At the Edge of the City She Waits

Janie Smith sells houses in the Antelope Valley. She works alone out of a model home at the corner of 36th West Street and Avenue J-2, a tract on the edge of town. The place is marked with nylon flags of faded red and a large sign: “Rainbow Homes.”

The tract of 21 homes was built about five years ago. This was high tide for Southern California real estate, and the Antelope Valley seemed poised to take its place as the next extension of metropolitan Los Angeles. Out here, it was go, go, go. And then it stopped.

“You could see it coming,” Smith says. “All you had to do was fly over in a helicopter and look down at all the sticks.”

The hammers fell silent and the customers stopped coming. Today, not far from the Rainbow Homes, the lonely, weathered frames--the sticks--of a block of unfinished houses loom as markers to the bust; the windows are broken and tumbleweeds have helped themselves inside. Smith has been hired to move the 12 remaining Rainbows. “It’s a bankruptcy deal,” she says. Houses that went for $250,000 can now be had for about $100,000 less. Still, the going is slow. Last week, only 10 lookers came by Smith’s office. Asked to describe the market, she doesn’t require much time to measure a response.

“How,” she asks, “does miserable sound?”

*

Smith is 61 years old and has been selling real estate for three decades across Southern California’s suburbs. Her hair and knit top match the Rainbow banners, and she also wears plain wool slacks and moccasins. No sense overdressing on this duty. As she talks, she walks through the tract, unlocking doors to empty houses. A couple has stopped to see the models. Smith is not sure how to read the pair. The tired-looking car is a bad sign, but the man’s hand-held telephone is cause for hope. “We’ll see,” she says.

Smith came to Lancaster from the Simi Valley. “When I first moved here,” she says, “I thought, ‘Who in their right mind would want to live this far out?’ But the more people live here, the more they like it, and the more they like it, the less they mind the drive.” She looks at your notebook as she says this. She is selling now.

Of course selling Lancaster requires, to a degree, an unselling of Los Angeles. Like most people here, Smith refers to Los Angeles as “down below.” She insists the term is geographical, not metaphorical, but you wonder. Down below, Lancasters will tell you, is where crime rages and the air stinks. Down below also is where jobs are found and pay is better, and so they make their deal with the devil city and measure their drive time in hours, not minutes.

With the earthquake, the trip has become even more fiendish. The commuters flood out of the tracts in darkness, and still they back up for miles at the broken intersection of the Golden State and Antelope Valley freeways. Never has the Antelope Valley seemed so far from Los Angeles. It has created an impact on court business and hospital business and, it would seem inevitable, the real estate business. You offer the thesis that the earthquake has exposed the fact that the outward march of Los Angeles cannot go on forever, that there are limits to how far a city can be stretched.

Smith is not ready to buy. “None of us can quite seem to get a feel for what the earthquake will do, good or bad,” she says. “It might be a positive. A lot of people lost their houses, you know. But I haven’t got any business from it, yet. I do have one sale coming in from down below, but that” she adds offhandedly, “is the result of a drive-by shooting, not the earthquake.”

*

The lookers are back. The man stands before a color-coded tract map.

“I liked the blue one,” he says.

“You mean teal,” Smith corrects him.

“Is the green one available?” he asks.

“Mint green,” she says. She is just being funny, but the man doesn’t seem amused. She asks about prices. He responds with questions about plumbing and paint jobs. Before long they are gone. “I don’t think so,” Smith says.

She walks you out. “Thanks,” she says, “for stopping to see us out here in the middle of nowhere.” And then she laughs, waves and retreats to her office, waiting inside her Rainbow Home for the city to come to the desert.