Planner Looks Ahead After Watching Irvine Grow Up

Ray Catalano came to the new town of Irvine from Syracuse 17 years ago to see if Irvine and Orange County could meet the “social, political and physical expectations of the new residents.”

For the most part, Catalano says, Irvine and Orange County have done just that.

For despite worsening traffic congestion and air pollution, pell-mell development, and housing costs beyond earth orbit, the 44-year-old urban planner and slow-growth activist says Orange County’s “can do” attitude probably will not allow the gloomy scenario of post-industrial decay painted for the future of Los Angeles in science-fiction films to occur here.

“Orange County will remain one of the most desirable places to live in the world, relative to most other places,” Catalano says of the next 20 to 30 years. “But there will be nostalgia for the way it was here in the 1980s. It’s been a great decade, economically and socially.”

Trained as an urban planner in the 1960s, Catalano was 26 when he came here in 1972. UC Irvine had hired him to teach and research a new subject--social ecology. He helped launch a project to study the effects of the region’s economic and social performance on health care needs.

But unlike sociologist Herbert Gans, who moved to a new Long Island suburb and in 1967 published “The Levittowners,” a landmark book about the granddaddy of planned communities, Catalano helped shape Irvine and the surrounding area directly, first as a city planning commissioner and later as an appointed city councilman who wielded the swing vote on most issues from October, 1985, to June, 1988. In March, 1988, Catalano said he would not seek election to another term because he did not want to ask people for campaign money and “in the same breath tell them not to expect any favors in exchange.”

Now he is moving on to a new research post at UC Berkeley. But looking back over nearly two decades, Catalano says Irvine was the best place he could have chosen to pursue his career.

“The opportunity to come to the major new town in America was too much to resist,” he says. “When I got here, I was interested in the place as a laboratory, but it didn’t take long to be seduced into being involved in the place as a citizen.”

Catalano adds: “My research had always been on the social and health effects of change in a dynamic, growing economy. Here, they were going to build this new town (and try) to help mitigate or make all of this change reasonable, in fact, to stimulate the change itself and give people a hand . . . by taking as much of the pain and confusion out of the kind of growth that other places had undergone.”

In the early years, says Catalano, architects ruled Irvine on the theory that “nice environments make nice people.”

“We discovered that wasn’t true,” Catalano recalls. “The remarkable thing was the speed with which that insight led to doing other things.” Irvine is now the most progressive city in the United States, Catalano believes, thanks to policies that promote creation of day-care facilities, affordable housing, assistance to the homeless, and human rights.

Some of Catalano’s other observations:

- “Let’s face it. Orange County in 1972 was reputed to be a fairly rigid, conservative and ideologically bound place. . . . But I think that these were more pragmatic people than I thought. For example, they didn’t create a metropolitan area in which you had an old, geographically bound central city that was decaying and isolated physically and socially from a lot of well-to-do suburbs that couldn’t give a damn.”

“It’s beyond me as to why the typical, influential Orange County voter--who I think of as being a moderate, management-oriented Republican--doesn’t understand that they own the road system. . . . If any private corporation struck a deal with a developer for a road to carry 100,000 cars a day and then they put 200,000 cars a day on it, destroying the investment, pretty fast they’d be in court for breach of contract. Yet that’s exactly what’s happening to the public’s infrastructure.”

- “Right now the decision is being made, implicitly if not explicitly, that the folks who are going to be here are those who can afford the three-quarters-of-a-million-dollar house . . . and the people whose work styles and life styles are such that they can afford to spend an infinite amount of time on the freeways.”

- Proposals for a new regional government with city and county representatives won’t work because “anybody could get a bloc of votes and do a number on us. . . . They should form something smaller with adjacent cities that have similar problems and let them allocate the number of (traffic) trips each day that their road system can handle.”

Catalano says his toughest decision as a city councilman was to cast the deciding vote for building the Yale Avenue overpass on the San Diego Freeway, over the objections of 1,500 neighborhood residents. The next city council reversed that decision.

Leaving UC Irvine also is a tough decision, he adds, because “everything you do here is ground breaking, risk taking. . . . UC Irvine has accelerated the maturation of Orange County considerably--economically as well as culturally.”

But Catalano isn’t out the door yet. He says he will commute between UC Berkeley and Orange County as long as necessary because he has not persuaded his wife, June, that it is also in her professional interests to move. June Catalano is Santa Ana’s director of community development. The couple has a 3-year-old daughter, Elizabeth.

There’s another reason to commute as well: Catalano has a major research project under way here about how Orange County’s economic performance has affected the demand for physical and mental health services.

The research project is similar to one that first brought him to UC Irvine 17 years ago.