CELEBRATE! : Orange County’s First 100 Years : THE IRVINE EXPERIMENT : WHERE NATURE AND MAN PROSPER’

The promise: ‘An environment as attractive, as balanced and as enduring as urban planning can make it . . . where urban sprawl has been stopped before it has started.’ The result: A tidy, unblemished, well-manicured place to live and work.

n the 1920s, an otherwise unremarkable expanse of ranchland was best known as the world’s second-largest source of lima beans. In the 1960s, it was taking shape as a master-planned community. In the 1970s, it was the largest planned community in North America.

Today, Irvine, whose residents voted for cityhood in 1971, is a tidy, unblemished, well-manicured place to live and work. And, like most communities, it has its critics and its boosters.

New York Times architecture critic Paul Goldberger recently described it this way: “Irvine is a world of condominiums and freeways, of shopping malls and office towers, in which everything looks as if it had been finished last month or will be finished next month, and what is old is what was built five years ago.”

To some residents that newness is part of its attraction. Konrad K. Larson, who has lived in Irvine for 19 years, considers it “a very attractive place to live. It’s new. It does have a . . . lot of parks. The schools are very good” and it is safe and clean.

IRVINE THE CITY IS contained on about 64,000 acres of what was once part of Irvine the ranch, a 108,184-acre bonanza purchased by James Irvine Sr. in 1876, when he bought out his partners, acquiring title to all of it. The name has stuck, although family ownership of the land had disappeared by 1983.

If the vastness of 64,000 acres is difficult to grasp, consider this: Geographically, the town is larger than Boston and San Francisco combined.

For a new city to flourish, “you have to be right in front of a wave of people moving toward you,” observes Republican lawmaker Gil Ferguson, who was vice president of public relations and advertising for the Irvine Co. before he was elected to represent Irvine residents in the state Assembly.

“As the people marched out of Los Angeles after World War II, they marched into Orange County,” Ferguson says.

In the path of this migration was what became the city of Irvine. It grew from an unincorporated community of fewer than 100 residents (most of them ranch workers) in 1960 to a full-service city of about 110,000 (most of them homeowners) today.

Of course, all of Orange County was in the path of that migration. What set Irvine apart was its heralded master plan, the blueprint to control and shape what was to come.

Its origins can be traced to the late 1950s. By then, the Irvine Co. had made a tidy fortune farming and ranching the old homestead, patriarch James I. Irvine II had been dead a decade and the University of California was looking for a place to put a new campus.

William L. Pereira--the world-renowned architect who brought a pyramid to San Francisco, an international airport to Los Angeles, a space station to Cape Canaveral and movie sets to “Gone With the Wind”--brought UC Irvine to the site of a one-time hog farm donated by the Irvine Co.

Pereira, hired first by the University of California, then later by the Irvine Co., also brought the concept of villages to the planned community. Pereira designed the first of the community’s planned villages, University Park, to surround the UC Irvine campus.

The village was to be a community unto itself with a unique look and feel, employing open space with bicycle paths, parks, roads and greenbelts, and it would be regulated by a resident association.

Pereira and Irvine Co. planners expanded the concept to the adjoining property that became the rest of the city. As more than 30 villages were added, each retained its distinctive qualities but was linked harmoniously with neighboring villages. From any point in town, shopping, schools and recreation areas were located within walking distance from homes along attractive, well-kept public corridors, such as the elaborate bicycle paths that weave through and link each village.

Telephone and utility lines were placed underground, and parks, paseos, greenbelts and setbacks decorated the landscape within and between the villages. This was strikingly unlike the hodgepodge of suburban tracts that sprawled across the Southern California basin.

Before incorporation, the Irvine Co. had received from county government approval of a master plan for the southern portion of its land surrounding the university. Plans were also being formulated for areas to the north.

But after the vote for cityhood in 1971, all plans were combined, and an overall master plan for Irvine took shape. The resulting plan outlined how and how much of the pristine ranch and farmland would be built upon and, perhaps more important, how much would not. Under the plan, two-thirds of the city will be developed and one-third will remain open space.

All this was wrapped neatly in a slogan that promised: “We build tomorrow’s cities today.”

AT THE TIME OF incorporation, about 10% of current development had taken place.

The Irvine Co. promised in 1970 that residents would “live in an environment that is as attractive, as balanced and as enduring as the science of urban planning can make it. It will be an environment where urban sprawl has been stopped before it has started. It will be an environment where nature and man both prosper.”

Nevertheless, incorporation had its opponents, including the neighboring city of Santa Ana, which wanted to bring the valuable real estate within its own boundaries. The failure to annex unincorporated Irvine was one of Santa Ana’s major “tragedies,” laments Dan Young, that city’s current mayor.

“The city fathers were not aggressive enough in their pursuit of that wonderful piece of geography,” Young complains. “As a mayor trying to rebuild my city’s tax base, there is a certain lust in my heart for the Irvine business complex” and the tax revenue it produces.

The Irvine Co., which in 1971 owned 85% of the land in the proposed city, supported incorporation.

Other developers believed that the Irvine Co. was acting against its own interest by backing incorporation, enabling residents to have more control over the company’s developments.

But Irvine Co. Vice Chairman Raymond L. Watson, who was the company’s principal planner when the master plan took shape, says he believed that “one of the yokes of democracy is democracy. We as a company ultimately have to learn how to deal with that.”

“We may build the parks or the greenbelts, but somebody has to run the programs that have the Little League football and baseball and have . . . whatever level of police they want to have.”

Ferguson recalls the company’s motives as not quite so altruistic.

“We (the Irvine Co.) had lost the support on the (county) Board of Supervisors,” Ferguson says. “Our man didn’t win. So they were 3-2 against us.

“It was pure looking out for ourselves. We determined it would be better to create a city to govern our master plan. It was better to trust our future to (city officials) than a (county) board that was antagonistic to our company.”

County officials increasingly were siding with surrounding communities interested in annexing the unincorporated area, spurring the incorporation movement.

“We had to (incorporate) or we wouldn’t have had any tax base left for the new city,” John H. Burton, who became one of the first councilman, said at the time. “If we didn’t stop it, the whole industrial park would have been up for grabs.”

Some saw incorporation as a means for the Irvine Co. to control decision making. Consequently, some candidates for the first City Council seemed to campaign as much against the Irvine Co. as for cityhood.

By most accounts, the first City Council was about evenly divided with Irvine Co. friends and foes. Larson, an unsuccessful council candidate in that first election, suggests today that “it would be an absolute mess out there if it weren’t for the Irvine Co.”

Moreover, Larson echoed the apparent opinion of many residents, saying: “The master plan idea was a very, very good idea. I don’t think the county would have implemented it. My feeling is the county really didn’t care much about the outlying area. We were out in the boonies.”

Whatever the motives, the pluses or minuses, cityhood was ushered in by a 2-to-1 margin on Dec. 21, 1971.

HAS THE IRVINE CO., which still owns nearly a third of the land in town, exerted undue influence? “There was a lot of fear about that. I don’t think that happened. I do think the company obviously had a tremendous amount of influence,” says William Woollett, Irvine’s first and, so far, only city manager. He has announced his resignation, effective Aug. 1, and will be succeeded by his current assistant, Paul Brady Jr.

The Irvine Co.’s relationship to the city in the beginning was unusual. The master plans drawn by the company eventually served as the basis for the entire design of the city. If that worked to the company’s advantage, the city enjoyed the advantage of not having to deal with numerous developers and landowners.

Ray Catalano, UC Irvine professor of social ecology and former Irvine city councilman, says that Irvine “found ways to provide affordable housing in ways other communities would not,” principally because the city had only one landowner and developer to deal with.

In another city, for example, a developer with only one parcel to build on is likely to want to maximize his profit on the project, Catalano says. But the Irvine Co. has been willing to make somewhat less of a profit by making concessions on a particular development because the city in turn has been willing to grant the company concessions, such as increased density, on other developments.

The result is that the company reaps the overall profit it expected, and the city wins rare concessions in parklands, greenbelts and other amenities that it might not have wrenched from a variety of developers.

The Irvine Co. has walked a fine political line but nonetheless has been a force in local politics.

Company employees have become involved in city political campaigns, encouraged to do so by their employer. But, according to Irvine Co. spokespersons, the employees were not instructed to do the company’s bidding. In fact, the Irvine Co.’s policy has been not to endorse or contribute to Irvine City Council candidates, says Larry Thomas, a company vice president.

Many residents, like Larson, believe that the city’s increasing population has diluted whatever influence the company may have had in city matters.

The Irvine Co.’s Watson likes to draw an analogy to a four-legged stool.

“One leg is the university because it’s a vital part,” he says. “Another leg is the community, the public. Another leg is the city government, which likes to think it is the public, but it isn’t. It’s something different. And the Irvine Co. is the fourth leg.

“We each had different jobs to do . . . . I think the stool is constantly being tilted one way or the other. I don’t think it’s ever level.

“Ideally you would like to ask, ‘Shouldn’t it be level?’ Maybe there were times in which we (the Irvine Co.) had more influence than was a nice balance. There are certainly other times when the city government has had more and more. That leg is getting longer all the time.”

In the view of current Mayor Larry Agran: “Without city government . . . you would have had an area that would have looked like the rest of south Orange County. Irvine is taking on a distinctive look.”

DESPITE ITS self-contained environment, Irvine is not an island unto itself. The city has experienced social problems and political scandals not unlike other fast-growing American suburbs.

Ambition took its toll when former Mayor Dave Baker pleaded guilty last year to felony forgery of a $48,000 check during his failed campaign for Congress. And, like the rest of the world, even the city’s highly regarded school system has been unable to avoid drug and violence problems among some of its youth. Traffic congestion, perhaps the most universal of maladies, has plagued Irvine largely because of regional congestion beyond the city’s control.

But success can be measured by the satisfaction of those who live there.

David Sills, a three-term city councilman who is now an Orange County Superior Court judge, says: “There are people who simply like Irvine, the facilities and the amenities. When they start looking around in other areas, they don’t find what Irvine has.”

Larson believes Irvine is appealing because “people who are the yuppie group--the up-and-coming, high-middle-class--are looking for a place for the kids to play, good schools to qualify them for the universities. And they have yuppie neighbors who think like they do.”

“I like the concept,” says Sue Ann Schappert, a 15-year resident. “I like the newness . . . . But it’s kind of hard to raise kids here. They get such a one-sided view of the world. Everything’s so clean, new and green . . . .”

Catalano says that “there were a lot of aspirations for Irvine in many different spheres of community achievement. I think the overall score card would be (that) we’ve met or exceeded most of them.”

“Residents of Irvine, (according to) almost every survey I’ve ever seen, have a higher level of satisfaction with the community and involvement than any place in the country,” he says.

“No matter where you go today,” says Watson, “people have heard of Irvine, and they associate it with a . . . successful, well-planned city.”

NOT EVERYONE HAS BEEN awe-struck. Mark Baldassare, UC Irvine professor of social ecology, says that Irvine has earned only a C grade as a planned community.

“I think it’s certainly been looked at as a model for urban development,” he says. “But in terms of (being a) success, I don’t think so.

“Its greatest failure (has been) to combine living and working in the same city, and that was the intention,” says Baldassare, who concedes, however, that he is one who has been able to live and work in Irvine.

On the whole, Baldassare says, “housing never really did match up with the jobs that (Irvine) provided.”

Although there are ample jobs within the city, not all are suited for the mostly up-scale residents who can afford to live there.

“There are some high-level corporate jobs available, but certainly for the major portion of the work force--the service workers, the typical white-collar workers--for them, living in Irvine is still a dream,” Baldassare says.

The two primary job centers in town are the Spectrum, at the junction of the Santa Ana and San Diego freeways, and the Irvine Business Center. The Spectrum is zoned largely for industrial and commercial uses, and development here will include a regional shopping center, offices and more medical-research buildings. The Irvine Business Center, located around John Wayne Airport, contains primarily office, manufacturing and warehouse space.

The Spectrum will grow from its present 9.7 million square feet of buildings to about 46 million square feet in the next decade. The Irvine Business Center already has 37 million square feet of buildings on its way to a projected 48 million square feet.

Watson contends that Irvine has been successful in providing jobs for its residents but concedes that more than half of Irvine’s residents still leave town to go to work.

“The object was not to have just a residential suburb, which is what the ‘50s produced,” Watson says. “We try to produce a community that has both jobs and residences and try to get some sort of balance.”

Ferguson allows, however, that Irvine “is not like a normal city.”

“There are no pawnshops. There are no muffler shops. There are no topless dancers. Everything is perfect,” he says. “It’s not like Harbor Boulevard or Las Vegas.

“When we were planning at the very beginning, the question was always: ‘How do you keep this from becoming sterile?’ ”

After nearly two decades of cityhood and three decades of planning, “it does have a sterility about it,” Ferguson concedes.

NONE OF WHAT MAKES IRVINE the way it is happened by accident, except perhaps the fact that the people who live there turned out to be whiter and richer than some might have expected.

The population is about 79% white, 5% higher than the county as a whole. Latinos account for 10.5% of residents, compared with 19% for the county, although blacks and “others” in Irvine amount to 10.5% of the population, compared with about 7% for the county. The estimated median household income 1988 is $55,601, compared with $39,673 for the county.

Irvine was designed as “the city beautiful for the beautiful people,” said then-Santa Ana City Manager Carl Thornton nearly 20 years ago. He did not mean it as a compliment.

One goal was to provide diverse housing. But the question even then was whether there would be a diverse racial and ethnic mix. Critics said from the beginning that the grand plan would spawn a “lily-white” enclave.

The city has its defenders on that score.

“You’ll find Irvine is probably more diverse than any community in south Orange County; that’s by design, not by accident,” Catalano says. “I think Irvine has tried perhaps more than any American suburb to have affordable housing. I think we’ve shown that housing for moderate-income doesn’t have to be unattractive.”

The median resale price of a home in Irvine is $209,000, compared with $211,038 countywide. Of the 10,300 housing units built in Irvine in the past five years, 7,750 were affordable only to upper-income families, those earning 20% more than the Orange County median income.

Middle-class families earning between 50% and 120% of the county’s median income qualified for 2,275 of the residential units built in Irvine during the same period. The remaining 275 residential units were affordable for families earning 50% and less of the median income.

Still, Catalano stresses, “I don’t think that we have gone far enough (in providing affordable housing).”

Ever-rising home prices are among Watson’s disappointments.

“The price of housing is so high it is becoming more and more difficult for a young family to start here,” Watson says. “That wasn’t true . . . in the early years.”

Watson says that the problem results from economic pressures beyond city and company control. He concedes, however, that Irvine’s very success contributes to the problem.

“On one hand you say, ‘I want people to believe this is the best place in the world,’ ” But to the degree people are convinced, they drive prices up. A byproduct of soaring prices has been to make development denser, Watson says.

Judy Archbold, an attorney who for eight years lived in a single-family home in the Woodbridge village, got married about 18 months ago, and she and her stockbroker-husband soon decided that their 1,210-square-foot “cottage home” was too small. They abandoned Irvine last year for a 30-year-old house with a pool on a quarter-acre lot in north Tustin. “We wanted a bigger lot and a bigger house and maybe fewer houses on the block,” she says. “We just didn’t think we could get anything like that in Irvine.”

(Still, Archbold profited. She bought her Irvine home new for $113,000 and sold it for nearly twice the price. “Not a bad investment at all,” she says.)

Former Snowapple neighbor Janice Schmit agrees that Irvine has become crowded.

“The town is getting very overpopulated,” she complains. “The traffic is very annoying.”

But Schmit also expresses what may be the prevailing sentiment-about-town: “I’m not terribly unhappy. I still like more about it than I don’t like.”

WHAT LIES AHEAD FOR this community designed to thwart suburban sprawl and intended to nurture a feeling of community? By the year 2020, it is expected to have nearly doubled its population, topping 200,000.

In terms of residential development, the city is about half finished, but expected commercial and industrial growth has not quite reached the halfway mark. Negotiations between the city and the Irvine Co. have modified the master plan to provide for even greater open space by preserving vast pristine areas of wilderness. In return, the company will be allowed to build up to five and 10 units per acre on land originally designated for one and two homes. Meanwhile, the goal remains to provide jobs for residents, as well as out-of-towners.

“You’ve heard it said that Irvine is boring, homogeneous,” Agran says. “You cannot create a 100-year history in 15 or 20 years. It takes a while . . . .”