Suburban Life: Urban Ills Are Catching Up

It’s 4 a.m. and the caravan is already leaving Moreno Valley in Riverside County for the long, long drive to work. Six men in a van pool have learned to sleep sitting up. One woman puts in a cassette tape and practices self-hypnosis. They thank God that when the sun comes up it will not be in their eyes.

These are people who spend an average of three hours a day on the road while their children spend as much as 12 hours in day care. The drive home is usually worse than the drive in. But what waits for them is their reward--the house, typically a salmon stucco spread with a red tile roof that looks exactly like the one next door.

“Four bedrooms and two baths with more than 1,600 square feet and we bought it for $91,000 three years ago,” said Doug Malousis, whose daily commute to Rosemead leaves him one hour at night to play with his 2-year-old daughter. “The sacrifice I make is my commute, and I am willing to make it.”

More than ever, hundreds of thousands of Southern Californians are willing to make such trade-offs. Far-flung suburban towns exploded with growth in the last decade: Santa Clarita in the west end of Los Angeles County grew nearly 66%, Irvine in Orange County swelled by nearly 78%, and Moreno Valley in Riverside County more than tripled.

Fourteen of the 29 cities in the nation that broke 100,000 in population are in Southern California, and almost all of those are suburbs, according to 1990 census figures.

Many suburbanites went looking for a more affordable home, low crime and a place for the children to play. Some were fleeing integrated urban neighborhoods and school busing, especially in the early 1980s, experts on the area’s demographics say.

“Places like Simi Valley and Santa Clarita and so on are related historically to white flight,” said Edward Soja, professor of urban and regional planning at UCLA. “I’m not saying this is the sole reason people went to the suburbs. But there is an element of racial escape behind some of this.”

Most found what they were looking for. Until recently, homes went for under $200,000 in some places. There were only two homicide cases in Simi Valley last year and one of the victims was killed elsewhere and the body dumped in the city. One housing development in Orange County comes complete with a race course for Big Wheels.

But a closer look at life in some of the suburbs suggests that it is not all paradise.

Growth came so fast to some cities that they suddenly were saddled with problems that older towns took decades to acquire. In many young suburbs, the schools are crowded, the roads are inferior and the traffic jammed. There is no live theater, no museum, no downtown and few jobs. Stately oaks were mowed down to make way for subdivisions, then replaced with skinny saplings. The houses have a cookie-cutter sameness and homeowners associations regulate everything from the color of the drapes to the number of times one may bounce on the diving board at the community pool.

There are more houses than jobs, which means more than a grueling commute. The lack of industry leaves a meager tax base and many suburbs are starved for revenue. Some residents pay hundreds of dollars in special taxes every year to pay for schools, roads and sewers to meet growing demand.

Orange County and the San Fernando Valley are considered suburban success stories with a proper balance of jobs, homes, thriving retail stores, arts and entertainment. But it was not long before they, too, were too expensive for young families, who ventured even farther into the suburban frontier in search of a home.

Suburbs spawned suburbs, where growth is so staggering that fledgling cities still struggle to keep up with the hordes banging at the door.

In Moreno Valley, about 70 miles east of downtown Los Angeles, more than 300 children a month enrolled in school in the mid-1980s. Almost all the classrooms are portable and the 3-year-old public library was declared too small the day it opened.

New roads are always under construction in the boom towns and existing ones seem to need widening every year. The traffic in Santa Clarita is “horrendous,” said Mayor Carl Boyer. The city is only 3 years old. With the Antelope Valley Freeway a main artery, one jackknifed truck can lock up most of the valley.

What few jobs there are--in strip shopping malls and fast-food restaurants--pay is not nearly enough to support a home, experts say. Even when the jobs are good, the housing prices may be out of reach. Los Angeles police officers moved to Simi Valley in droves some years ago, but the homes are so expensive today that many Simi Valley police officers live in Palmdale.

“Residential development doesn’t pay for itself,” said David Bellis, an Inland Empire planning expert and associate professor of public administration at Cal State San Bernardino. “Communities are already charging people to use community centers. If the company team wants to play softball in a city park, they have to pay for it. The kids pay $3 to swim in the city pool. Copies of police reports cost $75 in some places.”

Nowhere is the downside of suburban life more exaggerated than in Moreno Valley, 4 years old and dubbed by UCLA’s Soja as “the cruelest suburb of them all.”

The population ballooned more than 320% during the last decade and housing tracts sprouted like rye grass. But the jobs stayed in Orange and Los Angeles counties, and the mostly blue-collar residents, average age 28, spend a good portion of their lives on the freeway.

Some child-care centers advertise hours from 4 a.m. to midnight to accommodate the estimated 71% of the work force that commutes.

“We’ve had mothers come in in tears because they’ve been on the freeway for hours and are afraid they won’t get here on time to pick up their children,” said Sandra Moyer, director of Children’s World Learning Center, which charges $5 for every 15 minutes a parent is late.

Moreno Valley’s 48 square miles are deserted on weekdays and gridlocked on weekends. There are lines for the gas stations, post office, restaurants and traffic lights.

“The parents get home at 7 or 8 o’clock at night. The children eat dinner and hop into bed,” said Father Gerry DeLuney, a priest at St. Christopher’s Catholic Church in Moreno Valley. “The family unit is all but dead. The marriage is weakened. We have new homes purchased a year ago that are up for sale now because the parents are divorcing.”

What could possibly be worth it?

“It’s the American dream of owning your own house. They will do anything for a house,” Bellis said. “They commute five hours a day and are so anxiety-ridden when they get home that they kick the dog and slap the kids and drink six beers. But they’ve got the house and the barbecue and the back yard. It’s their island.”

Many suburban dwellers beg to differ. The quality of life in some of these cities is quite comfortable, they contend.

“This is a dynamic place, and we’re proud of it,” said Moreno Valley City Councilwoman Cynthia Crothers, a resident since 1973. “I’d match our city against almost anyplace else. We’ve just got to get our people off the freeway.”

Moreno Valley residents are so in love with their houses that the local Home Club, a national home improvement store, was the second-highest producer in the chain last year. The air in Simi Valley is usually clearer than in Los Angeles. When somebody stole the giant, spotlighted flag flying in front of Laurie Cummings’ home recently, deputies at the Santa Clarita sheriff’s station were so outraged that they took up a collection and bought her a new one.

Hard as these new towns try, there seems to be no escaping the social ills that have wracked Los Angeles. Community leaders report that gangs, graffiti, drug abuse, smog and lack of health care are at manageable levels in the suburbs, but are there nonetheless.

During a cold snap last year, officials in Moreno Valley counted 14 homeless people. Now, the town is divided about a 70-bed shelter recently opened at a local Catholic church that some residents fear will attract “Skid Row types.”

Nearly every town has some sort of graffiti-removal task force. Santa Clarita health officials report a large percentage of their residents do not have access to good health care because they are inadequately insured or not insured at all. Police recently seized huge amounts of marijuana from Lancaster in the Santa Clarita Valley. Reports of cross burnings and vandalized synagogues in Simi Valley and Thousand Oaks helped prompt Ventura County to form an agency that tracks skinheads and neo-Nazis.

“There is lower crime because there is lower density, but cocaine and crack are going to be there if they are not already,” Soja said. “To some extent, there is no escape.”

Some residents of these homogeneous, planned communities, accustomed to the diversity of the big city, suffer from culture shock. Biofeedback technician Steve Kassel, formerly a longhaired student with a pierced ear from West Los Angeles, said he once could not imagine settling in a community where the closest thing to culture was the Saugus Cafe, the place that James Dean is said to have eaten his last meal.

Priced out of the Westside, he joined the march to the suburbs to buy a house and raise a family and ended up in Santa Clarita. The restaurants were glorified coffee shops and there was not a decent bagel to be found. The first time Kassel saw a black person in town, “I walked up and thanked him for coming.”

The population has begun to integrate and the town has been promised a mall. There is talk of a symphony and opera. Santa Clarita offers Kassel something Los Angeles cannot--an affordable Southwestern-style stucco house on a quiet block.

“It’s nice to live in a brand new house,” said Linda Flammer-Kassel, his wife and the mother of his 2-year-old daughter. “My daughter lives in a safe, clean neighborhood. In spite of all our fantasies of leaving Southern California some day, we’ll probably be here a while.”

The booming growth of the 1980s has all but come to a screeching halt. Many cities have enacted slow-growth ordinances and barred the door.

The suburbs, experts say, do not want to be urban but cannot afford to remain bedroom communities, either. They need to attract jobs, fill some of their empty new homes and get their residents off the freeway. That, the experts say, is the challenge of the ‘90s.

Times staff writer Jenifer Warren contributed to this story.

FAST-GROWING COMMUNITIES

Southern California communities that broke the 100,000 population barrier in the last decade .

1980 1990 PERCENT CITY POPULATION POPULATION CHANGE Chula Vista 83,928 135,163 61.0 Ontario 88,820 133,179 49.9 Pomona 92,742 131,723 42.0 Oceanside 76,698 128,398 67.4 Moreno Valley 28,309 118,779 319.6 Orange 91,787 110,658 20.6 Santa Clarita 66,730 110,642 65.8 Irvine 62,134 110,330 77.6 Inglewood 94,245 109,602 16.3 Escondido 64,355 108,635 68.8 El Monte 79,494 106,209 33.6 Thousand Oaks 77,072 104,352 35.4 Rancho Cucamonga 55,253 101,409 83.5 Simi Valley 77,500 100,217 29.3

Source: U.S. Census