismay of Sutter Creek city councilman Sid Smith.

“Twenty-five years ago ‘twern’t one fence between here and Nevada,” he sighs. “Hell, I knew every person on the street. Now I only recognize 1 out of 10.”

As chief scout of the Kit Carson Mountain Men, a curmudgeonly group of seniors who don coonskin hats and buckskin at the mere thought of a parade, Smith tries to preserve Amador’s Wild West traditions. But the bewhiskered septuagenarian, who also serves as the town’s police commissioner, admits it’s an uphill fight.

“We used to ambush the Rotarian bus from San Francisco till folks complained,” he says. “It’s pretty bad when you can’t even fire a gun on the street.”

Not since the glory days of gambling and prostitution, both legal until the early 1950s, has money changed hands as rapidly in Amador. There is not a single vacant apartment in the entire county. Those who have purchased land must live in Lodi until their homes are completed.

On weekends, the towns fill quickly with citified sorts prospecting for a homestead. Those wanting Saturday dinner at Teresa’s in Jackson better have made a reservation by Thursday afternoon.

For Jackson realtor Larry Carney, 61, the new migrants are as rich as a vein of high-grade tellurium. Over the last two years, his company has brokered four major developments totaling more than 200 acres, and found dozens of flatlanders the house of their dreams.

‘I Just Match Them Up’

“Young people want to move up in the pines where they can go back to nature and keep a horse,” Carney explains. “I just match them up with people who’ve been snowed in for dozens of years and are ready to sell.”

Some Jackson residents, whose musings go best with a local red wine called “Hearty Har Har,” have been dismayed by the spread of fast-food outlets. But not Larry Carney. “The Kentucky Colonel fed us all champagne and chicken at the opening last week,” he remembers with a smile. “When Taco Bell arrived six months ago we didn’t get food, but they gave us champagne.”

Though the Amador Economic Development Commission estimates that four new jobs are created for each new resident, prosperity is far from uniform. Few jobs exist for high school graduates and white-collar employment is almost impossible to find. Young people seeking serious employment move to cities in the Sacramento Valley. But their numbers are more than offset by pensioned seniors come to start a new life.

Senior citizens account for 46% of Amador’s current population and 60% of its penturbian migrants. Like Robert Barfoot, 62, who bought the Country Squire Motel in 1985 with proceeds from the sale of his upholstery business in San Mateo, most insist they will never retire. Barfoot restores antiques, rebuilds classic cars, raises sheep and monitors a gold-bearing trout stream running through his back yard.

Before moving to penturbia, Barfoot studied his options. “I looked at Carmel and drove up to Mendocino, but no other place could match the Sierra,” he says. “We’ve got great food, good wine and excellent weather. There’s not much pressure but still plenty to do.”

Scholars have been predicting the demise of suburbia for decades. In his 1900 essay, “The Probable Diffusion of Great Cities,” H. G. Wells said that industrial cities by the end of the 20th Century would be hollow shells without a function. The post-urban city, he theorized, would be segmented into shopping malls occasionally visited by people leading a semi-agrarian existence.

Thirty years later, architect Frank Lloyd Wright prophesied that the city of the future would be even more decentralized than Wells had imagined. Wright’s theoretical model, Broadacre City, was a low-density sprawl unified by sophisticated communication and high-speed commuting.

Perched atop Daffodil Hill, six miles outside Volcano, Susan Woods has seen the post-urban city, and she thinks it works just fine. “When the real crash comes in two or three years we’ll survive,” says she, “because this community already has moved back to the future.”