Paradise Lost : So What Won? Cheaper Homes, Cleaner Air and Open Spaces : for Many Families Who Have Forsaken Orange County

Perhaps Pogo said it best in his comic strip in the early 1970s: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

The same “us” who once flocked to Southern California for a slice of sunny paradise are having some gloomy thoughts these days. Air pollution is obscuring views. Cars are cramming our byways. And open spaces, bean fields and cow pastures have disappeared beneath strip malls and parking lots.

While thousands are still spilling into the county each year, others are setting their sights on quieter spots of unspoiled beaches, unclogged freeways and cleaner air. And as the dream of owning a home becomes more elusive every month and traffic nears gridlock, a band of refugees is saying “enough!”

According to county migration records, 88,368 people moved out of Orange County in 1982-83, while 92,554 moved in. In 1986-87, 100,590 moved in, while 90,852 moved out.

In a survey conducted for The Times, pollster Mark Baldassare found that 28% of county residents would like to move, almost half of them out of the county. The desire to buy a home (27%) and a better location (23%) are the major reasons given by those wanting to pack up, whereas employment opportunities were named by just 12%.

“There are a whole lot of reasons why people are leaving, but a lot of people are leaving because of the price of homes,” says Barbara Taylor, president of the Orange County Business Development Center, a nonprofit company that tracks business and technological trends.

With the median price for a used single-family house in the county at $234,935, and with just 16% of the population able to afford that amount, the market keeps many itching to move, she adds.

“The housing situation will continue to drive a lot of people away. It comes down to either being able to earn the $70,000 you’d need to buy a house or moving or driving long distances to work. There are a number of studies that show that densely populated areas with a lot of traffic contribute to psychological stress. A lot of people are saying they don’t want to be bothered by that.”

Dr. Charles Patterson is one of them. The 62-year-old family physician sums up Pogo’s anxieties and puts it another way:

“The question isn’t why am I leaving Orange County. The question is why are you staying?”

Tired of the traffic, sick of the pollution and weary of the crowds, Patterson and his wife, who have lived in Corona del Mar for 12 years, have decided to cash in their equity and buy a ranch in Arizona.

They’re not the only ones bailing out. Karen Searer, a Huntington Beach newlywed, is moving with her husband, Don, to Sacramento, where they can buy a new, four-bedroom tract home for $125,000. And Jim and Helen Hall, formerly of Mission Viejo, have left for Santa Rosa to escape the crowds and congestion.

Patterson, who sold his home this fall and is renting a house in Arizona, remembers when he could count the waves on the Pacific from his office window in Newport Beach.

“Now it’s so smoggy you can hardly see the beach,” he says. “I think it’s unhealthy. I’m leaving because of the 55 Freeway. The crowds. And the pollution.”

Patterson has nothing against cars, as long as they don’t choke the highways, cram his cul-de-sac and pollute the air. Which they do. He says the street on which he lived in Corona del Mar has nine houses and 31 cars. The people across the street have six members in their family and six cars.

“The traffic has hindered me from doing a lot,” says Patterson, who years ago stopped delivering babies in large part because traffic jams prevented him from getting to the hospitals in time from his Newport Beach office.

“L.A. doesn’t have anything on us anymore,” he says. “All the people who used to be a problem there are down here now. The population center is unbroken from Camp Pendleton to Ventura. There’s no escape.”

Karen Searer came to the county 1 1/2 years ago still starry-eyed from working with film makers at Disney Studios in Burbank. At the time, she was reticent about trading in L.A.’s glitzy aura for the strip malls and suburban tracts of Orange County. Soon, however, she settled in happily--until she got married and started looking for her first house amid the shopping centers and beach communities.

“The biggest reason we’re leaving is the high price of housing,” says Searer, who recently left her job as an administrative assistant at South Coast Plaza and will be looking for a similar position in Sacramento. “We are obsessed with having a house of our own, preferably with a little land around it.”

She says hunting for a house in Orange County only left the newlywed couple more discouraged.

“We found nothing, and every day there was another horror story in the paper about the houses going up again. It kept Sacramento realistic and tempting for us.”

But it wasn’t just the housing that drove the couple northward.

“I’ve got this problem of not liking my commute to be more than a half-hour,” says Searer, who lived in Huntington Beach and worked in Costa Mesa until she moved to Sacramento last month.

“So every day, instead of allowing myself more time, I’d be late for work. It’s absurd, but I can’t see scheduling 40 minutes to an hour to drive to work.”

Searer couldn’t escape the highway shuffle even on the weekends. When they lived here, the couple left the county nearly every Friday to pursue varied sports activities. Every weekend they’d get stuck in traffic for hours.

One Sunday “it took us 6 hours to get home from San Diego,” she says.

During the couple’s furtive but futile search for a new county house, one thing became obvious: All they could afford was a small house on a patch of land in a distant development. The measly market kept the couple dreaming about the state capital, where Searer’s husband could work for the same real estate company.

In Sacramento, $125,000 will buy a “really nice, new four-bedroom tract house,” Searer says. “And you can still be in a desirable area for that. For an affordable house here you’re going to end up” in some undesirable area.

In Findlay, Ohio, $125,000 buys a sprawling executive home on more than 10,000 square feet of land, according to the town’s Chamber of Commerce. But Judy and Don Fagan, who lived in Mission Viejo for 3 years until they left in September after Don got a job through a former employer, chose a $54,000 house with three bedrooms and a 9,000-square-foot lot.

They too left Southern California so they could buy their first house.

“Every time we tried to save a little bit it would go somewhere else,” says Judy Fagan, whose monthly rent in Mission Viejo was $1,000. “The cost of living kept going up, but the pay never caught up. It was just too much of a struggle.”

The Fagans, who have a 4-year-old son, bought their new house--which measures 1,300 square feet, not including a large, finished basement--sight unseen. About half an hour after the couple signed the papers and sent them back to Ohio, a video of their new home arrived from a friend who had performed the house-hunting for them long distance.

“My husband’s father looked it over and found it was in good shape, and my girlfriend walked through it,” says Fagan, who grew up in Ohio. “We both love it, and we’re real happy here.”

For Jim and Helen Hall, Santa Rosa offered cleaner air, more natural beauty and a slower pace than the county they called home for 20 years.

“There is more natural beauty as opposed to man-made beauty here,” says Helen Hall, who, like the Fagans, fled Mission Viejo. “We left because of the traffic and smog. I think it was just the wall-to-wall towns, the feeling of solid development. Here there are real towns, with downtown sections and outskirts.”

The Halls found Santa Rosa housing only slightly less expensive than Orange County’s. “It’s a little better, but we were hoping we’d get much more of a house here, and we didn’t,” Helen says.

What frightens her now is the specter of development casting a shadow on Santa Rosa. Already she spies earthmovers and cranes on the pastoral horizon. Housing tracts are spilling into rural areas, and public spaces are becoming more crowded.

“It’s still rural, but it is slipping away,” she says wistfully. “It is much slower than Orange County, but traffic is getting bad. And they’re building more and more every day.”

Searer and Patterson think more residents will be bailing out of Orange County, if they can.

“We were looking at a model home in Sacramento, and we ran into a couple from Cypress,” Searer says. “They were there for the same reason we were. We talked about how bad it was looking for houses in Orange County. It was like old home week.”

If attrition becomes a trend, it might spell salvation for the county, Patterson says: “I think there will be a lot of people like me, so the out-migration may equal the in-migration. Then all you new people can have it.”

Patterson is following his heart to Prescott, Ariz., a mile-high town with a population of 15,000. With the money he made on his $500,000 Corona del Mar home, he is looking for a house or ranch with about 40 acres in the hamlet 150 miles north of Phoenix. Patterson delights in the area’s small-town flavor and wide-open spaces, where antelope still roam the hillsides and leased land and zero lot lines are exotic notions.

“There isn’t a freeway within 150 miles,” Patterson boasts.

Ironically, many who leave seem to miss the very thing that helped drive them out. Like a nasty habit hard to kick, the endless miles of malls that draw all those cars and people crowding the county are hard to give up cold turkey. While they may be too numerous here, they are a rare commodity elsewhere.

“I wonder about the shopping and whether there will be any,” says Searer, whose job at South Coast Plaza may have ruined her for Sacramento shopping centers. “I don’t want to sound like a snob, but they don’t dress as nicely, and they don’t have the stores or other things we (had) in Orange County.”

Hall misses the malls too--but doesn’t want them built in Santa Rosa: “I miss the shopping the most, especially Fashion Island. We don’t have anything like that here. But that’s one of the reasons we moved here, really.”

Patterson says that in Prescott his wife will miss the shopping, but he will be too busy fishing, hunting and watching the antelope bounding about his acreage to miss Southern California’s enticements.

“As far as I know, they’ve never had a traffic jam in Prescott. If they had, it would have made the news.”