Being at Southland’s Crossroads Puts the Boom in Brea
Claire Schlotterbeck lives in a cozy subdivision that clings to the side of Carbon Canyon. She has lost a whole squad of cats to the coyotes that patrol the hills looming over her house.
Drive a few miles on Carbon Canyon Road as its snakes between these steep olive-green hills and you forget you’re in the middle of a large metropolitan area.
Until rush hour. Then one of the road’s two lanes fills with cars that slow to a crawl as thousands of commuters battle their way into Brea through the nearly pristine canyon.
“It’s often bumper to bumper out there,” Schlotterbeck said.
Such is the price of success for Brea, a city of 33,500 tucked into the northernmost corner of Orange County, where a pocket-size economic boom is under way. It’s a small boom compared to the big boom towns in relatively undeveloped south Orange County. But it’s enough to make Brea stand out in comparison to its quieter and bigger neighbors in north Orange County like Yorba Linda or Placentia, which opted to develop primarily as residential cities.
Called ‘Irvine North’
In fact, some residents only half-jokingly call Brea “Irvine North,” a reference to the south county city that grew in a few decades to 98,000 residents and still has more jobs in its plants and offices than its residents can fill.
Some out-of-towners, say residents, think the city must be near those tar pits in Los Angeles. But Unocal knows exactly where Brea is. So does Allstate Insurance. And Suzuki. And Security Pacific National Bank.
All run major operations in the city, most of them started in the last 10 years, turning Brea into a center for banking and financial services.
Security Pacific processes checks here; Allstate has a regional office; most of the operations are solid but less-than-glamorous back office operations like processing checks.
Even manufacturers, who have been fleeing Orange County’s high land and labor costs for years, are moving to Brea, as Mark Industries did recently when it moved its scissors-lift plant from Long Beach to Brea.
Why? The answer is simple: Put a finger on a map of Southern California, where Los Angeles, Orange and San Bernardino counties converge. Your finger is resting on Brea.
The Orange Freeway, opened in 1972, neatly bisects the city and connects it to the teeming subdivisions inland and central Orange County at the other end.
“Banks and insurance companies look at those subdivisions and know they’re filled with the kind of back-office employees they’re looking for: a lot of clerical types, many of them the second wage earners in the family, most of them women,” said Bob Sattler, who markets office buildings in the city for Coldwell Banker’s commercial real estate brokerage.
“I get calls from brokers all over Southern California for banks and insurance companies that are interested in Brea,” he said.
The nearest competition are the glass office towers going up around Anaheim Stadium, several exits down the freeway.
But the crowded streets and densely settled neighborhoods of Anaheim--the county’s biggest city--seem a lot further away from the small-town world of Brea, which is nearly as old as Anaheim.
Brea rolls right up to the hills that separate Orange County from Los Angeles--long, lazy lines of hills abruptly broken here and there by the cone of a single hill. Below the hills, the city’s wide streets and open spaces give it an agreeably spacious, almost sprawling look. It’s a low-rise city: There aren’t yet any of Orange County’s ubiquitous boxy glass office towers.
Compared to glitzy county cities like Newport Beach or Laguna Beach, Brea “is a real quiet kind of small town, with a Midwestern kind of atmosphere,” said Wayne D. Wedin, a City Council member who is widely credited with shaping much of the city’s growth as its former city manager.
“It may have grown, but it’s still a small town.”
The city’s two biggest events are a country fair and a Christmas tree-lighting.
For much of its life, Brea was a sleepy little town with an economy that subsisted on an odd mixture of oil and oranges.
The oil came first. In the 1890s, the roughnecks came to Randolph--as it was then called--to work on the Union Oil Co.’s wells.
The town’s 700 residents decided to incorporate under the name of Brea in 1917. Brea , incidentally, is Spanish for tar , globs of which once dotted the oil-rich ground. Brea became the county’s eighth city.
Union Oil--now Unocal--was one of the city’s largest employers and landholders. Union and other oil companies drilling in Brea held onto their oil lands when the post-war subdivision boom swept into Orange County, fueled by thousands of Los Angeles workers looking for inexpensive housing. To a large extent, the wave of subdivision construction swept right by Brea and continued on south, even as it does today.
By the 1960s, the city recognized that its central location and the oncoming freeway would put it squarely in the path of a second wave of growth. This time, the city decided to accept it.
The time was right. Most of the old citrus groves were gone, and the oil was drying up too in many of the wells. When the county began taxing unused land more heavily, the oil companies too began to think about selling some of their holdings. Unocal alone owns as many as 300 acres inside the city limits and perhaps twice that in adjacent unincorporated areas within Brea’s planning jurisdiction, the city estimates.
Most of the emphasis on Brea’s development has been on jobs. The city’s population hasn’t grown that fast, and few new homes are being built. But there are now 18,000 jobs, according to the city, or more than one for every two residents.
Developers have built 2.2 million square feet of office space in Brea, or nearly five times the amount in the county’s tallest office building, the 20-story City Tower in Orange. That’s small compared to the mega-office developments around John Wayne Airport or South Coast Plaza, which are beginning to rival Los Angeles in amount of office space. But for such a small city, 2.2 million square feet is an impressive amount.
One million of those square feet was built in the last 4 years, according to Coldwell Banker, and nearly all of it was leased, although that has slowed down now, as it has over most of the county.
In retailing, the Brea Mall draws shoppers from all over and has the second-largest retail sales of any mall in the county, second only to mega-mall South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa.
So where are all the workers coming from? Over the hills. On the San Bernardino County side of Carbon Canyon and on into the city of Chino, houses seem to sprout from every hillside, the ubiquitous red tile roofs and tan stucco walls everywhere.
“That area is literally exploding,” said W. Steven Johnson, a vice president of the Meyers Group, a Corona consulting firm. “There were something like 3,000 acres graded for houses in there last year.”
Cheaper Housing
Droves of Orange County and Los Angeles residents have moved to San Bernardino and Riverside counties in search of cheaper housing in recent years, touching off one of the nation’s biggest housing booms. Many of them, however, must come back to Orange and Los Angeles to work, however.
Meanwhile, in Brea, “the oil companies have been slow to bring their land on the market,” said Johnson. With few homes going up in Brea, “the market for older houses is very tight.”
And very expensive, for all types of houses. New homes in the north county tend to be more expensive than the county average, already one of the highest in the country. According to the Meyers Group, the median price of a new home in the north during the fourth quarter was $352,000. In the south county, where most of the new homes are being built, it was $255,900.
Brea residents can probably afford it. Incomes here compare favorably to wealthy Newport Beach, largely, says City Council member Wedin, because of “old money: land, farming, oil.” The median household income in Brea in 1988 was $42,783 compared to $47,848 in Newport Beach, according to Donnelley Demographics.
Along the way, Brea resolved to keep a tight grip on the new development. It was one of the first--and the few--Orange County cities to require builders to deck out their projects with sculpture. But now, to some residents, that tight grip seems to be slipping a little.
Because of all the new jobs, each morning a wave of commuters descends on the city, tying up traffic on Carbon Canyon Road, the Orange Freeway and other roads for hours.
That worries and annoys residents, as does the prospect of more building on the hillsides facing the city, the only area inside the city where there are still large chunks of open land.
Unocal owns much of the hillside land and recently has sold some to Newport Beach home builder J.M. Peters Co. Inc., which built what residents say is an unpopular subdivision perched over the Orange Freeway. The 120 houses cost up to $400,000, and Peters says it would like to build more houses in Brea.
Unrevealed Plans
Unocal has yet to say what it plans for the hillsides or a big chemical fertilizer plant on 52 acres that it is closing.
“There’s obviously a lot of interest in their plans,” City Manager Edward G. Wohlenberg said of the oil company, which has had a sometimes prickly relationship with city government.
It seems likely that Brea residents will grumble about development on the hillside but are conservative enough not to do much about it. Brea voters rejected overwhelmingly a countywide slow-growth initiative that would have put the brakes on growth in the unincorporated areas around Brea.
“My guess is that people recognize something is going to happen on the hillsides, and they just want quality and a good appearance,” Wohlenberg said.
Meanwhile to the east, over in Carbon Canyon, Schlotterbeck was moved to join Hills for Everyone in 1980, a few years after moving back to the state from Michigan. The group helped promote creation of Chino Hills State Park, one of the largest and most expensive urban parks in the world when it is completed: Thirteen thousand acres, $70 million, all just a few minutes from downtown Brea.
“When I moved out here, I saw how healing nature can be to people faced with the onslaught of urban life,” Schlotterbeck said.
She worries about a proposed new road that would cut through the hills to San Bernardino County, relieving traffic on Carbon Canyon Road but skirting the park for much of its route.
Back downtown, from the big glass windows of the city’s ultramodern office building, you can see ramshackle houses just a few blocks from the gleaming buildings of the Brea Mall.
If the city has its way, soon many of those houses will disappear to make room for snazzy new condominiums and apartment complexes. Some of those new condominiums are already popping up on sites where old houses once leaned against the wind off the hills.
In the last 5 years, the city has spent $150 million acquiring land, tearing down buildings and paving roads in its deteriorating downtown area, according to Wohlenberg. As many as 25 acres may go for construction of enormous discount stores, whose operators are said to be interested in the area. Gradually, much of the old downtown is disappearing.
It all seems to be part of a sort of municipal split personality: A small town with the economic profile of a big city; a conservative town razing much of its past, a relatively upscale shopping town contemplating construction of a gigantic discount retailing center.
“It’s interesting what’s happened here,” said Wedin. “It’s a real unusual place.”
