L.A., Bakersfield Growth Is Poised for Grapevine Collision

Near the top of the daunting Grapevine, the mountain route between Southern California and the Central Valley, lies a wind-swept valley where developers are proposing to build a 70,000-resident city, the largest housing project in Los Angeles County history.

At the base of the same steep grade, a mammoth white Ikea furniture warehouse juts out of a parched Kern County plain. It is the first of dozens of warehouses planned at the foot of the Tehachapi Mountains.

Over the next decade or two, the 23,000-home Centennial housing project, the 1,450-acre warehouse complex and a third large development on the giant Tejon Ranch are expected to alter regional distinctions formed over 150 years--blurring the lines that have distinguished the sprawl of the south from the farms of the north, the city from the country, the burbs from the sticks.

Like steppingstones, the three projects along Interstate 5 would link Southern California and the Central Valley, filling parts of the 75-mile expanse between Santa Clarita and Bakersfield that is now nearly all open space.

The rugged Tehachapis had long proved to be one obstacle that even Southern California’s relentless sprawl could not surmount. The mountains were so formidable that the area’s first U.S. surveyor used camels to traverse them. Even when the Old Ridge Route was opened in 1915, it took the better part of a day to get from Los Angeles to Bakersfield.

But those old boundaries are becoming obsolete.

On the grazing lands of Tejon Ranch--an area larger than the city of Los Angeles--developers now plot the warehouse district as a major shipping springboard for goods from the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles. The “new town” of Centennial would include jobs for 30,000.

Protests seem inevitable--water is short, wildlife may be threatened and development would leapfrog far beyond current city boundaries. But given the growth records of Kern and Los Angeles counties, the ambitious vision for Tejon could prevail.

“It’s kind of like Southern California and Northern California are taking over Central California as a distinct place,” said Kathryn Colebrook, a mortgage company manager in Bakersfield. “Obviously, Southern California is coming over the hill.”

Indeed, residents of the Central Valley say they can already see the fading of regional distinctions in the old Depression-era boomtown of Bakersfield--and the best and worst of that change.

Tens of thousands of Southern Californians have already moved to that community, once better known for Buck Owens, oil and agriculture. There, in blistering summer heat and chilling winter fog, amid a stagnant economy, a typical house still sells for $119,000, a third of the price buyers are paying in coastal Southern California.

The president of the Bakersfield realty board said that one in five of his customers is from south of the Tehachapis. The city’s growth rate was three times that of the state over the last decade. And home sales are only accelerating, up 61% in the last four years.

“It’s basically people who 30 years ago might have bought a house in Woodland Hills, and 20 years ago in Thousand Oaks and 10 years ago in Santa Clarita,” said author and demographic researcher Joel Kotkin, a senior fellow at Pepperdine University.

“Now they’ve been priced out of those markets,” he said.

Amid the stylish new subdivisions of sprawling west Bakersfield, which has grown from virtually nothing in 20 years, sit trendy shops, big box stores and golf course communities so familiar to Southern Californians.

But while new industry brings jobs, along with it comes traffic. While affordable homes are the dream of young couples, they can obscure the heritage that once made Bakersfield a singular place.

“Southwest Bakersfield is almost a McTown, no different from the McTowns of Orange County or the McTown of Valencia, “ said Sriram Khe, former director of the Environmental Resource Management Program at Cal State Bakersfield.

Even as the red-tiled homes and Starbucks-studded shopping centers of the Southland migrated over the Grapevine, the Tejon Ranch still seemed an impenetrable barrier between the two regions. A cattle-raising operation since 1843, the 270,000-acre ranch comprises four old Spanish land grants. It’s 40 miles from north to south, 21 miles across--425 square miles in all.

In the 1870s, New York Herald newspaper correspondent Charles Nordhoff described the ranch as the “most magnificent estate, in a single hand, in America.”

Tejon was sold in 1912 to an investment group that included the owners of the Los Angeles Times.

“The ranch has never earned much money, but it’s a great piece of property,” said former Times Publisher Otis Chandler, whose family was a principal owner, through Times Mirror Co., until it sold its interest in 1997.

“Every developer, when they looked at it, thought they were going to make hundreds of millions of dollars,” Chandler said. “It’s been talked about for 30 years. But nothing has really come of it.”

Until recently.

With a sharp swing in corporate philosophy in 1996 and the sale of its livestock operations in the last two years, Tejon Ranch Co. became primarily a real estate development firm. “It’s like a sleeping giant waking up,” said economist Mark Evans, dean of the Extended University at Cal State Bakersfield. “Once they do a couple of things at the base of the Grapevine or even toward the top, then things will really accelerate.”

Tejon Ranch includes 16 miles of freeway frontage along the I-5 on each side of the Tejon Pass, where the artist Christo once installed 1,760 huge yellow umbrellas.

The ranch is bisected by the California Aqueduct, the straw through which the Southland draws water from the snowpacks of the north. And the ranch has abundant rights to that liquid gold.

So as the state experiences, simultaneously, a population surge, a water squeeze and a housing shortage, Tejon executives are seizing the moment. “We would like to develop our land, but we like to think we’re good stewards,” said Tejon Ranch President Robert A. Stine.

Tejon’s first three large projects are the warehouse complex near the junction of the I-5 and Highway 99, about 25 miles south of Bakersfield; the Centennial “new town” of 11,700 acres--half of it open space--30 miles north of Santa Clarita; and a golf course resort of second homes and ranch estates at Tejon Mountain Village, near Tejon Lake.

The first two warehouses are already built in Kern County. Developers submitted the Centennial project to Los Angeles County planners 10 days ago. They expect to firm up concepts for the luxury resort in Kern County this year or next.

The warehouse project is emblematic of Kern County’s ambition to become a kind of switching yard for big rigs that roam the West. That crossroads depot is no more than 4 1/4 hours from every major California city and Las Vegas.

Tejon executives are selling the Centennial project to Los Angeles County officials as a complete community with a balance between homes and jobs--a mini-Santa Clarita to help meet Los Angeles County’s housing deficiency of 28,000 dwellings a year.

“In Southern California, there’s not much available land left,” said Centennial project manager Greg Medeiros. “So the growth will probably be accommodated in the Antelope Valley or along Interstate 5. It’s the only underused freeway in Southern California.”

Centennial would exceed in size the 21,700-dwelling Newhall Ranch project near Santa Clarita, the largest residential development ever approved in Los Angeles County, according to county planners.

The Tejon projects face many questions.

“The issues of sprawl will definitely come up,” said Jim Hartl, planning director for Los Angeles County. “And when you start talking about a jobs-housing balance, you can’t force people to live and work in the same location.”

In Kern County, Planning Director Ted James said there wasn’t much complaint about the first phase of warehouses at the bottom of the Grapevine. But he expects more concerns about the expansion, which overlays habitat of the San Joaquin kit fox, a rare kangaroo rat and blunt-nosed leopard lizards.

“Every environmentalist in the state should be concerned about whatever is proposed for Tejon Ranch,” said Dan Cooper, director of bird conservation for Audubon California. “It’s an ecological gold mine.”

To blunt criticism, Tejon Ranch has sent representatives into surrounding communities to speak to groups and survey residents.

“We would like to avoid the typical thing where a developer lays out a plan and then you start arguing with environmental groups and officials,” Stine of the Tejon Ranch Co. said.

Whatever the fate of Tejon Ranch, the law of housing supply and demand is already changing the south end of the Central Valley.

“We’re seeing more L.A. influence here,” said James, the Kern County planner. “That’s become an issue: Do we want to be another Los Angeles bedroom community? There’s a strong feeling for the small-town character that Bakersfield still has to a large degree.”

Internal Revenue Service data show that about 55,500 Los Angeles County residents moved to Kern County from 1990 to 2001, nearly 22,000 more than moved in the other direction. And planners say thousands of commuters endure the long trip south over the Grapevine each day.

Khe, the former Cal State professor, is a Southern California transplant who commuted to Los Angeles for eight months after moving to Bakersfield. His wife has done the same while earning her doctorate at UCLA.

So Khe sees both sides of the Central Valley’s budding transformation: Growth is a boon for him as a homeowner and potentially good for the economy overall, he said. But it also brings pollution to a basin that already has some of the dirtiest air in the nation. A rich history is being brushed aside, too--one of oil exploration, agriculture and the 1930s influx of Oklahoma migrants.

“We’ve gotten rid of our railroad history; people turn up their noses at our remaining oil wells,” Khe said.

But Southern Californians who fill the new subdivisions say change generally is making their adopted hometown better all the time.

Suzanne Saltz, 30, an assistant director on the television drama “JAG,” drives 35,000 miles a year so she can live in one of Bakersfield’s newest neighborhoods.

“There are things Bakersfield has that L.A. can’t compare to--hometown feel and friendliness,” said Saltz, who jumps into her Volvo sedan each morning for a 1 1/2-hour drive to Santa Clarita.

But what Saltz, her lawyer husband and their two young children really like is the large two-story house on an acre they bought for $250,000. “It would be triple the price in L.A.,” she said.

She’s hoping that a shopping center nearby replicates the Marketplace outdoor mall built in southwest Bakersfield--a red brick complex with fountains, a movie theater, Starbucks, Baja Fresh and Jamba Juice that may be the busiest place in town on weekend nights.

In time, Bakersfield will become less itself and more an extension of the Southern California megalopolis, said Pepperdine’s Kotkin, a frequent visitor to the city.

“I remember Bakersfield 30 years ago being much more of a distinct place--sort of old Okie and Arkie, and funky country music,” Kotkin said.

“The spread of clueless suburbia is not anything that can be celebrated in story or song,” he said. “But it may just be inevitable. And it may be a way that individual families get to live a decent life.”

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Times staff writer Ray Herndon contributed to this report.