Suddenly, the Blueprint for a Happy Life Doesn’t Work

This was the postcard; this was the keeper. Eighty degrees on a late February Monday afternoon, leaves slightly aflutter on the trees, mothers pushing their babies in strollers and a solitary bird gliding overhead.

This is exactly what it must have looked like on the architects’ rendering when they drew up Rancho Santa Margarita. This isn’t a community--it’s a post-hypnotic state. Contentment, comfort and conformity, all with climate control.

You talk about planned communities--not only were the neighborhoods planned but so, in a sense, were the job sites. In late 1986, the Hughes Aircraft Co. announced it would be setting up shop in Rancho Santa Margarita, with the idea being that its employees could live in the burgeoning community and walk or bicycle to work.

It was the vaunted California dream to the nth degree--nice place to live, steady job down the street, avoid the freeways.

Oh yes, the California dream. We speak of it as if it were a birthright, freely given. For awhile, it probably seemed that way; after all, almost anyone who came out here could buy into it.

We tend to forget that you can wake up from the California dream in a New York minute without some rather basic components--like having a steady job.

Jeannette Wright landed in this dreamscape about four years ago, buying a one-bedroom townhouse right in the heart of beautiful downtown Rancho Santa Margarita. Then in her early 40s, Wright had been with Hughes since she was 19 years old and, if nothing else, thought she had the security needed to perpetuate her own revised version of the dream.

From her new Rancho Santa Margarita home, she commuted to work in Hughes’ Irvine plant for a year, until the new plant opened five minutes from her house.

In these precarious economic times, three years ago seems like a very long time.

For that reason, it’s a much warier Jeannette Wright who goes to work at Hughes these days. The company recently announced that it is shutting down its Rancho Santa Margarita operation and relocating the 475-person work force, most likely to Carlsbad in San Diego County. The rumor mill also is rife with reports of layoffs.

Suddenly, Jeannette Wright’s grip on her dream doesn’t feel so tight.

“It takes every penny I make to live right here,” she says, sitting in her living room on this picture-perfect day. “If Carlsbad is the only choice and I had to do it, I’d do it. I have to have a job. I can’t quit. I have too much invested to throw it down the drain.”

She’s hoping she can get transferred back to one of the company’s remaining Irvine operations, because she made a test drive last Sunday to Carlsbad and said it was a 52-mile one-way trip.

But it isn’t just the inconvenience that worries her; lots of people have tough commutes. What troubles her is the creeping sense of vulnerability, of how fragile her hold on the good life is. And while she isn’t greatly concerned about the worst-case scenario of being laid off, who knows?

Over the years at Hughes, she said, “there was always talk of layoffs here and there, but never this bad. We’d go week after week, there would be rumor after rumor, somebody would be laid off. . . .”

Now divorced and just shy of 46 with two grown children, Wright is her sole source of support. Having literally grown up professionally with Hughes, Wright felt the company’s protective hands on her.

“I had a feeling of security, I always thought Hughes was a great place to work, they treated their people well, I felt they watched over you, let you know when something was coming down. But now it seems, boom, it just happens.”

She mused about the good old days, when buying into the dream of Southern California seemed an impossibility. She and her husband went looking for their first house 25 years ago and bought one for $23,500. “We went house-shopping after that and saw some other houses we loved at $45,000 and said no way, we could never afford that.”

But they and thousands upon thousands of young families were able to afford other houses, because the steady employment in Southern California made it possible. Now, Wright is living amid houses where the average cost is $200,000. That sounds glamorous unless your job happens to be in jeopardy.

Hughes announced its realignment two weeks ago and has said it will let people know who’s going where sometime in March.

In the meantime, Wright says, she’s doing a lot of tossing and turning at night.

What happened to the dream, I asked her.

“Yeah, what happened to it?” she said. “It’s not here anymore.”

Which only goes to show you, even the best-laid plans of companies and communities often go awry.