Los Angeles: The Town’s Too Big for All of Us Bacilli

A sort of back-to-the-farm movement seems to be developing to ease the population pressure on big cities.

It does not advocate back to the farm, exactly, but back to the small towns, many of which are withering on the vine.

The latest of these evangelists to write me is William B. Seavey, who says he views the catastrophic overcrowding of our biggest cities from his “safe vantage point in Oregon.”

Seavey represents Relocation Research (P.O. Box 1122, Sierra Madre, CA 91024). “It’s an idea whose time surely has come,” he says.

Los Angeles is becoming unlivable, he observes. “Freeway gridlock. The landfill crisis. An unswimmable Santa Monica Bay. Third-stage smog alerts. Families living in garages. Long lines in supermarkets, banks and government offices.”

He forgot to mention murder, rape, burglary, armed robbery, gang warfare, litter, graffiti, the homeless and deteriorating schools.

There are reasons, Seavey says, why relocation is resisted. It would lower the tax base and appear to obviate chambers of commerce. Also, it might seem reminiscent of world war relocations, although of course it is in no way coercive. (Chambers of commerce, he points out, could continue to be useful in promoting tourism.)

“The solution is simply population redistribution,” he says. “It’s time the subject came out of the L.A. closet. Southern California was once a bucolic Shangri-La, only a few decades ago. The dream is over.”

Polls show that nearly half of big city dwellers would move to smaller towns if they could, he says. “Inertia is a powerful force. Fear is even more so.”

Most are glued to the city by jobs and family. But this may be specious, Seavey says. Many have low-paying jobs and live in seamy neighborhoods. In the country, at least they would be safe from physical harm. “Many of those who choose to live in Southern California are something akin to bacilli that have learned to adapt to a toxic culture.”

Every time I drive through the back lands I am struck by the emptiness of our small towns. Yet they have schools, banks, churches, fast-food joints and the inescapable mini-mall. Surely there is vitality enough here to support a population surge.

Years ago, my wife and I drove through Good Thunder, Minn. I had corresponded with the editor of the local newspaper. Clearly the town was dying. All along the main street stores were boarded up. The editor explained that all the young people had gone to the city. It was the old story: “How you gonna keep ‘em down on the farm?”

According to the California Almanac, 91.3% of our population was urbanized in 1980. In 1900, the figure was 52.3%. Yet our small towns are rapidly becoming cities. The state now has 41 cities with a population of more than 100,000. There are only 182 in the nation.

OK. The farm is out. Farms today are for corporations. But California has many small cities that are buzzing with electronics and other light industries. Seavey mentions, for example, San Luis Obispo. However, San Luis Obispo has already been discovered and is suffering from growing pains. San Luis Obispans are especially dismayed by the influx of Angelenos.

Back in the 1930s on a trip by car to Missouri, we stopped at a ghost town in Arizona. It was utterly abandoned. No souvenir shops. No bar. No gas pump. Nothing but hollow, windblown frame buildings, including a saloon with the back-bar mirror intact. It was a town that had failed. All its people had gone on to the city. It was a real ghost town.

One day, I imagine, Jimmy Stewart or somebody like him had stood with his wife on a nearby hill and said, “Someday, Matilda, there’s going to be a city down there.” No doubt that town has been reborn as a tourist trap. But why couldn’t people from the metropolis give new life to many of our dying towns?

How did the towns of the West come into being anyway? Some pioneer family came along, unloaded their wagon, and said, “This is as far as we go.” Before long, others had joined them. There was a well, then a general store, then a saloon--no, maybe the saloon came first--then a church, then a school, then a post office, then a sheriff, then a Boot Hill. Tombstone!

Isn’t it possible to populate and vitalize our small towns in the same way today?

Surely such a movement is already under way. But don’t expect me to join it. I like the skyscrapers and the restaurants and the shopping centers and Venice and the Music Center and Hollywood Boulevard and the Strip and the Dodgers.

It isn’t Paris, but it isn’t Tombstone, either.

I’ve adapted to the toxic culture.