QUALITY OF LIFE IN THE VALLEY : Craig Stecyk, sculptor

“You’ve got the basic onslaught of civilization here. People used to live out here to be different.

“They sought that quality of life that was a little less structured and more wide-open, the Southern California ranch experience. I guess the quality of life is still here, but you just can’t see it.

“The area we live in seemed to be far out, but now it seems like we’re right in the middle of it.

“There was an acre behind us and a few acres down the street, then for 18 months, somebody was pumping concrete every day. All day. Sometimes all night. It’s all been just bulldozed and raped. The problem is the price of the land is just so much, people can’t resist.

“We moved from downtown L.A., the burgeoning art scene, for a complete change. It was a real exciting prospect.

“At that time, they were establishing the Santa Monica Mountains park--the Valley to the sea--but their purchasing power has been so eroded by the inflation of real estate that they’re now being left with the secondary and tertiary properties.

“When we first lived out here, we’d look out the back of the studio and we had coyotes, skunks, raccoons, opossums, hawks, kit foxes on our property. Now you never see them. Now you have these fabulous, texture-coated, million-dollar monstrosities instead.

“We used to be able to walk and take our kids and play on the rolling hills adjacent to our property. If we want to see a landscape now, we have to actually get in a car and drive. I could set up sculptures on the hills behind our house. They’ve graded that hill and altered all of that. They paved in the creek behind our home. It was this sylvan little woodland environment, now it’s just a sewer. It’s a crime, really.

“We need more public, common, open green space. There ought to be some consideration over preservation of what little is left of it and possibly retrieving some of it. Are animals all going to be reduced to crawling down those two-foot drainage ditches they put in?”