Former Californian Finds a Haven, but Will It Stay Safe?

I’ve been away for 10 days, subsisting on nothing but foliage, bugs and rainwater. I asked Mom if she wouldn’t at least make me a tuna sandwich with chocolate milk, but she refused. Something about not wanting to spoil me. Finally, last weekend, a brave United Airlines pilot and crew rescued me and brought me back to Southern California.

Anyway, the annual vacation to Denver gave me another chance to see where all the native Californians have gone. While visiting friends in the Denver suburb of Littleton, I heard about the “Californians” in the house next door--although, in this section of Littleton, “next door” means on the 1.6-acre lot of rolling pastureland down the road.

I reached Bill Wolfe, who, with his wife, Joan, a registered nurse, and their two children moved to Colorado a year ago. During our conversation, Wolfe chuckled frequently, after the fashion of a man who’s onto a very big secret.

A native Californian, Wolfe is a 49-year-old custom home builder who gave up on Los Angeles. The family lived in the fashionable Ladera Heights section of Inglewood but now is part of the invading horde of Californians alternately credited or blamed for helping revive Denver in recent years, or leading it to its demise.

For us modern-day Southern Californians, however, the more probing question is why people like Wolfe are leaving.

“Our move was prompted by a lot of social ills, problems that the kids were having in school, and just a variety of really negative things as we saw it,” Wolfe said. “I think being a native, it puts me at a disadvantage, because I can recall what Los Angeles was like 45 years ago. When I was a boy, everybody went Christmas shopping downtown in the big department stores because it was a nice experience. Now, downtown has sort of disintegrated into a place where you go to work, immediately leave, and wish you didn’t have to go in the first place.”

In simplest terms, Denver is “relief” from Los Angeles, he said.

“Being in Colorado, this place reminds me a great deal of Southern California in the ‘60s. And I think people here are somewhat naive because I don’t think they realize what’s coming. I don’t think they realize what’s really going on and the things they should be concerned about, rather than the nit-picky things they choose to be concerned about.”

He means growth. “Specifically, the growth and development and the particular way it’s being done,” Wolfe said. “Some people are beginning to be concerned about it, but not enough are.”

On the other hand, he’s amazed that Littleton schools are considering expenditures for programs already given up in Los Angeles public schools. His children, now 9 and 12, went to a very good public school, he said, “but the roof was god-awful, the gutters were hanging off, the bathrooms were horrendous to the point where I went in on several weekends to try to fix things that were unusable.”

As a former Denver resident, I wonder whether transplanted Californians realize that Denver too has crime and social problems. During my vacation last week, for example, a mother was convicted of giving her son an automatic weapon that he used to kill another youngster.

Wolfe chuckled again, remembering Los Angeles New Years and Fourth of Julys in which he had lain in bed and heard spent cartridges land on his roof and in the family swimming pool. “It’s a riot,” he said, “to read the Littleton Independent, our little newspaper here. They publish a weekly compendium of crime, and it’s stealing a bike and the occasional fistfight.”

I asked him about the future. “I’m a little too skeptical at this point to say with any certainty that I’m locked into anything, except that I’m not locked into anything. I can definitely say that Los Angeles has seen the last of Bill Wolfe. I passed that word to everybody. We have a couple dozen friends with families like ours who, if they could sell their homes and if they hadn’t taken out so many home equity loans and are now sitting there with loans $100,000 more than their house is worth . . . if everyone I know could sell their house tomorrow, L.A. would empty out pretty quick.”

Footnote: While I was visiting Mom just last September, she and I took walks outside her apartment complex and enjoyed the prairie dog town in the empty lot just 20 feet across the street. On this trip, the prairie dogs were gone, the lot has been leveled and construction equipment is in place.

Moral of story in Denver these days: Bad time for prairie dogs, good time for invading masses.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.