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Suburban Dreams Hit Roadblock

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TIMES URBAN AFFAIRS WRITER

Once or twice a week, Maribel Diaz’s world goes black.

Hurtling down the Antelope Valley Freeway--her toddlers strapped in for the 70-mile journey from work and child care in Los Angeles to their Palmdale home--she slides into sleep.

Exhausted from the painfully long days that life demands in the distant suburbs, the mother awakens moments later. Her hands are gripping the steering wheel. Miraculously, her Toyota Corolla is still on the road.

Four-year-old Anthony tries to prevent these recurring moments of terror. He sits next to his mother, constantly poking his forefinger into her ribs. “Mommy,” he pleads, “are you falling asleep?”

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Like hundreds of thousands of others who have fled to the far-flung suburbs ringing Los Angeles, Maribel and Sergio Diaz arrived with visions of safe streets, clean air and affordable mortgages.

Three years ago, they were celebrating their fabulous find: a freshly minted, four-bedroom end-of-the-cul-de-sac beauty for $120,000. But now that the construction dust has settled in the Antelope Valley, reality has hit home.

Quietly, inside the new peach-and-beige stucco houses, under a sea of red-tile roofs, many middle-class families such as the Diazes are imploding. Suburban escape--at distances of 60 miles or more--leaves them little time for anything other than work and driving.

Commuters spend up to five hours a day behind the wheel. Their children sometimes are forced to endure 12 or 13 straight hours in day care. Some teenagers, home alone for long stretches after school, are helping fuel a surge in gangs and a 26% jump last year in arrests for violent juvenile crimes.

While many families are coping and even thriving, others are buckling under the strain of long daily separations from their children and spouses.

The side effects mostly are limited to fatigue, frustration and irritability. But all too often, marriages unravel, families disintegrate and homes are being lost at a staggering clip. Sometimes, the line between restrained anger and physical abuse is crossed.

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Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies make more domestic violence felony arrests in the Antelope Valley than at any of their 17 other stations. The area also has more child abuse reports than almost any place in the state--a rate twice as high as the rest of Los Angeles County.

“This way of life is destructive,” says Palmdale Lutheran priest Ken Simon. Mike Dispenza, who ran for mayor of Palmdale in 1994, says simply, “Families are literally being torn apart.”

No Place Like Home

Dubbed “the next San Fernando Valley” in the late 1980s, the shiny new Palmdale was a powerful lure for young families locked out of Los Angeles’ expensive home market and fearful of crime and problematic public schools.

Developers went for the jugular: Billboards promised, “Only NASA offers more space,” and, “More Bunk Rooms Than the Brady Bunch.” Mortgage companies approved deals with as little as 2% down. Civic leaders, many of them real estate agents, greased the dizzying pace of growth.

Frenzied would-be buyers camped out in the sagebrush-studded frontier, eager to enter lotteries for a chance to purchase a home. Products of Southern California’s car culture, they asked themselves: How bad could it be, tacking on some time to already-long commutes?

As wooden frames rose from the desert floor, some buyers carved “Bless Our Home” on the 2-by-4s. New arrivals clung to stories of families sleeping with doors unlocked and children playing carefree in front yards.

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Of all of Southern California’s new suburbs, the Antelope Valley city of Palmdale flourished like none other. Of cities with more than 50,000 people, Palmdale was the fastest growing in the United States, according to the 1990 census.

But, like a mirage, the sizzling boom in the desert has vanished, raising pointed questions among planning experts and family counselors about whether the region’s sprawling development was ill-conceived.

Tethered to an aerospace-dependent economy pummeled by the peace dividend, Palmdale now has the nation’s highest estimated foreclosure rate, according to DataQuick Information Systems Inc., a California real estate tracking firm.

Nearly one in 10 residences is now vacant, some becoming prime real estate for squatters. The city also has become a popular destination for welfare recipients and poorer families drawn to cut-rate rentals. Drive-by gang shootings and home invasion robberies no longer are rare.

The region’s development has been dominated by Kaufman & Broad Home Corp. The firm’s top Antelope Valley executive, Richard Petersen, says the company’s thousands of new homes have provided an affordable alternative to urban apartment life. New local jobs someday will be created, reducing the need for people to commute so far, he says. Yes, there’s no Nordstrom yet, he admits, but there are beautiful parks, safer streets and, most important, bargain homes.

“The negatives,” he says, “don’t seem to be continuing to escalate.”

In fact, many people say they remain happily committed to their new lives and would not trade their cathedral ceilings and large square footage for anything back in the urban morass.

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Standing on the stoop of their pristine Palmdale home, staring at stars so brilliant they seem suspended in the crisp night air, Los Angeles Police Department Officer Mitchell Nowlen, 31, says, “Here, we are really content.”

Mitchell’s wife, Wendy, 28, who works in Pasadena, says a rock-bottom sales price of $116,000 meant they could still pay for a boat, vacations and private schooling for their 6-year-old daughter, Ashley. There is ample parking at the grocery store, and the possibility of a last-minute dash to the movie theater, which rarely sells out. “I feel more secure here,” says Wendy, who is pregnant. They plan to stay until they retire.

Others can’t wait to bolt.

Domestic Disaster

Robert Hanks, an aerospace machinist, blames commuter life for slowly crushing his marriage. Although Robert, his wife, Debbie, and their two children--ages 11 and 6--are living under the same roof for now, she is looking to get out. Debbie and the couple’s two girls left home in November but, she says, they returned last month when they ran out of money and options.

On a recent day, Debbie, 36, sits down to discuss the couple’s unpaid bills. As Robert tries to hug her, she stiffens, her gaze icy.

Before moving here in 1989, the Hankses rented a home in Sylmar, minutes from his job. There was plenty of time to talk back then. “We were close,” Robert says, looking longingly at his wife of 12 years. In those days, when he pulled the late shift, Debbie would bring him steak dinners with chocolate pie. Their only pressing problem was urban life--the congestion, the police helicopters hovering overhead, the gang-plagued schools.

Panicking as they watched the prices of new homes jump $20,000 overnight, the Hankses snapped up a 5-year-old Antelope Valley home for $102,000. During their first week there, lounging in the backyard Jacuzzi under snowy skies, they felt a deep sense of contentment--that soon would turn to contempt.

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“It’s like going into another time zone,” says a weary Robert, 38, who leaves home at 3:30 a.m. every day for work. Four years ago, overtaken by fatigue on one drive home, he dozed off. His Honda’s fender slammed into the concrete highway divider at 80 mph. The car spun six times, ricocheting across the road like a Ping-Pong ball. Robert, who was unscathed, switched to a 4 a.m. vanpool, lengthening his travel time to nearly five hours a day.

Growing job stress shortened Robert’s fuse even further. Each month for a year, he says, supervisors at his Bendix Corp. plant in North Hollywood told him that his unit was on the brink of being shut down. When Bendix was acquired by Allied Signal Inc., Robert was transferred to Torrance. At the same time, he says, overtime was axed, cutting his $80,000 annual income by more than a quarter. Creditors reclaimed the Hankses’ boat and new Honda Accord.

Debbie, meanwhile, spent her days at home in a neighborhood transformed into a wind-whipped ghost town as commuters cleared out. Sandstorms were so powerful that at times she couldn’t see her neighbor across the street. Eventually, nearly every house on their block was foreclosed, opening them to squatters and teen hoodlums who hauled away lights, stoves, even the paneling, Debbie says. The value of the Hankses’ home plummeted to $50,000. “I felt trapped,” she says.

Every day, Robert got home 14 hours after he left. Usually, he would drop to the chocolate-colored carpet and stare vacantly at the big-screen TV. “His vibes would shake the walls,” says Debbie. “It was like talking to a doorknob.”

“I knew if I talked to them, I’d just jump on them,” responds Robert, who began to feel like an intruder in his own family. Guilt-racked over being home so little, he avoided disciplining the girls, causing more conflict with Debbie.

By last fall, the fights were furious.

“We just wanted to tear each other’s heads off,” says Debbie. Once, Robert says, he threw her against a wall. Another time, Debbie says, he put his hands around her throat and squeezed. “We got a half-inch away from violence,” her husband recalls of the incident.

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Debbie says she sometimes became so stressed from the marital strife that her chest would seize up and she couldn’t breathe. As she talks, Robert paces the living room, clutching his head with both hands.

“The only thing in my life is going to work,” he says through clenched teeth. “Doing that f------ drive.”

Debbie Hanks and Laura Himes have never met, but they are soul mates in anger.

Sitting by her big living-room window in another Antelope Valley development, Laura waits for her husband, Ron, to return from his job at a City of Commerce plastics company.

“My husband is not there for diddly-squat!” she says. “His job and commute dominate his life.”

The Himeses, unhappy with the size of their cramped home in Torrance, bought a Palmdale model with twice the square footage in 1987. The low price of the house allowed them to pay off credit card debts, buy a Chevy Sprint and let Laura quit her job to spend more time rearing their two children and making quilts. Laura hoped to continue the family tradition of candlelight dinners with the radio turned down low.

But Ron hasn’t been home for a family dinner in three months. He put 100,000 miles on the new car during its first two years. Laura calls herself “the widow.”

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On one recent evening, after Ron finally arrives, he pecks her on the cheek. She flinches, and tells a visitor that she is considering divorce.

Both husband and wife agree they would rather be in their old Torrance bungalow than in their new sunny-yellow home.

“I feel lonely,” Laura tells Ron. “I’m going crazy.”

Ron says he understands his wife’s dissatisfaction but coming to Palmdale was the only way they could afford a big house. “I thought moving here would benefit the family,” he says, adding that they didn’t consider the toll of commuting. “I could fall asleep standing on the corner.”

Lashing Out

During the last couple of years, problems associated with the long commutes have overtaken people who initially coped but eventually succumbed to the unrelenting grind, says Steven E. Sultan, director of the Antelope Valley Psychological Center.

“Most people I see who are commuting to Los Angeles are not talking about the positives it brings into their lives,” he says.

In all, nearly half of Antelope Valley residents commute, the vast majority of them clocking at least two hours a day on the road.

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Sultan says more than a third of his practice consists of commuters. Many blame problems with drug dependency and physical abuse on their stressful new lifestyles.

Greg Krynen says the commute stirred such rage in him that he eventually released it on his wife and small children.

An industrial insulator who moved to Palmdale from Torrance as a renter seven years ago, hoping to build a home here, Greg was on the freeway by 4 a.m. every day. He returned 14 or more hours later, after five nerve-racking hours driving to Orange County and back. Twice a week, to save gas and aggravation, he slept in his truck, separated from his wife and three children, Patsy, 7, Justyn, 5, and Emily, 3.

Patsy’s kindergarten crayon drawings of her family included her mother, sister, brother, even the dog, Dexter. Dad was never sketched in. “I felt sad,” says Patsy, a serious girl with wide-set eyes. “I liked playing with him. I missed him.” Justyn often played out a dollhouse skit: the male doll, the daddy, leaves for work; the other dolls, the children, sob uncontrollably.

To unwind at night, Greg would lock himself in the bedroom or grab some tools, roll under his 1978 Chevy truck, and stare at the chassis. Hours later, his wife, Dodi, would find him there, asleep.

His temper flared with the slightest nudge. Last year, in an after-work argument over what video to watch, Greg says he punched Dodi in the stomach several times. “She hit her head when she bounced off the wall,” he recalls, admitting: “I go for the gut.”

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Dodi says that during the fight, she slapped her husband twice. “He hates being hit in the face,” she says. At one point, as she tried to walk away, Dodi says Greg belted her in the back of the head so hard her vision went blurry and she threw up for two hours. “I told him if anything like that happened again, we were through.”

The couple says that was the final time they exchanged blows. But seven months later Greg was in trouble with the law for beating his grade-school daughter.

According to the family and court files, he smacked Patsy across the face. The thin girl sprawled back, nose bleeding, the back of her head splitting as it hit her toy chest. Emergency room doctors reported Greg to authorities. A deputy, in his report on the incident, said he asked the girl if her father often hit her. “Yes,” the deputy quoted her as saying. “Sometimes four times a day.”

Child endangerment charges were brought against Greg in December but were dropped last month after he completed a city-run parenting program. Child welfare authorities say they are continuing to monitor his progress.

Greg says he never meant to hurt his wife or children. But he has realized that, for him, commuting and family are a volatile mix. He now works at a lower-paying local gardening job. Recently, Patsy made a drawing on a white paper plate at school. “To dad,” she stenciled at the top.

Day-Care Blues

The impact on children comes in ways more subtle, but no less psychologically hurtful. Many spend a staggering number of hours away from their parents.

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“Kids feel lonely. They feel abandoned,” says Antelope Valley family therapist Angela K. Williams. “The kids feel: My parents aren’t around much, so I must not be important.”

Fourth-grader Brian Gilleland, a freckled, frenetic boy, laments that he can only snatch brief chats with his mother, Alicia, while she throws together the evening meal. “Most of the time, she doesn’t have time to listen,” says Brian, who was suspended in first grade for carrying a knife to school.

At bedtime, he pleads, “Stay here for a minute, Mommy. Let me tell you about school.” But Alicia says she tears herself away so her two youngsters can get to sleep and be better rested for school.

Catering to the Antelope Valley’s needs, some day-care centers open before dawn. Mothers bring pillows and blankets, mindful that their children are barely getting a full night’s sleep.

At the YMCA in Palmdale, the doors crack open just as the sun peeks over the horizon; the children are about to begin a grueling 12 1/2-hour stay.

Suzen Hooper screeches up to the curb just past 6 a.m. with two of her three children. Hooper, who must arrive at her Northridge credit union job by 8:30, impatiently tugs the sleeve of 5-year-old Randy, who balks at going inside. Angry and pouting, he stumbles through the door and cowers in the corner, sucking his thumb, his blond hair uncombed, a look of quiet desperation on his face.

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“We only see my mom Saturday and Sunday,” says Randy, who momentarily pulls out of his funk to lick a bowl of chocolate pudding. “I miss my mom a lot.”

Randy’s 7-year-old sister, Tanya, says this isn’t how things should be. “It’d be better staying at home some,” the girl says, hunched over construction paper as she draws tulips under a puffy gray sky. “We have a big backyard and a treehouse. And I can’t play in it.”

Commuter children, says YMCA site director Terii Eckhardt, often share disturbing traits: They are more tired, more argumentative and less prepared for school than children whose parents live closer to work.

Randy, whose mom and dad are separated, sometimes arrives three or four days straight wearing the same soiled clothing. He sobs that he is exhausted, and beds down on a YMCA mattress for three- to five-hour naps. After a dozen hours here, the boy begins chanting, “I want to go home!” He hurls building blocks across the YMCA site, a double-wide trailer. He recently kept telling workers he didn’t feel well, a tactic staffers think he used in hopes of spending more time with mom.

At 5 p.m., their 11th hour at the YMCA, some children fix their gaze steadily on the clock. Randy, playing with a dollhouse, stares out the front window. Six-year-old Joseph Thomas, who tells his mother he resents her long daily absences and has begun to get school suspensions for fighting, starts pummeling Randy with his fists and legs.

Eckhardt has a hard time understanding the lives of the parents she sees.

“I would rather sacrifice and live in a little hut and be with my kids than never see my kids,” she says at 6:30, piling Munchkin-sized chairs on the brown Formica tables.

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Truant Teenagers

Some parents are so fearful of being far from their children during an emergency that they drag them along for the commute.

Darleen Jordan used to drop her three children, who were then in the second and sixth grades, at a Glendale school with after-hours programs. She then would head to her Mid-Wilshire office. On long workdays, she picked the kids up at school and brought them back to the office. She would lug a television, VCR and sleeping bags from the trunk of her car.

Family meals often were pizza on paper plates during the drive home. If Jordan began to nod off, she sought out a freeway underpass and set an alarm to sleep 20 minutes. When too fatigued, Jordan, the children and her husband, who was commuting separately Downtown, would check into a Los Angeles motel.

Finally, Darleen surrendered. After having another baby, she got out of the fast lane and became a full-time homemaker. Looking back, all she can say is: “Oh my God, we made a mistake.”

Even worse problems exist among teens too old for day care or trips with mom to work. They often are left home alone for 10 to 14 hours a day when school isn’t in session.

Police, alarmed by the epidemic numbers of teenagers who lie to their parents about going to classes, have launched truancy sweeps. Despite a new ordinance--violations cost parents $135--authorities typically round up 100 Palmdale teenagers a day.

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Two months into the current school semester, Suzen Hooper’s 14-year-old son, Scott, had missed 11 days at Mesa Junior High. “Lots of kids cut school,” he says, shrugging. Before leaving the house at 6 a.m., Scott’s mother wakes him, but he slips back into bed.

Scott wants to become involved in Boy Scouts or Little League, but his mother says she gets home too late to take him. Grandparents and friends in Los Angeles no longer can help since she moved so far away. Scott’s grade-point average has dropped from honor roll to below 1.0. In the sixth grade, his mom says, he began wearing baggy clothes and scribbling the name of a gang on school spiral notebooks. Scott says he is not in a gang now.

Some teens are turning not only to gangs but to drugs, shoplifting and residential burglaries, targeting neighborhoods evacuated by commuters, says sheriff’s Deputy Chris Haymond.

Nearly 580 Palmdale juveniles were arrested last year for crimes ranging from burglary to aggravated assault.

“Mom and dad are chasing dollar bills down the freeway. And the kids are footloose and fancy free,” says Michael Dutton, principal of Antelope Valley High School.

Hanging in There

No question, Jeffery and Danielle Wooten admit, it’s a hard life being commuter parents on the edge of the Mojave. But for now, for their children, they are convinced the Antelope Valley still outshines Los Angeles.

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“We knew once we moved out here that it would be difficult, that it would be a sacrifice,” says Danielle, who is 24. “We feel we are getting something better out of the deal.”

The Wootens say they sometimes feel like strangers passing in the night--on opposite sides of the freeway. He works the graveyard shift as a security guard at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center in South-Central Los Angeles. She works all day as a medical office clerk in Santa Clarita. Together with a relative, they juggle baby-sitting for the three children who live at the Wootens’ almost-new four-bedroom home in Lancaster.

On weekdays, Jeffery and Danielle average about 30 minutes together under the same roof. “I’m coming. He’s going,” says Danielle. “Sometimes he’s cooked dinner and I don’t want to eat. I’m just tired. We snap at each other.”

The hurt feelings can fester for days until the couple finds time to iron things out. “We have to keep reminding each other: This is what we chose,” Danielle says.

Jeffery, 34, says he misses his wife.

“I don’t let it show a lot,” he confesses. “I try to maintain, even though I’m dead tired.” When she comes through the door, Jeffrey says, he tells her that he loves her. Exhausted, Danielle trudges upstairs to sleep, Jeffery says, “and doesn’t hug me.”

As the couple talks with a visitor at their dining room table, Jeffery begins to snore loudly, seated in his chair.

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While he sleeps, Danielle explains that by the time she gets home at 8 p.m., there is little time for motherhood. She remembers one recent day off when their 2-year-old son, Taylor, refused to leave her lap. “Mommy, don’t leave!” he chanted. “Mommy, don’t leave!”

Realizing the potential harm, the Wootens have family meetings with their children, explaining why mom and dad can’t always be there. They pray together. Then, the parents remind the children that they all have their own bedrooms now, unlike when they were enduring apartment life in the San Fernando Valley.

“When they get older they will realize the sacrifices we made were in their best interest,” Danielle says. “They will know their parents did love them.” She adds, half trying to convince herself, “I think they are happy.”

Chucking the Commute

Rather than accept the trade-offs inherent in spending long hours behind the wheel, a growing number of people are willing to take substantial pay cuts to work closer to home. About 800 hopefuls recently lined up before dawn in front of the discount Food-4-Less grocery store to apply for 70 low-wage positions.

Divorced mother Tamara Howell ditched the drive and began a day-care business in her home, watching over the children of commuters on her Palmdale block.

“I was just a robot,” says Tamara, clasping her chest. “I felt hypnotized.”

By last year, the 5-foot-3 Howell had shrunk to 92 pounds, 20 below what doctors thought was healthy. She slept, curled up in her car, during lunch hour at her Chatsworth job.

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She rose at 3:30 a.m. to do dishes, bills and laundry; her children were in day care by 6.

Quality time with her daughter Samantha, then 3, and her younger son Brian was the 10-minute drive home from day care.

“There is so much I missed,” she says. “There are no replays.”

These days, she is having few regrets. The money isn’t as good, but her life is much richer. With more free time, she takes her children to the park and on field trips to the Antelope Valley Indian museum.

“My kids are loving having me here,” Tamara says. “It’s not perfect, but it’s a heck of a lot better than it was. . . . You sacrifice, but now I’m sacrificing for the right things.”

Antelope Valley family therapist Jorge Zepeda says he understands why so many people are leaving. He can’t say the same for those who take their place.

“I don’t know why they come,” he says in bewilderment.

In mid-March, dozens of construction workers, clad in fluorescent-orange vests, put the finishing touches on a massive expansion of Palmdale’s main carpool lot.

And on the Antelope Valley Freeway’s Palmdale Boulevard exit, a huge billboard has gone up, hawking what will be one of Los Angeles County’s largest planned suburban developments, the 7,200-home Ritter Ranch tract.

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“A new kind of family habitat,” it beckons.

Next: Welfare families--and class conflict--come to the new suburbs.

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SURVIVAL SKILLS / How Antelope Valley Residents Deal With Tough Commutes

Two Couples Team Up

* Eric Erickson and Kathleen McKenzie-Erickson

HOME PURCHASED: 1992

PRICE: $86,000

The Ericksons’ solution to commuter fatigue: Wife Kathleen would spend weeknights in a Chatsworth apartment. Eric says his wife, a software specialist for a law firm, had to get up at 3:30 a.m. and return home after 6:30 p.m. She shared her L.A. rental with a neighbor’s wife who also was weary of the long daily commute from the Antelope Valley. Meanwhile, the husbands of the two L.A.-bound women would deal with their bouts of loneliness by inviting each other over for dinner. The arrangement was put on hold a few months ago when Kathleen took a leave of absence because of a hand problem she developed from work. But now she’s getting better and is thinking about starting the madness all over again. If that happens, Eric, who is studying to become a mediator, says that when the couple gets together on weekends, they will simply “sit and bask in each other’s warmth.”

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SURVIVAL SKILLS / How Antelope Valley Residents Deal With Tough Commutes

A Cot in the Office

* Ron Saldivar and Lydia Guzman-Saldivar

HOME PURCHASED: 1993

PRICE: $130,000

Los Angeles Police Officer Ron Saldivar spends three nights each week sleeping on a cot in the department’s Rampart Division, away from his wife and 13-month-old son in the Antelope Valley. Ron sleeps at the station because he fears that fatigue from 12-hour work shifts might cause him to fall asleep on the drive home. A colleague recently dozed off at the wheel on the Antelope Valley Freeway, crashed down an embankment and suffered nerve damage to his arm, Ron says. The Saldivars initially were thrilled with their three-bedroom, two-story Palmdale home, a big step up from the 500-square-foot Lincoln Heights duplex they previously rented. But Lydia, saying the couple eventually realized Ron’s absences were a necessary evil, now says: “This is commuter hell.” The family stopped making mortgage payments last year and expects to be evicted from their foreclosed home shortly.

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SURVIVAL SKILLS / How Antelope Valley Residents Deal With Tough Commutes

Five-Day Job, Two Commutes

* Gary and Kim Montana

HOME PURCHASED: 1994

PRICE: $80,000

Monday through Friday, Gary Montana lives in Hacienda Heights with his mother--leaving behind his two children, two stepchildren, wife and house in the Antelope Valley. Gary says he is putting in so much overtime these days that there aren’t enough hours left to get home and back to work. Gary’s wife, Kim, drives him to his job as a sheet-metal worker in El Sereno on Monday at 4:15 a.m. and picks him up at the end of the week. “It’s terrible. This one barely even knows him,” Kim says, cradling the couple’s 6-month-old son. “He looks at him like: Who is this guy?” On weekends, Kim says, the couple’s 1-year-old son, Gary Jr., plants himself on dad’s lap all day and won’t leave his side at night. “There is no other way to do it,” Kim says.

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The Daily Grind Behind the Wheel

As Americans push their suburbs out further and further, an increasing proportion of people are spending large chunks of their day behind the wheel. The percentage who spend two or more hours each day commuting is particularly high in Southern California. In the Antelope Valley, more than 30% of residents are on the road at least two hous a day.

Two Hours or More Round Trip

UNITED STATES: 6.0%

ANTELOPE VALLEY: 30.0%

Palmdale: 36.9%

SELECTED SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA COUNTIES

Los Angeles County: 16.2%

Orange County: 17.1%

Ventura County: 14.6%

San Bernardino County: 25.3%

Riverside County: 24.7%

5-County Average: 18.1%

Sources and notes: U.S. Census for nationwide and Palmdale data, which is 1990, the most recent available. Antelope Valley Data is for 1993 from U.S. Census and Southern California Association of Governments. Southern California data from the Southern California Rideshare department of the Southern California Association of Governments. It is for 1994, the most recent year available.

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