What Price Quality of Life for More New Development?

You will want to know why I am sitting in the Yum-Yum doughnut shop on Harbor Boulevard in Garden Grove rather than being at home, why I am here rather than at the movie matinees at MainPlace with those who spend their weekends over margaritas and potato skins in Spoons or with those who browse in Barnes & Noble and Nordstrom and Bullock’s.

There is no Barnes & Noble here on Harbor Boulevard, nor is there a Nordstrom or a Spoons or a first-run movie theater. The doughnut shop’s plastic chairs are not the epicenter of affluent shoppers with time to kill, and the #43 OCTA bus conveying the raw and the reduced on its tortuous way south is unlikely to appeal to the clientele who congregate in Bullock’s.

Smoke from numerous cigarettes curls slowly into the air of the small room, and no one seems particularly unnerved by the appearance of two prostitutes who buy four sugar doughnuts and two black coffees to go.

Conversations here do not center on the remodeling of patios, dens or vestibules but on roofing jobs, the machinations of landlords. The colloquies that one overhears here tend to show a pronounced disregard for verbal embroidery, rhetoric.

And though the content of these conversations may lack a certain immediacy to my own life, there is in them a kind of directness, an uninflected earnestness I find appealing.

I have been following in the papers for some time land-use issues and development projects and growth initiatives in Orange County. This interest is not as airy as it appears: Because I ride a bicycle and don’t drive a car--and because I lived in downtown Santa Ana’s Civic Center area on a street heavily Latino and yet to be targeted for gentrification--I am able to limn with some accuracy the changes taking place in my own and surrounding neighborhoods.

I was living, one among many, on a street aswarm with colors, languages and pedestrians--the antithesis, that is, of the restrictive covenants of the suburban paradigm, of the gates and stockaded enclaves of South County. It is a street where people on foot or bicycle were not considered liabilities. Not yet. But the outlook is not good. Already the landscape has darkened with a dismaying increase in traffic congestion and parking caused by the recent construction of office buildings nearby.

In Santa Ana, my old neighbors, despite their difficulty with English, do not misapprehend the changes they see occurring there, and they are not optimistic, because when the time comes for this street to be redeveloped, none of them will be able to afford living here. The people in this neighborhood, of course, are the imponderables in Orange County, the disaffected, the chips. They make up, as it were, the ad hoc coalition of the unconvinced. In Santa Ana, there are only a few streets left like theirs--and there is no one to tell them how to save it.

So I find myself increasingly distrustful when I read that a new housing development is “desirable,” when I am told that the abandonment in 1983 of affordable housing quotas was for our own good, when I am narcotized by talk of “aggressive acquisition strategies” and “generating economic growth” and “unincorporated parcels.”

The developers, of course, are working within the parameters of developers anywhere--that is, anything goes.

I am left wondering after reading and hearing all these “positions” just how far we are all willing to go to palliate our obsessive need for grass and greener fields and racial homogeneity. Are we willing to live in San Bernardino and work in Los Angeles? Because that is what it’s coming to.

The barrenness of this development, the standardized settlements, the constellation of roofs extending southward--these are already anticlimax, grotesquely arrogant, immoderate and of course--are we surprised?--inoperative before they are even completed. The daily embolism of the freeways, slow enough for hand-to-hand combat, is empirical evidence of that.

Where are the anarchies of land acquisition leading us all? What treks are we not ready to undertake in our hunt for the “best,” for new “cities” unreachable by foot or bicycle or public transportation, these little boomlets of prosperity we dot down here, there, anywhere? Are we ready to wake at 4 a.m., at 3, to get into our cars? Is nothing too much for us?

I suspect the individuals here in the doughnut shop are not full of bright bleak hope like the rest of us; they are the kind of people who remain undeceived about life’s possibilities. The rest of us listen to the developers, the planners, the officials and power brokers. “Life was never so good” we tell our exhausted selves, yet more than a little bewildered by the consequences of our frenzied migrations.