Urban Refugees Put Squeeze on Rural Life : Lifestyles: It’s a familiar story. Those who were lured to the quiet towns of Temecula and Murrieta are now facing the problems they tried to escape: traffic congestion, crime and pollution.

The valley is most dramatic at night, when the clear desert air sparkleswith an oasis of lights. Street lights, house lights, headlights.

They illuminate an inland valley once known best for its touristy antique stores, its rolling vineyards, its wide-open cattle ranges. A couple of side-by-side blinks of towns in the rural countryside halfway between San Diego and Riverside alongside Interstate 15.

Temecula.

Murrieta.

For years, they were the kinds of places that made you wonder: Who would live there besides retirees and ranchers, and maybe the fellow who runs the gas station?

Today they are boom towns, overnight sensations born of refugees from San Diego, Los Angeles and Orange counties--many of whom still drive hellacious commutes to their old jobs until these bedroom communities can catch up in the jobs market.

The dizzying growth has taken its toll in Temecula, foremost in the arena of traffic. Lacking sufficient signals, the former hayseed of a town now is forced to put traffic cops at crowded intersections during rush hours.

In 10 years, the population of Temecula and Murrieta valleys at the southern edge of Riverside County has catapulted from less than 10,000 to about 100,000. Most of that growth has occurred in the past three years, swamping the area like a flash flood in the desert. And, Riverside County planners say, the two young cities and the adjoining unincorporated county area are going to double in population before the dust settles.

Little wonder, for here are spanking-new homes in spanking-new neighborhoods at bargain prices, framed beneath clear blue skies and unmarred hillsides. It’s a lifestyle or two removed from metropolitan ills, a wedding of urban sophistication and rural ambience, of youth soccer leagues and 4-H clubs, feed stores and farm tractor races, thoroughbred horse ranches and championship golf courses and a home-grown radio station that plays Karen Carpenter songs.

For people like Dave and Chris Davis, moving to Temecula meant the chance to buy a home that, in the late 1980s, was significantly cheaper than comparable homes in Orange County.

The Davises, who moved from Tustin in that county, are hunkering down for the good life with their 9-month-old daughter, Sarah, even if it means a 45-minute commute for Dave to his office in Riverside.

“We would have stayed in Orange County if we could afford to buy a house there,” Chris said. “But it’s exciting being here. Everything is new. And there seems to be a lot of young couples moving here, buying houses, having babies--people who are in the same place we are.

“Everyone we meet here is from somewhere different.”

Even though they have barely arrived, residents of Temecula and Murrieta already worry that the good life is unraveling. The community’s rural atmosphere is being overwhelmed by the very people who have sought it out. Even though the 35-officer Temecula Police Department--sheriff’s deputies under contract to the city--hasn’t had to yet investigate a homicide, the graffiti are cropping up here and there, along with suggestions that gang members hide in the shadows.

That worries people like Ed and Sue Madrid, who say their dream of living happily ever after is corroding under the sun.

The young couple moved to Murrieta from Oceanside in 1988, saying the San Diego coast is too fast-lane for the raising of a young family.

Already they are looking to move out. They talk of Flagstaff, Ariz.

“All the people from L.A. and San Diego are moving out here--and bringing their problems with them,” said Sue Madrid, 27. “We’ve got crime, kids joining gangs, smog, traffic.

“Everything we moved away from is now following us out here.”

Indeed, progress has proven a bittersweet process for Temecula, which incorporated as a city in 1989 and now has a population of about 35,000, and for Murrieta, which became a city this past summer and is now home to about 30,000. Officials now wonder if bigger is necessarily better as they come to grips with traffic and the need for more parks and schools.

“This place reminds me a lot of what the Irvine Ranch used to be,” said Leigh Engdahl of the master-planned community in Orange County, where she lived for 10 years before moving to Temecula with her banking husband. Today she is the executive director of the Temecula Valley Chamber of Commerce.

“In a way, we’re what Orange County was 20 years ago,” she said.

Just two years ago, two grocery stores were enough to serve the two towns. Now there are five. Two years ago, the biggest retail stores in town were a Payless drug store and a Ben Franklin variety store. Today shoppers can choose from a Target and Mervyns, and soon they will have K mart, Costco and Walmart stores. Neighborhood, national-brand chain stores and fast-food joints line the streets.

Serious shoppers head into Riverside or south to Escondido for their mall fix. But Newport Beach developer Donahue Shriber is planning to open the Murrieta Springs Mall in 1993 and eventually offer eight anchor stores and 200 mall stores. A hotel and office building complex are planned as well.

Patricia Novotney was a principal at a school in Irvine six years ago when she was wooed to Temecula to serve as superintendent over a single elementary school and a middle school that served 1,200 students. The high school kids went up the highway to Elsinore.

Today, she presides over a district with a 2,400-student high school, plus six elementary schools and two middle schools for an additional 5,900 students, a child-care program for commuting parents to drop off children as early as 6:30 a.m., and plans to build 18 more schools for an expected 15,000 more students. Murrieta’s student population is going in the same direction.

The component most lacking in the two communities is a local employment base. An estimated 65% of the area’s working people leave town to go to work every day. The No. 1 destination, according to one local survey, is Orange County; Riverside is second. Others drive to San Diego or Los Angeles; the headlights of commuters start illuminating neighborhood streets at 4 and 5 in the morning.

The area is trying to carve out a high-tech industrial niche focusing on the medical and computer fronts. The largest employer in the region is Advanced Cardiovascular Systems, where 900 workers manufacture devices used for angioplasty. Five hundred more manufacture power semiconductors at International Rectifier.

Though a minor player in California’s wine industry, the dozen local wineries are said to contribute $32 million to the local economy, both for their grape sales, wine production and spinoff tourism business.

Local business boosters tout the region’s ideal location as a distribution center: 90 miles southeast of Los Angeles, 60 miles north of San Diego. And don’t forget, they add, the relatively clean skies, cheaper land, relative abundance of water thanks to a generous underground aquifer, and a freeway that is wide open by Southern California standards.

“Our land prices used to be 40% cheaper than L.A. or Orange County. Now it’s just 10% to 20% cheaper,” said Bill Bopf, who worked for one of the area’s major developers and who today is a prominent realtor and president of the Economic Development Corp., formed in July to promote business growth in both Temecula and Murrieta.

“In a lot of ways, this is a replay of Orange County,” said Bopf, who once was city manager of Tustin. “When Orange County first started, there was open land, not an overly great concern about growth, and it was a desirable place to live.”

Temecula’s growth stemmed from the organized efforts of a single development company, while Murrieta, targeted by smaller-scale developers, took on a more varied cast.

The area’s first settlers were Indians and, later, Spaniards, who farmed the area for grain. Travelers first took note of Temecula in the early 1800s because it was an overnight stop on the stage route between Missouri and San Francisco.

For decades, cattlemen drove their herds to Temecula for rail shipment. The original town site--preserved today as Temecula’s Old Town and generously peppered with antique stores and down-home cafes--was mapped in 1884.

Then, in 1936, came the area’s first big news story: Village blacksmith John McNeil murdered his wife and became the last man to hang in California before the state turned to the gas chamber.

Serious development around Temecula opened in 1964, when the 97,500-acre Vail cattle ranch was sold for $21 million to the Oakland-based Kaiser Aluminum & Chemical Corp. But its plans stalled, a victim of the real estate recession of the early 1980s.

In 1986, Kaiser and its partners sold the land for more than $400 million to Bedford Properties, headquartered in Lafayette, near Oakland. And the development, called Rancho California, took off thanks to intensive marketing.

By the late 1980s, first-time home buyers could buy single-family tract homes for $120,000 “and people in Orange County were selling their homes there for $500,000 and coming out here to buy 10-acre estate homes for $300,000 or $400,000,” recalled Bopf.

Bedford targeted several audiences, he said.

“The big appeal was to first-time home buyers. We couldn’t build them fast enough. There was another product for the person making $90,000, driving a BMW, who was 45 and had one child.”

In 1989--in the face of an increasingly anti-growth sentiment brewing in Riverside County--the residents of Temecula voted to incorporate as their own city. The incorporation campaign was unabashedly and heavily financed by developers wanting to protect their own futures in town.

Specifically left outside the city boundaries--at the vintners’ request--was the wine country east of Temecula, down Rancho California Road, where large, country-size lots are needed for the financial viability of grape growing.

The drafters of cityhood did look north to include Murrieta, but residents there wanted nothing to do with the notion of losing their country-spun ambience to master planning. And, last summer--to fend off Temecula once and for all--Murrieta incorporated as its own city.

For years, Jerry Allen, his wife and three young daughters lived in Placentia in Orange County, and he commuted to downtown Los Angeles as a deputy sheriff. In 1977 they moved to a 10-acre parcel in Murrieta, drawn by its pristine, rural setting and small-town (population then 2,000) feel, the kind of place he wanted to raise his daughters.

He still commuted to downtown Los Angeles, a 1 3/4-hour trip.

In 1979 he switched jobs to head security for the Xerox Corp. facility in El Segundo. His commute was two hours each way; he couldn’t take that, so he left Xerox in 1983 to work for his father’s plating shop in East Los Angeles.

The drive was now just miserable instead of a killer, and he admitted that his long hours away from home were taking a toll on family life--a dilemma, he said, that confronts many of the valley’s commuting breadwinners.

“You don’t get to see the kids growing up. By the time you get home at night, at 7:30 or later, everyone’s tired, the dinner is late and nobody feels like talking much.

“We discussed the idea of moving back” to Los Angeles, but the family was too married to the Murrieta way of life. The girls were involved in 4-H activities, and his wife was steeped in school volunteerism. Allen himself had become a volunteer fireman.

So, in 1987, Allen hired on full-time with the Murrieta Fire Department, where today he is a battalion chief.

He talks wistfully of the old days in Murrieta. “It would take you an hour to go to the store--not because it was far away but because you’d know everybody there, and you’d end up talking to everyone.”

Now, he says, he’s in and out of the supermarket in just a few minutes, finding himself in line with strangers.

But Allen has hardly turned his back on the community. When Murrieta voted a year ago this month to incorporate last July 1, he was elected mayor.

His political agenda? “Well, there are no tremendous controversies in town. People just want to preserve it as the kind of place it was when they moved here,” he said.

“But it’s getting hard to do that, because, if we preserve that same ambience, then it’s still going to be attractive and still more people will want to move here. We can’t close the door on people. That’s not the style of Murrieta, to close the door on people.”

Down the street in Temecula are stronger whiffs of disillusionment.

Sal Munoz, a civil attorney who moved from Rancho Cucamonga to Temecula in 1989 and was elected to its first City Council that same year, said the city has been paying too little attention to preserving its small-town life.

“I came here for a healthier environment,” he said, “but I haven’t seen the city take the lead on environmental questions like air quality. I have a tough time convincing city staff to convert our vehicles to propane.”

He says he is angry that developers haven’t been pressed to widen roads to ease congestion and discouraged that the young city lacks a general plan to better map growth strategies.

He described the council majority as “pro-development at almost any cost.”

“There’s no logic to growth, yet we continue to approve project after project without waiting for the general plan,” he said. “I take some comfort in knowing that we’re no L.A., but I know that it’s only going to get worse.”

But Temecula Mayor Ron Parks has no apologies about encouraging growth.

The most pressing need for the city, he says, is business and industrial growth to balance the residential growth and to give people the chance to work locally.

What are Temecula’s greatest planning flaws? He wishes the early developers had left more trails for hikers, bicyclists and equestrians. “A lot of trails are now blocked by development,” he said.

Also common are complaints that the major thoroughfares that cross over I-15 and link the east and west sides of Temecula are too narrow, the victims of poor planning and tight purse strings by Riverside County and the California Department of Transportation in the early 1980s.

Remarked Gail Achen, who moved with her husband, Norm, to Temecula from Laguna Beach in 1977, “I can go through Laguna faster than getting from one side of Temecula to the other.”

“We used to complain about the traffic in Orange County,” she said. “Now here we are in Temecula, complaining about the traffic.”