Eastward, Ho : Southern Californians are Headed Inland, to the Area Around the Ontario Airport--the Newest Edge City in a Region That Invented the Concept.

ROSY-CHEEKED, PRETERNATURALLY BLOND WILLARD (Skip) Morris, president of the Ontario Center, has the air of a scratch golfer or daily tennis player. His professional attire is a pink monogrammed oxford shirt, collar and one button undone, and loafers without socks. It’s not surprising to discover that he, his wife and their three kids live in a master-planned, gated community in Mission Viejo--and that they love it.

To afford that life, every weekday morning Morris drives north and east 62 miles to an office building on Haven Avenue just north of Interstate 10 in Ontario, two miles east of Ontario International Airport. It’s a reverse commute, Morris admits, to an entirely different world, where Holsteins chomp grass alongside California 83, and the hottest restaurant around is the new Chili’s. “Sometimes out here,” he says, “I do feel a little out of place.” That’s one reason Morris and the area’s other developers--many of whom also reside in Orange County--are trying to build Ontario into a place more like the one they live in.

Another reason is that, someday, they could make a lot of money.

“When I first got here in 1985, there was nothing but tumbleweed and jack rabbits,” says Morris, whose development occupies the dusty site of the former Ontario Motor Speedway. The Ontario Center, a subsidiary of Chevron Land & Development Co., has since rousted some rabbits with a Hilton hotel and office buildings, including San Bernardino County’s tallest, the nine-story Empire Towers. And Morris and Chevron are just beginning. On the wall of his office’s fourth-floor conference room, with its picture-window view north up a dramatic alluvial plain to the sprawling city of Rancho Cucamonga and 10,064-foot Mt. Baldy, is an architectural drawing of what Morris hopes Ontario Center will become. The development would be of a scope never seen in California so far from the beach. A dozen more buildings. A mall twice the size of any around. Possibly a public library. A full-service “car care” center. Acres of landscaped and lighted parking lots. Streets named to evoke memories of the speedway: Lotus Avenue, Mercedes Lane, Alfa Romeo Lane, Ferrari Lane.

“We’re looking to create a better version of John Wayne,” Morris says. He is referring to the gleaming cityscape around the Orange County airport, where a person standing on the MacArthur Boulevard overpass above Interstate 405 can count as many as 40 office towers of between five and 20 stories. Just 15 years ago, there were none. His colleague Tom Merle, the Ontario Center’s bow-tie-clad vice president, chips in: “Create an oasis, a mini-environment that has the image, the shine.”

They mean an oasis carved out of the hardscrabble underdevelopment of the Inland Empire, from its truck stops, pig farms, listless late-19th-Century downtowns, treeless tract developments and abandoned industrial plants. They mean a place where coastal business people will be comfortable in spite of the stifling summer heat and smog and harrowing 50-mile-an-hour winds, a place where they will want to locate their operations. Merle mentions Joel Garreau’s recent book, “Edge City: Life on the New Frontier,” which chronicles the national burgeoning of these shiny concentrations of glass-and-steel towers and landscaped plazas, of which Century City, the John Wayne Airport area and Warner Center in the San Fernando Valley are archetypes. “We need to create an environment that looks like that.”

In other words, like a new American city.

To understand the machinery of growth in California as it turns, finally, inalterably inland, the place to go is 37 miles east of downtown Los Angeles, to the area around the Ontario airport. “If LAX is the capital of coastal California and maybe of the whole Pacific Rim, then I think of the Ontario airport as the capital of the Inland state,” says Asia- and Washington-based author James Fallows, who grew up in Redlands and flies into Ontario when he visits his family. “You get off a plane and it hits you: People wear polyester, they’re regular. It’s Midwesterners who have found the sun. Then you get off a plane at LAX. There’s no sharper image of the division.” Yet as the economic juggernaut of Los Angeles reaches over the hills, western San Bernardino County suddenly finds itself a bridge to the coast, an experiment in what the Inland state might become.

Now that its once-distinct cities are fusing together, the area is suffering an identity crisis: No one is quite sure what to call it. Planners use “West Valley,” meaning the western half of the San Bernardino Valley. Developers hype it as the “Gateway to the Inland Empire.” The local daily newspaper is the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, though “Inland Valley” turns out to be a recent editorial invention that hasn’t stuck.

What each moniker refers to is the developing sprawl below the San Bernardino Mountains from the Los Angeles County line nearly to the city of San Bernardino. About 20 miles wide and 10 miles deep, the area is physically diverse enough that movie producers have used one end (Claremont) for quaint Midwestern shoots and the other (the now-defunct Kaiser Steel plant in Fontana) for hellish post-nuclear-war scenes, most recently in “Terminator 2.” Think of it as a slightly larger geographical twin to the San Fernando Valley, 45 miles east.

The parallels don’t stop there. What the San Fernando Valley was in the ‘50s and ‘60s, the Ontario area was in the ‘70s and ‘80s: the first stop for Angelenos hunting down affordable housing and one of the fastest-growing locales in the nation. In three years alone, between 1987 and 1990, the combined population of the six cities surrounding the airport--Montclair, Upland, Chino, Ontario, Rancho Cucamonga and Fontana--jumped from 387,000 to 475,000. That rate of growth is projected to continue, and it means that by 2010, 1 million people will live here.

But these primarily residential communities are only the necessary outskirts, the prerequisites of the new American city that has begun to glitter around the airport in western San Bernardino County. Its centerpiece is Haven Avenue, which has been enthusiastically designated the future Wilshire Boulevard or MacArthur Boulevard of the Inland Empire. Wes McDaniel, the executive director of San Bernardino Associated Governments, ticks off what this street could supply. “Identity. A sense of place. Meaning. Economics. Jobs.” From Interstate 10 and the Ontario airport, Haven Avenue makes a beeline north six miles up the dramatic, steady grade to the base of Mt. Baldy. Though still only half-developed, Haven is accepted, according to Rancho Cucamonga City Planner Brad Buller, as “the primo street in a future edge city of L.A.”

The term edge city was coined by Garreau, who spent 10 years as a reporter for the Washington Post observing the development of this new urban form. “Americans are creating the biggest change in a hundred years in how we build cities,” reads the first paragraph of his book, published last fall. “Every single American city that is growing, is growing in the fashion of Los Angeles, with multiple urban cores.” Such hubs, and the tracts of single-family dwellings they serve, he explains, now are far more important social and economic forces than the nation’s original big-city downtowns. Edge cities, he writes, have “become the place(s) in which the majority of Americans now live, learn, work, shop, play, pray and die.”

Though he certainly did not discover edge cities--urban planners had been charting them for decades, giving them such names as “urban villages,” “technoburbs” and “post-suburban outer cities”--Garreau has helped define and count them. According to Garreau, any post-1960 hub that contains, among other things, at least one major retail mall, 5 million square feet of leasable office space and more jobs than bedrooms is an edge city. These are not cities as Americans usually think of them, he concedes. They rarely have a formal name, boundaries or government and are often identified only by the freeway or the mall that anchors them. But, writes Garreau, “by any functional urban standard--tall buildings, bright lights, office space that represents white-collar jobs, shopping, entertainment, prestigious hotels, corporate headquarters, hospitals with CAT scans, even population, each Edge City is larger than downtown Portland, Ore.; Portland, Me., or Tampa or Tucson.”

You know the form: It was invented--and perfected--in Los Angeles. Mid-Wilshire, Century City-Beverly Hills and West L.A. were among the first. In the San Fernando Valley, Sherman Oaks (where U.S. 101 hits the 405), Burbank-Universal City and the Canoga Park-Chatsworth areas qualify. Colorado and Lake streets anchor an edge city from Pasadena to Arcadia. To the south, the confluence around Disneyland and Anaheim Stadium is a huge edge city. Altogether, Garreau counted 19 in the Los Angeles Basin in various stages of development--including the Ontario airport area.

In Ontario, however, Los Angeles is cloning its city form far from the ocean, and it’s hard to know whether to shiver or clap. All the way back to medieval times, city building was a grand, respected endeavor, but now people wonder. Even Orange County, whose commercial centers are envied around the world, has gagged on traffic and high office-vacancy rates and wants no more of edge city. Ventura, for years a logical site for an edge city, is saying no in advance. For now, the coast has had enough.

So inland it is. In “Cities and the Wealth of Nations,” her landmark study on how big cities create big economies, Jane Jacobs wrote that “civilizations in which cities stagnate don’t develop and flourish further. They deteriorate.” In that light, perhaps the Ontario airport area represents L.A.’s willful refusal to deteriorate. However you might judge L.A.’s sprawl, what would you expect it to do--voluntarily cease to grow? No, this “old” city is doing what it has always done: heading for wide-open space. And the Gateway to the Inland Empire has neither the luxury nor the inclination to resist.

DAVID ARISS, MANAGING DIRECTOR OF CALIFORnia Commerce Centers, the largest industrial developer in the airport area, is one of the newcomers. He helped build the Orange County industrial market in the ‘70s and began working Ontario in 1984. Ask him exactly how edge cities occur, and he laughs. It’s not apparent? His complete history of their development takes about three minutes. Ariss, it turns out, believes that edge cities are an almost divine force of economics--and he’s not alone. Dennis Macheski, of the accounting firm Price Waterhouse, who studied new urban centers for 16 years with the Southern California Assn. of Governments, mimics Ariss’ explanation without prompting. First come the freeways. Then the houses, population, stores. Then the industrial boxes with jobs. Then the final touch, the element that puts the city in edge city: office buildings.

Ariss starts with the freeways. In the hall of his office off Haven Avenue, he has hung the famous photograph of Southern California taken from 450 miles up in space. He points to two thin bands of white heading east from what looks to be downtown Los Angeles. “You know what those are, don’t you?” he asks. He’s talking about the 10 and 60 freeways. “Those are the goddamn rivers!” he answers. “Just like the Mississippi, the Hudson, the Allegheny. Where all things must pass.”

The first major highway, of course, was Route 66, which came through the area in 1915, but even before then Ontario and its surroundings had been defined by transit. It was crossed by an Indian trail before recorded history and was settled only when the Santa Fe and Southern Pacific came through in the 1880s. When Interstate 10 was built in the ‘50s, it linked a string of company towns: Alta Loma supported by SunKist, Fontana by Kaiser Steel, Cucamonga by vineyards and Ontario by its “international” airport (one flight daily to Mexico). Los Angeles might as well have been in Fiji.

Then in the ‘60s and early ‘70s, it happened: leakage over Pomona’s Kellogg Hill, the last gear-grinding freeway grade between Los Angeles and the Inland Empire. “L.A. got more crowded, more expensive, and people started saying, ‘Well, I’ll work there, but at least I can get my home at last,’ ” remembers Randall Lewis of Lewis Homes, the Ontario area’s leading home builder. His parents, Ralph and Goldy, started the company in Claremont in the mid-’50s and in the ‘70s built some of the first starter tracts in the west San Bernardino Valley. As the ‘70s progressed, Lewis and other builders began looking for even cheaper land in the unincorporated ranch towns farther east along Route 66. Once again, it appeared, L.A.’s suburban sprawl was devouring acreage without thought to planning or the environment.

The exception was Rancho Cucamonga. In 1977, voters from the small ranching towns of Etiwanda, Alta Loma and Cucamonga incorporated into a new city that corralled 36 square miles of mostly empty land north of Interstate 10 and the airport. The town started with a population of only 44,000, but city fathers knew it was destined to grow rapidly. They just didn’t want it to become a hodgepodge like the San Fernando Valley or most of Orange County.

“Many of the supporters were from old ranching families, the sons of the area’s pioneers,” says Anthea Hartig, a Rancho Cucamonga associate planner and local historian whose mother helped lead the incorporation campaign. “They’d been born in the teens and had seen two wars, L.A.’s incredible growth, the freeways. They understood change and accepted it as part of life. They just wanted to make it as good as possible.” Interestingly, the model that the ranchers chose to emulate was the coastal experiment in ultra-planned community living, Irvine. “Irvine’s idea,” says Buller, “was that you can have a yard, single-family homes and jobs all here and still be a livable city. That’s what we want here, too.”

Rancho Cucamonga’s first city plan was approved in 1981, and it has been followed like the Bible. It directed industry and offices down the hill near the freeway, where Skip Morris’ Ontario Center would later emerge. It called for homes, schools, open space and shopping centers up the slope, with Haven Avenue the spine. The plan includes a 100-acre city park now under construction, a stadium for a minor-league baseball team, not yet started, and flood-control channels doubling as bike and walking paths, some of which are already in use. Design standards are strict--tile roofs and lots of pink and orange stucco. The old idea of value-in-presentation was invoked. Says Buller: “If you dress nice, people think you know what you’re doing--even if you don’t.”

Just like Irvine before it, Rancho Cucamonga quickly earned a reputation as nit-picky. Still, the opportunity to play ball on an empty field drew the same home builders who developed Orange County--Birtcher, Cole, Lyons. In the early ‘80s, Lewis Homes began developing Terra Vista, a massive 1,300-acre master-planned development with room to eventually house 9,000 families. Three other huge subdivisions--including schools--were planned and started, and land values crept higher. So the developers again moved one town east, to Fontana, where the closure of the Kaiser plant had left the city eager to develop anew. In both cities, stucco was slapped on walls fast enough to earn national notice: Rancho Cucamonga was the nation’s second-fastest-growing city in the 1980s, while Fontana grew 10% in 1990 alone.

In the meantime, Ariss’ California Commerce was carpeting the flatlands east of the airport in Ontario. Not really suitable for housing because of airport noise, the area had always seemed prime for warehousing and distribution operations with its proximity to major freeways, railways and the airport. But how to get started?

Two of the biggest developers in Orange County had an answer. Again it was “Follow Irvine.” Partners Don Shaw, a major independent developer; the Lusk Co., a huge residential and commercial builder, and Cadillac Fairview, a now-defunct Canadian developer, hired Ariss in 1984 to master-plan an industrial center. “Shaw kept saying, ‘Let’s buy one big chunk and do it right, like Irvine,’ ” remembers Ariss. In the early ‘80s, the partners spent $15 million in seed money on a 1,350-acre plot and built some of the most modern warehouses in Southern California. It was speculation, a measured gamble that manufacturers of retail goods from tennis shoes to baseball bats were looking for cheap space where they could store their wares and park the trucks and rail boxes needed to move them. It paid off. “We’ve sold $227 million worth of property,” says Ariss.

As the story goes, Ariss persuaded Coldwell Banker brokers who were showing out-of-town clients industrial space in Los Angeles to simply put on the air conditioning and drive. Thirty minutes later, almost before they knew it, the execs would be strolling through one of Ariss’ brand-new stadium-length warehouses wondering why they were ever interested in a congested, expensive area like the City of Industry. BMW, Michelin Tires, K mart, L.A. Gear and many others moved in. United Parcel Service decided to build its Pacific Rim shipping hub nearby. “It was the hottest industrial real estate in the U.S. through the mid-1980s,” says William Fulton, an independent development analyst. “They were filling space three times as fast as even Orange County did at its peak in the late ‘60s.” And, as Ariss likes to say, while distribution doesn’t employ a lot of people, it employs more people than vacant land.

Randall Lewis remembers the ‘80s as the area’s “adolescence”--a spurt into a different being altogether, symbolized by the 1985 arrival of Nordstrom at the Montclair Plaza, which suddenly became a carbon copy of the Westside Pavilion in West Los Angeles. At about the same time, Chevron put up the area’s first Grade A corporate office building, the one Skip Morris commutes to. “That (year) was the turning point,” exults Lewis. “You could practically hear doctors and lawyers saying, ‘Honey, we can move out there now.’ ”

SIX YEARS AFTER THE TURNING POINT, IN THE COOLER ECONOMIC climate of 1991, Ariss, Lewis and the other west San Bernardino Valley developers are far less exultant. The recession hit the area in the middle of a building frenzy of homes and industrial boxes that developers have struggled to fill. Even the few incipient office high-rises overreached demand. “The area was grossly overbuilt,” says Morris. In the larger Inland Empire (the only area for which there is data), home buying is down 40% from the 1990 peak, the office vacancy rate is 25% and relocations to the area’s industrial space are way down. While homes are still being built to attract the Angelenos who move to the Inland Empire--48,000 in the year ending June, 1991--other construction has virtually ceased. “It will be late 1993 or, more likely, 1994 before speculative commercial development will even pass the laugh test at the banks,” writes T. A. Sutherland of Inland Business magazine.

Ariss, for one, is feeling the pinch. He is now trying to develop the old Kaiser Steel property, envisioned during the high times of 1989 as the site of a major office and mall complex and now looking more and more like an albatross of debt and endless cleanup. “Developers are an endangered species,” he grumbles while conducting a spiritless tour of the bombed-out site. “They’re dead.” Yet, minutes later in his office, he refuses to give an inch on his vision. He takes out a booklet he has produced called “Jobs Create Change,” which makes two simple points: Everyone benefits from commercial hubs; the Ontario airport edge city is signed, sealed and all but delivered. His booklet is subtitled “The Growth, Development & Evolution of Real Estate Within Southern California.”

It’s a startling document, rife with greenish aerial photographs of three commercial centers--the areas around Long Beach Airport, John Wayne Airport and Warner Center in Woodland Hills, taken in 1970, 1980 and 1990--which are compared to shots of the Ontario airport area in 1980 and 1990. Readers are supposed to imagine Ontario in the year 2000. The recession over. A full-on boom town.

“What do you see here?” asks Ariss, pointing to a 1970 photo of huge, empty fields around John Wayne. “What does it remind you of?” he presses.

“That’s right”--he turns to the aerial of the empty fields east of Ontario airport, 1980--”it’s the same as this area, just before I got here.”

He turns to the 1990 photograph of Ontario, which shows the carpet of subdivisions and industrial boxes. “And do you know what this looks exactly like?” he asks. He flips back to the photo of Irvine 10 years into its development. The same process, different places, 10 years apart. Finally, he flips to John Wayne, 1990, by which time the office buildings are up.

Ariss’ photos are persuasive, especially if you know a little history. In the pictures, the Warner Center area is mostly empty land in 1970, covered with subdivisions and industrial space in 1980 and, in 1990, a magnificent edge city despite the economic slowdowns of 1971, 1977 and 1982. Same with the Long Beach Airport area. The photos show massive empty acreage transformed into some of the most prosperous, valuable land on Earth, even after periods when the process stalled.

“Ontario can’t miss,” says Ariss, a former Marine major who flew helicopters in Vietnam. “We’ve got the land, the worker bees, less union activity, lots of dual-worker families, no shirkers with bad attitudes. People will work hard for a third less pay. No, not too many pinkos out here,” he cackles. “Yes, a very conservative area out here. Even the Democrats are conservative!”

Macheski of Price Waterhouse, with much less at stake, is also convinced that growth is inexorable. Macheski says Ontario is more than halfway through the typical process and right on schedule. Its housing boom began in 1972; the industrial boom (as always, he says) began 12 years later, when Ariss arrived; 15 years after that, Morris’ hoped-for office blitz will begin. “Yeah, 1997’s the explosion year for offices,” he says with eerie certainty.

After the explosion, there it will be: Another mature edge city. But it won’t be the gleaming Irvine that the developers hope for. Says John Husing, the lead economist at Cal State San Bernardino’s Management Center: “It’s not the beach. Senior executives, given their choice, will pick Orange County simply because of the ambience.” Yet it will certainly become a commuting destination, as did the San Fernando Valley and Orange County hubs. Over the next 10 years, “Ontario will be branch offices, back-office clerk operations, offices for local lawyers and accountants to serve the growing population,” says Macheski. “Lots of four- and five-story buildings.” After that, Macheski predicts, the area will be the site of some regional corporate headquarters. As the airport, which already handles more passengers than John Wayne, expands to the size of San Francisco International, as retail outlets such as Ikea and a second and third mall open--all are planned--and as the population rises, Macheski says, office employment will increase as fast as it did in the Valley during the ‘70s and ‘80s.

FOR THE MOST PART, RESIDENTS OF THE ONTARIO AREA SEEM TO share Ariss’ enthusiasm for the jobs, stores and amenities that a developing commercial hub guarantees. But amid housing-tract billboards and office-for-lease signs, it’s possible to sense a backlash as the area loses its small-town, inland feel. Garreau says this is typical. While an edge city might be the prosperous and convenient free-market result of millions of individual choices, it will “still (give) some people the creeps.”

Anthea Hartig, head of Rancho Cucamonga’s historic-preservation program, for one. She laughs off the irony of her job with a city that has a blueprint for quadrupling in size in its first 30 years. “One of my favorite comments from the new residents is, ‘Gee, I didn’t even know we had a history.’ ”

Hartig finds herself gravitating toward that history, and not just at work. She and her husband bought an older home in downtown Ontario, near Euclid Avenue, the magnificent, tree-lined boulevard that pioneers William and George Chaffey designed into the city they planned 109 years ago. Ontario, named after Chaffey’s home province in Canada, was a town where everyone had ownership in the water company, and the city built a high school and college practically before anything else. For decades, however, the downtown five miles west of Haven Avenue has been fatigued and now mostly houses Latino service workers, but Hartig is drawn to its venerable character more than to Haven’s spanking-new, generic edge city. “People say (an edge city) is inevitable because they see all the early signs,” she says.

We are walking along Haven Avenue from her office in Rancho Cucamonga’s civic center to Rose’s Caffe Luna, an espresso bar that she jokes represents the entirety of urban culture in the city. Hartig walks whenever she can as a sort of lonely protest against the car-oriented, anti-pedestrian development along Haven. She also likes strolling along the avenue where it still abuts a vineyard. In an area that once had 13,000 acres of grapes, there are only 1,500 vineyard acres left.

Hartig ticks off the signals. “The office buildings. The freeways. The Price Club arriving. You wonder whether people just have this mental construct in their heads that this is the way Southern California develops, and that construct just overrides everything. Even this city”--the “sensible-growth” city her parents fought for and she works for--”is planned according to that construct.

“It’s almost--” she searches for the word, then is surprised when she finds it--”reactionary.”

She isn’t being rhetorical. “For better or worse,” wrote Jane Jacobs about the cities on the edge of a “city region” like Los Angeles, “they are creatures of their nuclear cities, and they remain so.” Everything sprouting along Haven Avenue has been built in reaction to Los Angeles or its most famous reaction, Orange County. Haven’s glass towers were built with loans from coastal banks (none of the nine locally owned banks is a commercial lender) to attract a coastal executive who might decide to place a branch office there. Higher up, the tracts of two-story stucco homes that march across the slope are largely filled by people moving from and still working in Los Angeles. (Transportation officials count 135,000 San Bernardino County residents commuting to L.A. County daily.)

The new shopping centers exist for and thrive on the disposable income of these commuters. Husing, the economist, estimates that half of the Inland Empire’s economic product stems from the “export of labor” to Orange and L.A. counties. At the north end of Haven Avenue, huge new “executive” homes designed like theme-park buildings are meant to appeal to professionals fleeing the city. Even Rancho’s profligate new civic center was designed by Los Angeles architect John Carl Warnke.

At Rose’s Caffe Luna, Hartig introduces me to Dave Forman, a local architect. He doesn’t use the word reactionary when he talks about the local architecture, but it’s not a happy discussion. He notes that each new shopping center, one after the other, is designed with the same elements: sandstone-hued exterior, red plastic signage, exposed redwood beams and vaguely Moorish corner turrets. To “vary” subdivisions, which also are slavishly stucco, builders simply bend the streets a bit or alternate tile roofs among different tones of pink.

“It’s not just Rancho,” says Forman. “All the cities out here start off saying Mediterranean even though they know all the others are doing the same. They use this mythical past as a cover for the fact that they don’t have a current vision for their city. And what is sad is that they have the freedom to do anything, because they are virtually inventing these communities on paper. But there is no imagination.”

Randall Lewis, the Lewis Homes executive who helped develop the area and might be counted on to defend it, actually agrees. “We’re all asking, ‘Is there life after stucco?’ ” he says, quoting a participant in a recent home builders’ conference. But, he explains, “housing is a fashion business, more so than even autos, and popularity rules. We put up different models, a Tudor, French, ranch, and the brokers come back to us and say, ‘More of the Mediterranean. That’s what buyers want.’ ”

He adds that developers must build the same house over and over to keep prices affordable. Anyway, insists Lewis, the new tracts won’t always look like cookie-cutter communities. Over time, trees will grow up and owners will landscape their homes according to individual taste. “Some of these will be really good-looking communities.”

Lack of aesthetic vision isn’t the only reason some find edge cities creepy. There is the absence of urbanity, of culture, of, say, five-, four-, three- or even two-star restaurants to complement the lone espresso bar in Rancho Cucamonga. Lewis says he’d like to see a foreign-movie house. But then he shrugs. “The things you and I might miss, many people don’t miss. And actually, the area is over-screened for Hollywood movies.” Other defenders like to point to what they see as aesthetic successes and harbingers of culture: the Orange County Performing Arts Center and the Jewel Court of South Coast Plaza, where 5th Avenue stores are packed cheek by luxurious jowl.

The one nasty charge against edge cities that Lewis adamantly denies is that their development tends to divide people along racial lines. Not in the Ontario area, he says. In fact, from Lewis’ point of view, the new subdivisions give people the reassurance they need to come together. Lewis describes the prospective buyers that show up at his company’s open houses: “Middle class. Working people. All races. They want a back yard, a quiet street, a safe place to take their kids trick-or-treating. You want to know who we sell a lot of homes to? Law enforcement. Cops from L.A. County. They’re trying to get away.”

If it’s flight, then Lewis is right that it’s multiracial flight. The Ontario area is now 44% black, Asian and Latino. During the ‘80s, when tens of thousands of Angeleno families bought into the area--paying anywhere from $80,000 for townhouses to $200,000 for four-bedroom, two-bath, 2,000-square-foot houses--71% of the area’s growth was nonwhite. Even Rancho Cucamonga, with its Irvine-like reputation for elitism, is 43% nonwhite. But whatever the ethnic population in San Bernardino County, registered Republicans have increased 135% since 1980, compared to a 75% increase in Democrats.

Lewis, who grew up in the area, is proud that it has retained the feel of a solid, middle-class set of communities despite two decades of relentless growth. “At night and on weekends, when people get back from work, there’s a sense of community. Somehow, almost by happenstance, the region is developing as we like, as a place I want to live.”

Even Forman, the architect, ends up admitting that his aesthetic disappointment doesn’t keep him from enjoying the area. He grew up in the San Fernando Valley. “God, it was a relief to get out here, to the slower pace, less hassle getting around.” When told that the area is projected to get as crowded as the Valley, he denies it. “The Valley is all in the city of L.A., and the politicians were letting any development through. Here there are too many political units, and planning is still tied to individual cities and their controls. People will holler if it gets too bad.” That conceit is well known to Angelenos.

THE EDGE BECKONS WITH its solitude and affordability, but soon there is demand for amenities and jobs--for growth. Before you know it, the appeal is gone. In the late ‘80s, when the Ontario area was going through its “adolescence,” its models already had reached that point. Throughout the Valley, slow-growth sentiment rose to a fever pitch, while Orange County voters nearly passed an initiative that would have slammed their edge city shut. The traffic and crowding were driving them crazy.

Wes McDaniel and his colleague Eric Haley at Associated San Bernardino Governments are two of the area’s top planners and spend much of their time grappling with the problems edge city brings. “Everyone wants to make the airport-area development higher-quality,” says McDaniel. “Better air quality, public transit, two people in every car.” But, he adds, “the basic thing is going to happen”--meaning lots of office buildings, malls, people.

Still, there is hope that even the “basic thing” can be controlled. “The ground rules have changed since John Wayne,” Haley says. “Air quality and traffic weren’t in the foreground then.” Tough new regional and federal measures to limit congestion and smog have helped promote telecommuting, high-occupancy freeway lanes and van pooling and could lead to new toll roads, pollution-free cars and additional public transit (a train from San Bernardino to Los Angeles is scheduled to start running in October). “If the clean-air movement maintains its vitality, it will totally change the way we exercise mobility,” says Haley.

The planners also hope the Ontario area will make room for the low-cost apartments and multi-residence complexes needed to house the service workers who will scoop the frozen yogurt and clean the office toilets of edge city.

This controlled-growth scenario positions the Ontario area as an efficient, affordable sponge for workers, shoppers and residents, attracting enough people to decelerate L.A.’s frenzied drive to settle the next edge.

Dream on, says economist Husing. Just as L.A.’s failure to decongest its roads and house its workers pushed people out to Ontario and into the arms of its developers, so the same accruing problems will inevitably push development to future edges. “This model has existed in L.A. since the 1940s,” Husing says. “It will go on and on--from Escondido to the high desert, all the way to, who knows, Barstow.”

“It could happen,” concedes McDaniel. “The next one would probably be Victorville to Palmdale. That’s the battleground. Do they do another San Fernando out there?”

Victorville? Barstow , a scut of sand nearly 200 miles from the coast? It stretches the imagination: Glass towers turning San Bernardino and Riverside into little Burbanks. Indian Wells as large as Fullerton. Hundreds of thousands of Inlanders commuting bumper-to-bumper across the high desert, the Coachella Valley, even the Mojave.

Maybe, but developers such as Skip Morris can only take them one edge at a time, and for now, the Ontario Center commands his attention. As more and more companies open branches in the Inland Empire, he will have the office space and gas stations and parking and shops ready. “I couldn’t be better protected,” he says. “I’m near an airport on the edge of Los Angeles.”

Personally, he says, he wouldn’t live near Ontario. But he does say he’s thinking about leaving Mission Viejo for Lake Arrowhead, in the mountains on the edge of the edge, which he calls the future Malibu of the Inland Empire.

Call it a fait accompli , says Morris. Pointing out the window to the vacant old racetrack where the rest of his development will rise, he says, “I look out there and see the buildings, the roads, traffic moving, people walking. I’ve been imagining it so long, it’s become a living, breathing thing.”