A Shaking Up of Southern California’s Population

The 1990s may be the period of exodus from Los Angeles.

Los Angeles will remain a magnet that draws immigrants from south and east to a freer life. Perhaps in the 1990s we will begin to receive some new blood from the new democracies of Eastern Europe, now that their borders are open.

Meanwhile, though, the stress will be lightened somewhat by the hundreds of thousands who give up on Los Angeles, demoralized by its diminishing amenities, sell their houses at inflated prices and buy cheaper houses in other places.

In the last years of the 1980s the emigrants began to crowd into the suburbs of such places as Seattle, Olympia, San Luis Obispo, Santa Maria, Phoenix and cities in Nevada, Utah and Idaho. Once again we were discovering the West that we had pioneered in the middle of the last century.

And our new hosts were beginning to feel the stress. Newspapers began to reflect the resentment toward Angelenos with angry columns and letters to the editor. What they said, in effect, was “go back where you came from.”

What was driving us out was smog, traffic, litter, graffiti, crime, the high cost of housing and the stress of overcrowding. What made the residents of our new homes hate us was the fear that we would bring those curses with us. They were repulsed not only by our bad manners, but by our values. They were afraid we would infect them with greed, selfishness and hostility.

The country is big. Angelenos suffocating in the overcrowded city looked with longing at the wide open spaces. There is still lots of room out there for us to disperse in. All you have to do to see how much wilderness remains is to fly over the continent in an airplane. I believe there are no fewer than seven American towns named Buffalo Gap, in as many states. I doubt that any are overcrowded. All doubtless have the basic amenities--schools, supermarkets, a McDonald’s, a beer bar and a jail.

Perhaps prophetic is a Christmas and New Year’s message we received from Laurel Rose and Joe Cohn, formerly of Los Angeles. They have moved with their two children to Montecito, south of Santa Barbara, where they have a lot with a “very small stream.”

In explaining their defection they paraphrased Scripture:

“There was much Greed and Wickedness, and the people turned against their neighbors and there was Mischief. And the Lord was vexed sore, and at last He turned His wrath against the people of the City, and he sent three terrible Plagues amongst them.

“There was a plague of Graffiti, and it fell upon wood and cement and stucco alike, and upon all that had been beautiful. And there was the plague of the McDonald’s wrappers and the beer cans and the litter of the Philistines. And there was a visitation of cars, and they multiplied miraculously and they clogged the streets and the avenues and the parking lots and the alleys, and they spewed forth their smog, and the Sun darkened and the Skies burned yellow . . . .”

And it will come to pass that many follow in their footsteps. Our balmy New Year’s Day, transmitted to the frozen East by television, will prompt another 10,000 people to get onto the bus.

In February, 1971, after the Sylmar earthquake, Associated Press sent star reporter Saul Pett here from New York to write a story about the devastation of Los Angeles. Of course most of the damage was confined to the Sylmar area. It wasn’t the kind of disaster that the East wanted to hear about.

Frustrated, and having to write something , Pett decided to write a story trying to explain why Angelenos continued to live here despite smog and the threat of earthquake, fire and mudslide. He called me to ask if I had an answer.

“Where are you, Saul?” I asked him.

“In the Beverly Hilton,” he said.

“Well, stick you head out the window,” I said, “and tell yourself it’s February.”

Of course you can’t open a window at the Beverly Hilton, but I think Saul got the point.