‘Wide Spot’ on Route 66 Grows Up : Rancho Cucamonga: The former backwater with a funny name attracts new residents with its low home prices and high quality of life.

A lot of people have made fun of Cucamonga over the years.

The most famous, of course, was comedian Jack Benny, who thought the name was funny and often mentioned it in his radio and television shows. It almost always got a laugh.

In one 1958 TV episode, for example, Benny and sidekick Rochester are standing in a train station as a voice on the public address system calls, “Train on Track 5 now leaving for Anaheim, Azusa and Cuc!-amonnn-ga!” Then there’s a pause.

“Attention please, attention. The train for Anaheim, Azusa and Cuc!-amonnn-ga will be delayed indefinitely. Definitely is located two miles east of Cuc!-amonnn-ga.”

Even today, residents of Rancho Cucamonga, as it’s now called, say the name of their city still gets a reaction from older-generation out-of-towners.

Writer Joan Didion also made sport of Cucamonga, although in a darker way. In “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” a 1966 essay about a woman named Lucille Miller who burned her dentist husband to death in the family Volkswagen, Didion made Cucamonga sound like Low Rent-ville, USA.

She described the Cucamonga area as “the California where it is easy to Dial-a-Devotion but hard to buy a book,” a place of fading subdivision signs touting “Half-Acre Ranches $95 Down,” whipped forlornly in the Santa Ana winds. The image of Cucamonga as a funny-sounding San Bernardino County hick town, just a wide spot on Route 66 about 40 miles east of L.A., no longer applies.

“It’s just amazing how things have changed,” says John Picone, who with his wife, Cindy, grew up in town.

“You know the Mrs. Miller case, where the woman burned her husband in a Volkswagen? That was up on Banyan Street, between Carnelian and Sapphire. Back then there was nothing out there. Banyan was so remote that we used it as our drag strip when we were in high school. Imagine something like that happening there now.”

What was once a desolate stretch of rural road, is now a major residential thoroughfare. In every direction there are homes, subdivisions, planned communities numbering in the hundreds, even thousands, of units.

Look north from Foothill Boulevard, the old Route 66, toward the long, sloping foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, and you’ll notice a sea of red-tiled roofs--almost all the roofs in Rancho Cucamonga are red tile--bisected by eucalyptus-lined streets and broken up by parks and open space.

The people who live in those houses are generally well-off (median household income is $40,000-plus) and mostly well-educated. Almost half the adults have been to college, almost one in five holds a degree. They are also overwhelmingly--almost 90%--white.

At most major intersections in Rancho Cucamonga you’ll see mini-malls with the usual assortment of fast-food shops and chain retail stores, but here they are low-key, with single-story buildings, generous landscaping, plentiful parking and subdued signs.

Look south from Foothill, down Haven Avenue and you’ll see glass-and-steel corporate towers, most of them surrounded by expanses of grass and sculpted shrubbery.

In 1977, the communities of Alta Loma, Cucamonga and Etiwanda jointly incorporated as the 36-square mile city of Rancho Cucamonga. Cucamonga reportedly is an old Indian word meaning “sandy place.” According to longtime residents, the “Rancho” was added to give the city a suburban feel; “Cucamonga” was retained because it was a famous name.

At incorporation, the population was an estimated 45,000. By 1989, Rancho Cucamonga had 104,000 residents--an increase of more than 125% in a little over a decade. There are almost 20,000 more homes in Rancho Cucamonga today than there were 10 years ago.

And it’s still growing. Although housing sales are down from previous years, it’s difficult to drive a mile in Rancho Cucamonga without seeing new housing developments in various stages of completion--developments of astonishing size, in some cases.

For example, the 1,300-acre Terra Vista planned community, a Lewis Homes project, will contain almost 9,000 homes when completed, making it one of the largest housing projects in California. Victoria, a development by the William Lyon Co., will have 8,800 homes when completed.

Almost everyone agrees that home prices are the primary reason for Rancho Cucamonga’s stunning growth.

“Price is what attracts people out here,” says Heidi Burns of Better Homes & Gardens Realtors. According to Burns, a single-family home can run from a low of $115,000 to $1.5 million for a home and acreage in the foothills at the north end of the city. A medium-priced home in Rancho Cucamonga, Burns says, would be in the $180,000 range.

George Cervantes of Tarbell Realtors agrees that most new Cucamonga residents are looking for home prices they can’t find closer to L.A. He puts the average home price in Alta Loma, the most upscale portion of Rancho Cucamonga, at about $200,000, while homes on half-acre lots in the area range up to $400,000.

“We had heard all the horror stories about L.A. real estate prices, so we didn’t even bother to look there,” says Sharon Bopp, 36, a writer and editor who with her husband, Jeff, and their daughter moved to Rancho Cucamonga from Iowa three years ago.

Bopp says they were attracted to Rancho Cucamonga by the good schools and relatively low prices for housing--although she admits that, coming from Iowa, they were still “shocked” by what Californians consider affordable.

But price is not Rancho Cucamonga’s only draw. According to residents, real estate agents and city officials, the way the city has handled its extraordinary growth has been of almost equal importance.

Too often, growth of this magnitude creates an urban nightmare of strip commercial development, poorly planned housing projects, overwhelmed city services and snarled traffic.

But most Rancho Cucamonga residents, even the old-timers, seem satisfied with the direction their city is taking.

“I’m really pleased with the way this city is turning out,” says John Picone, who now owns Picone Plumbing. John and his wife, Cindy, both attended Alta Loma High School--she was homecoming queen of 1967--and except for a brief period when he was in the Army, they’ve lived in Rancho Cucamonga ever since. Seven years ago they bought their current home, a four-bedroom, three-bath Spanish-style house on Manzanita Drive, for $145,000.

“If you look at some of the other areas around here that have experienced dramatic growth, they’re a mess,” says John. “But this town looks good. Cucamonga has gone out of its way to make it a balanced community, and anybody who comes here wanting to build something is going to have to meet some pretty tough standards. But that pays off in the end.”

True, Picone says, the growth has brought with it some problems, most notably an increase in traffic.

Larry Henderson, chief planner for the city, says that it was the residents’ desire for growth standards that created the city of Rancho Cucamonga in the first place.

“The city incorporated because residents looked around and saw a threat to their way of life,” says Henderson. “Developments were coming in with no parks, no landscaping; developers were just throwing them up as fast as they could. So the citizens’ advisory group on incorporation got together and decided that development was going to happen anyway, so they were going to make sure it was done right. And they’ve stuck with that.”

In Cucamonga, making sure it’s done right means that parks and landscaping had better be a high priority for any prospective developer; that developers make all necessary street improvements before they build a house, not after; that developers pay special fees for landscaping and infrastructure improvement throughout the city, not just in the immediate vicinity of their projects.

It also means that all new structures undergo design review by the planning department or the planning commission. And it means that developers always have to pay up front.

“The developers resisted all that at the start,” recalls Henderson. “But they tell us now, ‘Hey, we complained at first but now it has paid off.’ And developers are still willing to pay more to come here, because they know their investment is protected.”

Joseph Oleson, a vice president of Lewis Homes, agrees. “The city has very high standards.” He adds, diplomatically, “It’s certainly a challenge to work there.”

It’s Pop Warner football practice night at Heritage Community Park, a beautifully maintained, white-fenced park dotted with playing fields and crisscrossed by horse trails. Sandi Spetnagel is sitting in the bleachers, watching her son run through plays and talking about the bargain Rancho Cucamonga has proved to be.

“The home we got here we wouldn’t have been able to touch almost anywhere else,” says Spetnagel. Five years ago, she and her husband sold their 900-square-foot home in Lakewood and bought a 2,800-square-foot home on a half acre in the Alta Loma section for $175,000.

“We have everything here,” she says. “The schools are good. There are a lot of sports activities. To the left of us we have the mountains and out front we can see the lights shining in the valley at night. There’s a countrylike atmosphere.”

Like almost everywhere else in Southern California, Rancho Cucamonga has experienced a real estate slowdown in recent months.

“We’re in an adjustment period,” says Joseph Oleson of Lewis Homes. “There isn’t the push, push, push there was before.” Nevertheless, Oleson says, “we’re in a submarket that’s still getting a decent absorption rate. The lower end especially are still moving well.”

Despite the slowdown, the Southern California Assn. of Governments predicts that Rancho Cucamonga’s population will reach 133,000 by the year 2000--and it’s worth noting that in the past, the association’s population projections for Rancho Cucamonga have erred on the low side.

“There wasn’t anybody who thought it would grow like it has,” says 85-year-old Nellie Motsinger, who moved from Oklahoma to Alta Loma back in the 1930s. She still lives in the house she and her husband paid $3,200 for in 1938.

“Back then there were orange groves across the street from us,” she remembers. “Now everywhere you look there are fine homes, just fine homes.

“But I still like it very much.”

AT A GLANCE Population

1990 estimate: 112,431

1980-90 change: 103.5%

Median age: 29.5 years

Annual income

Per capita: 15,509

Median household: 48,813

Household distribution

Less than $15,000: 7.3%

$15,000 - $30,000: 13.3%

$30,000 - $50,000: 31.4%

$50,000 - $75,000: 31.7%

$75,000 + 16.3%