The Inland Migration : Development: The search for affordable housing is fueling building booms in rural areas. Lake Elsinore and Solano County are showing the strains.

In their eternal quest for open space and affordable homes, Californians are moving inland in larger numbers than ever before, sparking an unprecedented development boom all through the center of the state.

While average single-family home prices have soared far beyond $200,000 and cooled sales in most coastal areas, affordable prices that are still well under $200,000 are turning rural towns from Tracy to Temecula into middle-class bedroom boom towns.

Two inland counties, Riverside and Sacramento, passed 1 million in population in 1989 for the first time. California’s total population is increasing fast as well, indicating that the torrid pace of development is not about to slow down.

“The economic forces are too strong,” said Stephen Levy, economist for the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy. “The growth won’t disappear.”

More people moved to California last year--421,000--than at any time since World War II, according to estimates from the California Department of Finance. The state now has more than 29 million people and is expected to have around 35 million early in the next century.

The inland growth has brought all the unpleasant side effects so familiar on the coast--jammed freeways, unsightly sprawl, overcrowded schools. The Central Valley, home to fast-growing cities such as Modesto and Sacramento, is spreading out so haphazardly that some planners warn that the region will resemble the sprawl of Los Angeles or San Jose someday.

Two of the fast-growing regions grappling with change are Solano County northeast of San Francisco and the Lake Elsinore area southeast of Los Angeles. Until recently, crowds were scarce and agriculture was king in these regions, but both are now showing the strain.

Solano County

Vacaville used to be a quiet farm community in rural Solano County midway between San Francisco and Sacramento, known primarily for its onion dehydration plant, the largest private employer in town.

“You could (always) tell it was Vacaville because you could smell the onions on the way through,” recalled William J. Carroll, Vacaville’s 54-year-old mayor and a local businessman who has lived there nearly all his life.

The onion dehydration plant closed a few years ago, and Vacaville’s identity has been changing ever since. Today, it’s a fast-growing suburban community where Bank of America, the nation’s third-largest bank, plans one day to be the biggest non-government employer.

Vacaville and the rest of Solano County have seen explosive growth because they are among the last affordable areas left in the nine-county San Francisco Bay Area--and the latest hot spot for business relocations.

The county is in the first stages of a development boom that promises to alter its agricultural and military-base character every bit as profoundly as when early Spanish settlers dislodged the Southern Patwin Indians in the last century.

“The growth is unbelievable,” real estate developer Scott R. Sheldon said. “It’s like Riverside County was a few years ago.”

Solano County is already well on its way to being another ring in the suburbanization of the Bay Area, fueled in part by the fact that its neighbor to the south, Contra Costa County, is increasingly congested and expensive.

Young families are flocking to Solano County in search of a less crowded place to live and, most important, homes costing well under $200,000. Typical home prices in central Solano County range from $140,000 for resale houses to $175,000 for new ones, local real estate experts say.

“Solano County is the most affordable area in the Bay Area,” said Thomas B. Cook, director of housing and land use for the Bay Area Council, a business-funded research group. “It has the cheapest houses and the cheapest rents.”

Affordable homes are a major reason that Cori Curtola Gormley drives 54 miles to her secretarial job south of San Francisco. She and her husband live in Vallejo, where she was raised.

Once primarily known as a military town, Vallejo is so filled with young families that its overloaded school system is on a year-round schedule. “It’s more a bedroom community now than anything else,” Gormley said.

It used to be that Solano County had little draw for outsiders.

Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield was the primary staging area for troops going to Vietnam, while Mare Island in Vallejo was the shipyard where nearly 400 combat vessels were built during World War II. Vacaville has a maximum security prison.

These days, though, investors are staking claims on agricultural land all over the county, which encompasses 834 square miles. “There is not any prime agricultural land in the county that is sacrosanct now,” state Rep. Thomas Hannigan (D-Fairfield) said in an interview.

The region’s population, estimated at 326,000 today, is expected to reach 455,000 by the year 2005, according to a report by the Assn. of Bay Area Governments. The county had 235,000 people in 1980.

The growth has taken a toll on everyone. Newcomers are finding school systems all over the county ill equipped to handle the influx of students, and the freeway system is far from adequate to accommodate the added cars.

“It’s traffic, traffic, traffic,” said Anthony J. Intintoli, a high school teacher and mayor of Vallejo. “That’s all everyone wants to talk about.”

Fairfield, a fast-growing town of 78,500, has proposed the controversial step of establishing a special annual tax on all new homes as a means of funding 10 new schools costing more than $100 million. Voters turned down a $60-million bond issue last year.

Some cities have slapped lids or moratoriums on new-home construction until more classrooms are built. Vacaville has proposed a 1,400-unit ceiling on new tract homes for 1990, less than half what developers would like.

By the standards of crowded Orange and Los Angeles counties, though, Solano County remains relatively open, with a landscape that varies from strikingly beautiful and tranquil to Kansas flat.

Though the 25 miles from Vallejo to Vacaville is becoming increasingly developed along Interstate 80, miles of hills and postcard-perfect valleys remain unblemished. All the county’s major towns are located along the freeway corridor.

But it is the future that has locals apprehensive. The sprawl, if not shaped properly, may eventually stretch unbroken from the Bay Area all the way to Sacramento and perhaps even to Reno, some locals believe.

“We have the potential for explosive growth here, and that’s what worries me,” said Craig McNamara, a local farmer and son of former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara.

San Jose and Santa Clara County epitomize the Bay Area sprawl that Solano County least wants to emulate. “Will Vacaville Become Another San Jose?” asked a recent flyer from the Committee for Orderly Growth, which McNamara heads.

Solano County has avoided some development through a partnership of voters and environmentalists who have taken their case to court and the ballot box.

Fairfield has a program to preserve open space on either side of its borders by acquiring property through an agency known as the Solano County Farmlands and Open Space Foundation. The foundation just bought a 2,100-acre ranch for about $1,000 an acre that it plans to keep as open space.

The foundation was formed after McNamara’s group sued the city and agreed to an out-of-court settlement for what it claimed was an illegal annexation of property for an upscale residential development in Fairfield known as Rancho Solano. The foundation’s initial funding came in part from a loan from the city.

McNamara’s alliance also played a pivotal role in the passage of Proposition A, a hotly contested initiative approved in 1984 that cut off new development in unincorporated areas of Solano County. The initiative was drafted after residents objected to construction of a new town, which would have been called Manzanita, on county land.

Though its proponents were heavily outspent, Proposition A passed narrowly, and development on county-controlled land came virtually to a halt. Development is now allowed only on property located in a city or in an area that a city is planning to annex.

“With some exceptions, it really put the county of Solano out of the development business,” said Norman J. Repanich, president of the Solano Economic Development Corp., a privately funded business group.

Though Proposition A is set to expire in the mid-1990s, it’s likely that an extension will be put to another vote. Whether it passes again “may be the single greatest influence on what the county looks like 10 years from now,” Hannigan said.

Meanwhile, new businesses ranging from a candy factory to a mattress plant have moved to Solano County, attracted by affordable land and labor. “You can find twice the land at half the price,” boasts Gary Falati, the mayor of Fairfield.

One real estate development firm has acquired 4,000 acres of farmland along Interstate 80 between Vacaville and Dixon that it plans to develop in the mid- to late-1990s. Another investment company has bought more than 1,000 acres from Chevron near Vacaville that it plans to develop for homes and businesses.

The most attention, though, has focused on plans by Bank of America to build a $125-million office complex on 100 acres near Vacaville in a picturesque area known as Lagoon Valley. The development, unveiled in November, is expected to employ up to 2,500 people.

The San Francisco-based bank has obtained an option to buy the property, now owned by developer Peter McCuen, and hopes to begin construction next year. The property is expected to be annexed by Vacaville, where Mayor Carroll hailed the news as “a great day for Vacaville and Solano County” because of all the local jobs that it will create.

Carroll clearly has mixed feelings about the growth, though, as do many in town. Carroll supports the 1,400-unit limit on new tract homes because the city is short of school capacity.

He waxes nostalgic about the old days, fondly remembering the onion dehydration plant as the symbol of a different time. “It was the passing of an era” when it closed, the mayor said.

Small-town Vacaville is indeed gone. Its population of 66,000 today is expected to double in the next 20 years. “I think it has grown too fast,” said Margie Carroll, the mayor’s wife. “I wish it had not happened this way.”

Mayor Carroll believes that the county can avoid wall-to-wall suburbs only by mandating that plenty of open space be provided by developers. “In the final analysis, I see the only open space will come from within the areas that are being developed,” he said.

Lake Elsinore

Pick the fastest-growing part of the fastest-growing county in California and you get a 15-mile patch of freeway along Interstate 15 stretching from Lake Elsinore to Temecula in southwest Riverside County.

Young families fleeing primarily from Orange County, bolstered by retirees from Los Angeles and some refugees from San Diego County, have turned this region into the newest hot spot for middle-class living in Southern California.

Though a pleasant climate and terrain along with cleaner air are big draws, it’s the affordable tract homes priced between $100,000 and $250,000 that are the main attraction.

“It enabled us to get into our first house, which we couldn’t do (in Orange County) unless we lived in the ghetto,” said one publishing company executive who drives from south of Lake Elsinore to Costa Mesa to work.

The influx of people has provided new vigor for Lake Elsinore, a 102-year-old city with a highly unpredictable lake on its flank, and given a distinctly suburban look to Temecula, which only a few years ago was a quaint village encircled by citrus groves, horse farms and wineries.

The combined population of the Elsinore and Temecula valleys, from Corona to the San Diego County border, is about 115,000 and could balloon to 400,000 by the year 2020, according to Vick Knight Jr., a retired educator and consultant to the Lake Elsinore Valley Chamber of Commerce.

“It sounds scary as hell,” Knight said.

The population in the five communities from Lake Elsinore to Temecula has tripled to more than 55,000 since 1980 and it likely will triple again in the next 10 years, according to the Economic Community Development Agency for Riverside County.

Since 1980, Temecula’s population has increased to 17,300 from 4,839, while Lake Elsinore’s has grown to 13,769 from 5,982. A key reason for the increases was that Interstate 15 was finally completed all the way from Corona to San Diego.

Those moving to the Elsinore and Temecula valleys often endure monstrous commutes because the region is so isolated. It’s about 90 miles southeast of Los Angeles and 60 miles northeast of San Diego.

Charles Wieland, a machinist who lives in Wildomar just south of Lake Elsinore, said it used to take him 2 1/2 hours to get home in the afternoon from his job in Santa Ana. Commuters say it often takes an hour to travel the short stretch from Anaheim to Corona during rush hour.

But Wieland now lives in a house that is nearly twice as big as the one that he used to have in Santa Ana, and it cost only about $6,000 more. He bought the home three years ago for $117,000.

He is also fortunate because he found a job in Temecula, where an increasing number of companies are building plants, among them a Japanese automotive products firm and a computer company from El Segundo. Shopping centers abound.

Wieland welcomes the development as progress that is making his life easier. “I wanted the growth to happen,” he said. “When I first moved here, you had to drive all the way to Riverside if you wanted something.”

The change is everywhere:

- Lake Elsinore now has a Sizzler restaurant and K mart department store, both of which are said to be doing land-office business. But the city’s only synagogue, once the house of worship for a vibrant Orthodox Jewish population, closed recently because many have either moved away or died.

- The Ortega Highway, the scenic Highway 74 that runs through Lake Elsinore, has become a heavily traveled and dangerous thoroughfare for commuters who work in southern Orange County. It’s a 35-mile drive through the Cleveland National Forest on a winding, two-lane road never intended to handle rush-hour traffic.

“The traffic has increased tremendously,” said Ken Daily, a California highway patrolman. “And whenever you have people late for work, you have a lot of unsafe passing.”

- Temecula has growth indigestion. Crime is up sharply, and, according to Mayor Ron Parks, the city needs another seven schools, estimated to cost $65 million, to alleviate overcrowding.

Traffic gridlock is common at rush hour as drivers endure long waits just to get across the freeway overpasses. “Traffic is the biggest problem that has resulted from the growth,” said William A. Harker, general manager of the Temecula Town Assn., a promotion and preservation group.

Temecula was incorporated as a city only last year, though its long history goes back to the early 1800s, when it was an overnight stop on the stage route from Missouri to San Francisco. (The stage depot still stands on a ranch outside town.)

The incorporation combined the old town of Temecula with the booming new area known as Rancho California, a suburban-style planned community that has been built at a furious pace in recent years by the master developer, Bedford Properties.

After a spirited debate, voters last year overwhelmingly approved Temecula as the name for the newly incorporated city.

The seeds for Rancho California go back more than 25 years when Vail Co. sold a huge cattle ranch for $21 million to an investment partnership headed by Kaiser Aluminum & Chemical Corp. The partnership, which later included Aetna Life & Casualty, eventually bought nearly 100,000 acres for a planned development that did not begin in earnest until after the severe real estate recession of the early 1980s receded.

“As inflation got under control and interest rates fell, all hell broke loose,” said Harker, Temecula’s unofficial local historian and a retired engineer for Hughes Aircraft. “It has been the rate of growth that has surprised everyone, not the growth itself.”

Bedford Properties, headed by real estate developer Peter Bedford, bought the development from Kaiser in 1986 for more than $400 million, and development has accelerated even further since then.

Another 6,000 houses and 3,000 apartments are planned in the next two to three years, Harker said. Peter Bedford could not be reached for comment.

The Temecula area is also a miniature Napa Valley. About a dozen wineries have been developed in the past two decades, with Callaway Vineyard the oldest and probably best known. It’s owned by Hiram Walker & Co., the Canadian liquor company.

The wine region has become a popular tourist attraction. A San Francisco real estate development company, Pacific Union, is planning a $25-million resort, to be called the Wickets, that will have a 135-room hotel along with a winery, croquet court and 40 acres of vineyards.

Temecula has also had its share of famous residents over the years. Former President Ronald Reagan had a ranch there, and actor Jack Klugman is such a familiar figure around town that the locals don’t pay any attention to him anymore, Harker said. Klugman has a ranch a few miles outside town.

Lake Elsinore, by contrast, is not as upscale as its neighbor to the south. It was labeled the “City of Hate” in a Los Angeles television documentary in the 1950s because of alleged anti-Semitism in the area. Yet, it is an ethnically diverse town that had a black mayor in the 1960s.

In the past, the lake has been as much a curse as blessing. It has alternately flooded and dried up, playing havoc with the town and its residents.

In 1948, thousands of carp mysteriously died in a nine-day period, followed by an infestation of gnats that appeared as the lake level dropped lower and lower. In 1951, the lake dried up for the first time in recorded history, but heavy rains filled it up to 11 feet in 1952. Then it dried up again in 1954.

These flows and ebbs caused one local newspaper to remark in 1958: “Lake Elsinore is the only lake in the world that you can walk across without getting your feet wet and in the process be simultaneously engulfed by a sandstorm and bogged down in the mud.”

The latest calamity occurred in the early 1980s, when heavy floods wiped out hundreds of homes around the lake and caused property damage of more than $70 million. Lately, though, the lake has shrunk because of the drought.

The city has nearly finished a levy as part of a $42-million-plus effort to stabilize the lake at manageable levels. Business officials expect that the project will open up for development the huge flood plain at the south end of the lake.