Growing Ourselves to Death

And so, it is said, civilization is crossing the Tehachapi. On what today is a desolate brown patch south of Bakersfield, where cattle graze and dust blows, a whole new city soon will emerge--San Emidio, a planned community of 63,000 residents, 28,000 jobs, 10 schools and three golf courses. Rah.

Kern County residents opposed to this project regard it as the most extreme extension yet of Los Angeles. “Don’t let anyone fool you,” one warned in a Times article Sunday. “People are going to live here and drive 80 miles to work in Los Angeles.” In this way, San Emidio represents a nightmare realized, a threshold crossed. The Tehachapi mountains have provided a natural barrier between the valley and Sprawl City. With San Emidio--blessed by Kern County supervisors and set for a 1996 groundbreaking--L.A. will have vaulted over the hill. Next stop: Chico.

I have my doubts, having made that god-awful, radiator-busting haul over the hill on I-5 many times. It would be a killer commute. My hunch is that, instead of L.A.’s northern frontier, the developers are creating Bakersfield South. Nonetheless, the project has raised anew a question that won’t go away:

Are we doomed to grow ourselves to death, to become a giant uninterrupted sprawl of pink stucco houses and Speedee 7-Elevens aka Greater L.A.?

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For years, much of Southern California’s economy has depended not only on steady growth, but also on a peculiar form of growth--suburban expansion. Developments leapfrog one another, pushing the city ever outward. With each new tract comes Ralphs, then a bank, schools, a strip mall perhaps, light industry, jobs. Eureka! A satellite city is born, and on to the next frontier.

This manifest destiny, suburban-style, propels our economy more than anything else--more than defense, high-tech, movies, agriculture, you name it. It’s as though L.A. must keep elbowing its way outward--through the San Gorgonio Pass, across the Santa Ana River, over the Conejo Grade--or die.

Local governments especially become addicted to sprawl. Through fees charged to developers, they can raise money for schools or other necessities that have gone underfunded since Proposition 13. Also, a few strip malls packed in among the pink adobe can help raise sales tax revenues, financing more government services.

The devil, though, must be paid. With this form of growth comes traffic congestion. Smog. Ugliness. And inner-city rot: For every new frontier community, an older neighborhood is left behind, ripe for decay and attendant miseries. Like unemployment. And crime. And these so-called quality-of-life issues are what most concern outsiders wary of moving businesses or families into the state. Thus, as we grow in this way, so do we also slowly devalue ourselves. A losing proposition.

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Stopping growth altogether is out of the question. The hordes are coming, ready or not. I frame the issue instead as smart growth versus dumb growth. Better experts use the term contained growth. They talk of greenbelts and transit corridors, of developing a rational method to determine where, and where not, to build. There is discussion also of turning development back toward forsaken neighborhoods, though we’ve seen what luck Peter Ueberroth and Rebuild L.A. have experienced with that pitch.

Managed growth can be a tough political sell, giving government haters the willies. The Wilson Administration initially was eager to create a growth plan, but quickly grew quiet on the issue. This in part stemmed from the economy--it is tough to focus on growth when the state is in recession--and also from internal differences over just how far such planning ought to be taken.

The issue, nonetheless, is expected to resurface in a big way--not just in Southern California, but throughout the state. Said Vic Weisser, president of the California Council for Environmental and Economic Balance, a labor-business coalition studying growth: “There is a growing realization by the political leadership of this state . . . that the situation has become unbearable and we have to do something, rather rapidly. If we don’t do something in the next few years, we will have lost any opportunity to shape growth in a way that will allow us to maintain the lifestyle we enjoy in California.”

There are no easy solutions. “Everybody,” said one economist, “is struggling with this question right now: How we accommodate growth without killing ourselves?” Find the answer to that one and you can win a big prize--a Nobel perhaps, or a governorship. Or, and this one’s on me, a free trip to a place called San Emidio.