More People Headed Inland

Like a grinding tectonic shift, a demographic temblor rocked California in 2001. Experts saw it coming, but the census confirmed the trend: The growth boom focused for a century on the Golden State’s coast has shifted to the agricultural heartland of the Central Valley.

These days, the go-go growth spots are fast-changing farm towns and evolving commuter villages in the state’s sprawling belly. Eight of California’s 17 fastest-growing counties are in the vast, oblong bowl stretching 400 miles from Redding to Bakersfield.

Much of the boom is driven by the region’s comparatively inexpensive housing prices, which have lured hordes of coastal dwellers. Even with the current recession, a home in most parts of the Central Valley is less than a third the median price in the Bay Area or Los Angeles.

But the bigger forces behind the valley’s population explosion are a sizable influx of immigrants and a breathtaking birthrate, particularly among the region’s huge Latino community.

So far, prosperity has not come with the population growth.

The valley is the poorest region in the state, with poverty levels in some spots sinking as low as Appalachia. The median income is roughly half that enjoyed in the Bay Area or Los Angeles. Nearly one in four families lives below the poverty level.

“It’s as different from the rest of California as California is from Mississippi,” said Michael Teitz, an emeritus professor of city and regional planning at UC Berkeley.

It also presents perhaps California’s greatest array of questions, difficulties and potential opportunities as the state grapples with growth in the coming decades.

The population is expected to grow by about 12 million people by 2020, a 36% boost from the current 34 million. With its vast, rural expanse, the Great Central Valley is expected to absorb a big proportion of that growth.

Huge societal consequences teeter in the balance, many of them already issues of the day: Water shortages. Conversion of farmland. Traffic headaches. Urban-style air pollution. A dearth of tax dollars, particularly with the economy swooning, for needs ranging from sewers to schools. Epic poverty. An undereducated work force.

Such problems are a challenge not just for the valley, but the state as a whole, said Carol Whiteside, executive director of the Great Valley Center, a Modesto think tank. “If some of these trends continue, the Central Valley could end up a place that is very, very expensive for all California in terms of dependence and social need.”

1 in 8 Commutes to Bay Area or Southland

California’s trend of decentralizing communities is nothing new. Exurbs and edge cities have been sprouting for generations. But nowhere is it seen more starkly than the Central Valley.

Just look at the march of commuter villages outward from the Bay Area.

In the 1970s, Livermore was a far-flung outpost, isolated by coastal foothills from the bay. Now it’s a center of offices and commerce, home for workers commuting in from places as far away as Modesto, in the dead center of the Central Valley.

According to a 1999 Central Valley survey, one in eight employed residents of the state’s agrarian core said they commuted to jobs in the Bay Area or Los Angeles region. In parts of the valley hugging the Bay Area, one in five drives west to jobs in San Francisco or Silicon Valley.

“People keep saying, ‘Oh, it’s only another five miles,’ ” said Michael Dardia, an economist at the nonprofit Sphere Institute, a public policy think tank. “They keep doing that, and suddenly they’re in Patterson,” a Central Valley farm town flanking Interstate 5.

Instead of commuting long distances, many valley residents would like to bring high-tech jobs to their towns. For generations they had a two-pronged pitch offering cheap land and cheap labor.

But that refrain doesn’t resonate among the glitterati of the so-called “new economy.” Valley towns simply lack the cultural and community ambience to attract such high-end businesses.

“The folks out there really want economic development,” said Stephen Levy, director of the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy, a Palo Alto-based think tank. “But that’s a ways off.”

America’s current downturn isn’t helping. Two years ago, businesses were being squeezed out of the Bay Area by high office rental prices and low vacancies. The valley was eager to be a destination. But with the dot-com bust, vacancy rates have skyrocketed by the bay, and office costs have been slashed in half. Businesses that survived the bust now aren’t as inclined to move inland.

Firms that have stepped into the valley, mostly to establish manufacturing plants, have already cast their vote. The winners are Sacramento satellite cities such as Roseville and Folsom, which attracted big tech campuses in the 1990s.

Such economic frills combine with Sacramento’s government-town economy to make it the Central Valley’s unchallenged star in the minds of some planners. Situated halfway between the Sierra and the Bay Area, its mix of jobs, schools and leafy neighborhoods prompts some to suggest Sacramento will begin to garner national attention as a livable community, despite its sizzling summer heat.

“Sacramento is going to be a Portland,” Dardia said. “It’s a place that’s not as large and that’s OK. It’s very livable and affordable, with an educated population.”

Sacramento’s success has fueled growth in neighboring counties such as Yolo and El Dorado. But nowhere in the valley is growth faster than Placer County, a magnet for urban escapees seeking a more rural lifestyle or retirement freedom. During the 1990s, it’s 43.8% growth rate made Placer the state’s second fastest-growing county.

Judy Beck is the archetypal newcomer to Placer.

A year ago, she and her husband, Richard, sold their Bay Area house for $500,000 and moved into a retirement community, purchasing a comfortable Spanish-style home for $220,000.

“It was just time to get out of the Bay Area,” she said. “We needed to escape the rat race.”

Other areas also have grown fast, despite the absence of high-tech. Several hours down the freeway from Sacramento, Fresno has confounded demographers who saw no obvious engine for growth.

Fresno Considered Ideal for Distribution Centers

While the downtown neighborhoods have struggled, Fresno has forged ahead in recent years by becoming a center for warehouse distribution, geographically situated in the perfect spot for one-day truck runs to either Los Angeles or the Bay Area. Like several valley towns, it has also lured “back office” operations that provide support services for commercial centers on the coast.

While anti-growth sentiment has raged in coastal California since the 1980s, residents of the Central Valley remain essentially pro-growth, according to Mark Baldassare, a senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California. Surveys by Baldassare have found that valley residents want jobs and housing, but they also hope to retain agriculture, long the dominant force in their lives.

“To me the Central Valley will be the most interesting part of the state to watch during the coming decade,” Baldassare said. “It is undergoing the most dramatic change, from agriculture to urban development. And it has the biggest question marks.”

Growth is clinging largely to the existing freeway network lacing the region. The valley is fast becoming a series of linear strips of development. The California 99 corridor, once flanked by farm fields, is rapidly filling with shopping malls and subdivisions. Interstate 80 between the Bay Area and the Sierra is fueling growth in edge cities such as Vacaville, Fairfield and Dixon.

For planners such as Teitz, the big worry is the push for development along Interstate 5. They fear such growth could create local traffic jams, tying up what is the prime freight highway for California.

Commuter rail is just beginning to expand. Rush-hour trains have been added between Sacramento and the Bay Area, as well as a new line from the San Joaquin County boom towns of Tracy and Manteca to San Jose.

Further in the future is the high-speed rail project proposed between Los Angeles and Northern California, which could dramatically alter development patterns. If built, a daily commute from Fresno to either Los Angeles or the Bay Area would be a real possibility. But the project, at $25 billion, could be decades away.

Water also promises to be a potent issue in the balancing act over building subdivisions and retaining agriculture.

Household water consumption in the valley, raked by scorching summers, is far higher than on the coast. A new state law that requires large projects to account for water supplies before construction begins promises to make life more difficult for developers.

But the pricing schemes for water could play in development’s favor. With residential users paying eight to 10 times what agriculture does for water, “that would create an overwhelming incentive” for agribusiness to increasingly sell water instead of crops, Dardia said.

Concerns About Sprawl Called Misleading

Some locals worry that the Central Valley already is becoming California’s leading example of sprawl. But planners say such sentiments are misleading. Teitz, who is now research director at the Public Policy Institute of California, said the density of the state’s new developments is typically greater than new subdivisions in the east.

Teitz sees a pressing need for the region to steer a path between “simple-minded growth” and laissez faire development. With the economy stalling, there’s even less tax money to help pay for the fallout of growth, putting the onus for sewers, schools and firehouses ever more on development fees.

But builder fees only go so far. “It helps you pay for the fire station,” Teitz said, “but it doesn’t help you run the fire company.”

The likely result will be knock-down brawls over tax revenues between retrofitting urban centers and inland regions trying to build from scratch.

In such a fight, the likely loser would be the valley, which lacks the political clout that urban areas enjoy in the statehouse.

“There’s isn’t enough money to go around in good times--and clearly good times are over,” Baldassare said. “I think that’s a huge problem for the state.”

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Earlier installments of this series are available at https://www.latimes.com/reflections2001.