‘Los Angelization’: It’s the Central Coast’s Nightmare

In the perfect solitude of the Santa Lucia Mountains beside an old family graveyard where deer and wild pigs are the only regular visitors, the great-grandson of a pioneer rancher talked about “Los Angelization” in a tone of voice normally reserved for drought or taxes.

“It could be the ruination of our way of life if something isn’t done about it pretty soon,” said Billy Warren, whose family acquired their 10,000-acre cattle ranch in the late 1800s.

A few years ago, Warren would blame mishaps on bobcats or coyotes. Now, when a calf is mauled, he is more inclined to suspect an irresponsible dog owner from Los Angeles. When a ranch gate is left open or one of his decorative cow skulls stolen, his suspicions run in a similar vein.

Los Angelization.

Reverberating like a chain saw up and down the Central Coast, the term means different things--none of them good--to the residents of a pastoral region that is close to being overwhelmed by the problems and opportunities created by a mass migration out of Los Angeles and Orange counties.

Planners and real estate experts here estimate that more than half the people who have moved to San Luis Obispo County during the last five years have come from Los Angeles and Orange counties, many of them cash rich from home sales in a relatively booming Southern California real estate market.

Yet, while a lot of people along the Central Coast would like to blame the turmoil here on the interlopers from the south, there is the feeling as well that traditional values somehow have gone topsy-turvy.

Ranchers and farmers, tempted by skyrocketing land values, can seem only too willing to turn their great-grandfathers’ ranches into condo clusters, business parks and destination resorts. At the same time, lawyers and college professors--people who have seldom waked to the crow of a rooster, let alone chased a stray cow--are becoming instant experts on the preservation of ranchland.

What is happening here is part of the growing pains being felt by a number of places in the West, from Seattle to Santa Fe, N.M. Surging populations, fed by emigres from Southern California, are causing new problems from higher home prices to increased traffic congestion to political disharmony.

In San Luis Obispo County, the most visible sign of change is along the southern shore, from Arroyo Grande to Pismo Beach, where a phalanx of salmon pink tile roofs is filling in one of the last uncluttered stretches of coastline between Laguna Nigel and Big Sur. Seemingly overnight, the low-key county tucked between Santa Barbara and Big Sur, a region noted for its clean air, country towns and mantle of green mountains, is starting to remind people of a Southern California suburb.

“We’re already beginning to look like Orange County,” grumbled one local official.

During the last year, real estate prices rose from 50% to 150% across the county. “You have to look pretty hard to find an entry-level house for less than $235,000,” said Michael Dwiggins, the president of the San Luis Obispo City Board of Realtors.

Applications for building permits shot up 300%. Water rates have tripled in some towns, and at least one municipal well has dried up. Traces of cancer-causing pollutants have begun showing up in ground water near landfills. And, this year, for the first time, county air quality fell below state standards for ozone and other components of automobile exhaust.

A Rural Gentry

The sparsely populated county--150,000 in 1980--is expected to double its inhabitants by the year 2000.

Observing the changes, Stephen Nukes, the president of a planning firm that works for several coastal counties, predicted the rise of a new rural gentry that will alter the way life is led along the Central Coast.

“San Luis Obispo could easily become the Beverly Hills of the Central Coast,” Nukes said. “In the past, most of the people who moved here were from the San Joaquin Valley, moving from one agricultural region to another. But what we’re seeing now is a huge influx of city people with money and sophistication. Many of them are active retirees, in their 40s and 50s, who don’t have to work everyday and have the time to devote to local culture or politics.”

Nukes speculated that along with the new breed will come fancier stores, restaurants and the novelty of night life.

In the midst of all the activity, the county’s leadership has succumbed to political paralysis. For months, the San Luis Obispo County Board of Supervisors has been unable to agree on a strategy for coping with the pressures of the population explosion. As a result, the debate over growth policy will probably be decided at the ballot box next June. Already, rival initiatives are pitting north county residents against south, splitting ranchers into warring camps and, in a few cases, setting family members against one another.

“The last year and a half has been a fright,” said Bryce Tingle, the county’s assistant planning director.

If people can agree on one thing, however, it is that Los Angeles (and Orange County) are to blame.

“LA, GO HOME,” read a picket sign outside a recent meeting of the Board of Supervisors.

The newcomers from the south are not resented just for coming but for coming with a certain attitude, one that is especially rankling to the people here who would like to profit from the new growth.

“The people who just got here, the L.A. refugees, are the ones trying to close the door behind them,” Supervisor Bill Coy said. “It’s the ex-city dwellers who come with these schemes to preserve open space by preventing farmers from selling off grazing land that can’t support cows any longer,” said Coy, who grows oranges and avocados on his north county farm.

This struggle over the land, of course, is not altogether new to California. It has happened as well in Northern California’s Gold Country and Wine Country and in the Sierra foothills near Yosemite--picturesque locales where city dwellers have fled in search of all the comforts of Santa Monica amid the untrammeled splendor of nature.

Scenic Ranchland

At issue in San Luis Obispo County is the fate of a million or more acres of scenic ranchland. For 200 years, the misty pastures and furrowed slopes have drawn people to the landscape, from the Spanish missionary Junipero Serra, who established a mission in 1772, to the American soldier-explorer John C. Fremont, who claimed the county for the United States in 1847, to today’s expatriates from Southern California.

Among the latest wave are people willing to wait five years or more for a building permit that will let them erect a house with a view of the Pacific or of the Morro peaks, the nine miniature mountains that march single file from the city of San Luis Obispo into the sea.

The fight over the future of the land tends to pit agrarian interests, which want to profit from the real estate value of grazing land, against a coalition of newcomers and long-time residents, most of them townsfolk. They want to keep the land free of shopping centers, golf courses and subdivisions.

Public opinion polls show a large majority of residents favor putting the brakes on the building boom, and both sides in the current political battle insist they are fighting for the same thing--maintaining the county’s rural character.

The agrarians, led by the San Luis Obispo County Farm Bureau, argue that if they are allowed to develop their least-productive acreage, it will give them the financial cushion they need to keep the bulk of their land in agriculture.

“We don’t want to be the generation that sold the farms,” said Marilyn Britton, executive manager of the Farm Bureau. “The reason there is so much open space in the county is because farmers and ranchers work hard and go into debt to keep their land in agriculture.

“The preservationists have no idea of the costs involved in agriculture. A lot of them don’t even like farming,” she said, contending that they are among the first to complain about farm noises and smells, not to mention pesticides.

The Farm Bureau and its allies are battling an initiative that would limit population growth by 2.5% annually and slow rural development by making it much harder to sell off land currently zoned agricultural. The Farm Bureau alliance is sponsoring a counter-initiative that would restrict growth to 3% a year and provide unspecified incentives for the protection of “economically viable agricultural land and the preservation of open space.” At the same time, the counter-initiative would give farmers and ranchers a free hand to dispose of agricultural acreage.

However, much of the most beautiful land--along mountainsides, for example--is the least agriculturally viable and the likeliest candidate for development. According to the Farm Bureau, only 11% of the county’s agricultural land is considered “prime” or capable of supporting row crops and vineyards, where most of the money in farming is made these days.

A number of ranchers agreed to keep their land in agriculture for 10 years in return for tax breaks under the state’s land conservation or Williamson Act. But as the 10-year pacts expire, some ranchers are deciding to not to renew, so that their land will be available for development.

Many thousands of acres of pastureland have already passed into the hands of developers, and there has been a flurry of plans presented that, if approved by county officials, would break down 5,000- and 10,000-acre ranches into five- and 10-acre ranchettes.

The most ambitious plan to date would take the 14,000-acre Santa Margarita Ranch into a suburban community, complete with 3,000 homes, two or three golf courses and an industrial park.

“The planned community would overwhelm the little town of Santa Margarita (a settlement of 2,000 people and one of the oldest in the county) and wipe out one of the last big viable cattle ranches,” said Tingle, the assistant county planning director.

Growth Controls

Not all ranchers and farmers side with the Farm Bureau. Some, like Billy Warren of Cambria, support efforts to restrict the sale and development of agricultural land. Without growth controls, Warren said the cost of growth--of Los Angelization--will fall on ranchers who can ill afford higher taxes.

“What we’d like is to let people from L.A. come up and buy a house or a ranch without causing us to go broke paying for the water and the sewers and the schools they expected to have waiting for them,” Warren said.

Warren’s neighbor, Shirley Bianchi, also the descendant of a pioneer rancher, is campaigning for county supervisor on a platform that would allow ranchers to sell development rights without letting go of their land. The rights could be bought by someone wishing to develop property elsewhere that has no value as open space.

But Warren and Bianchi are keenly aware of the pressures on ranchers to sell out. Land worth $500 an acre a few years ago now sells for $5,000 or more.

Bianchi pointed out that some people simply are forced to sell. She spoke of a nearby family who must sell valuable water rights in order to pay the hospital bills of a parent suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.

But Bianchi has less sympathy for most would-be sellers, including a cousin who wants to sell his piece of the family ranch to a developer with plans to subdivide the property into 40-acre “boutique ranches”.

“What in the world is a boutique ranch?” Warren asked her.

“It’s something they thought up in Los Angeles,” Bianchi said.