TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/111389/11138900.050

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 8.7 KB | 166 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 38

Californians Keep Out!


A wave of transplants from the Golden State touches off a
backlash in Seattle

By Jordan Bonfante


    Kelly Cutlip was driving along a Los Angeles freeway in
June 1988 when a speeding Toyota with a drug-dazed 22-year-old
woman at the wheel traversed crazily five traffic lanes, crashed
broadside into his pickup and gave him the ride of his life.
Cutlip, 36, a marble mason from nearby Irvine, found himself
strapped upside down as the truck skidded on its roof at 60
m.p.h., sparks flying past his head like an acetylene shower in
a metal shop. "That's it," he announced to his wife that night.
"That's the clincher."

    Within two months the Cutlips had sold their house and
moved with their four children to Seattle, with no job and few
friends, but with a determination to find a less stressful life.
Today the family is settled in the wooded suburb of Issaquah in
a cedar split-level that cost them $110,000 less than their
California home. Even if Kelly's income has dipped 20%, his
commute is mercifully brief. At the wheel, he says, he no longer
starts at the sound of a backfire for fear it might be a highway
shooting. "We were tired of being in the fast lane," says Mary
Cutlip, 36. "We wanted a more peaceable, low-key way of life.
We wanted our kids to grow up at a slower pace."

    As it happens, ten of the twelve other young families on
their block in Issaquah are also from out of state. For the
Cutlips are part of a "northward-ho!" movement of new settlers,
mainly from California, who have been streaming by the tens of
thousands toward the inviting frontier of the Pacific Northwest.
The influx into dynamic areas like Seattle and, to a lesser
extent, Portland, Ore., is urbanizing a once rural hinterland
and intensifying the Northwest's already bitter debate over
local growth.

    Many of the new migrants are young, middle-class families
from Los Angeles and Orange County. According to University of
Southern California geographer Thomas Jablonsky, their flight
represents the first net "out migration" of this trendsetting
group in the state's history. They are relatively skilled and
prosperous, and mobile enough to escape Southern California's
well-advertised problems of traffic, smog and crime. Many are
so-called equity emigres who cash in on their California houses
to acquire equivalent property near Puget Sound at literally
half the price. Last month's Northern California earthquake,
however, has had little impact on the exodus. A poll by the
Field Institute showed that though many Californians expect new
quakes, only 2% say they are likely to move out of the state for
that reason.

    Thanks to the new arrivals, the Seattle area is growing as
fast as a Sunbelt mecca. In the past year, Washington has gained
100,000 people, most in the twelve-county Puget Sound Basin. A
survey by Seattle demographer Laurie McCutcheon for the Puget
Power Co. showed that in 1988 the fastest-growing area, suburban
King County to the east of Seattle, received 12,700 new
households from out of state, 22% of them from California.

    Seattle in fact has achieved a stunning comeback from the
"Boeing bust" of the early 1970s, when the aircraft
manufacturer slashed its work force from 105,000 to 38,000.
Since the mid-1980s, the region's industries have diversified
into computers, new fisheries and Pacific Rim trade.
Unemployment has fallen to a 20-year low of 4.5%. Now business
is so brisk at Boeing that not even a record-high work force of
110,000 is enough to meet production schedules. Last month
57,000 machinists went on strike at four Boeing plants,
demanding a larger share of company profits. "We have gone
through the hard times with this company," a union leader said,
"and we want to go through the good times as well."

    The effect of what McCutcheon calls an "astronomical
escalation of people" has been unaccustomed congestion, a 28%
inflation of real estate values in just 18 months and a
perceptibly upscale -- Washingtonians would say ostentatious --
change in the appearance and style of some of Seattle's suburbs.
With that has come a tendency to tar California with guilt by
association -- for damage to the environment, for fast-talking
wheeling and dealing, and for the drug trafficking among
offshoots of Los Angeles gangs in the blue-collar districts of
Tacoma. California has also become a political buzz word. "Any
candidate can get a rise out of his audience just by mentioning
the bugaboo of `Los Angelization,'" says Doug Jewett, one of the
contenders in this week's mayoral election. One successful
antigrowth candidate used the slogan "If You Don't Want King
County to Become Another California, Vote for Brian Derdowski."

    Antigrowth instincts have stiffened, especially around
Seattle, where the citizenry has been increasingly inclined to
put environmental conservatism first. Last May, for example,
voters overwhelmingly approved new restrictions limiting the
height of future downtown skyscrapers to 450 ft. "The California
rush is actually useful in crystallizing the debate over our
future," says Lois Schwennesen, King County's planning and
development manager. "It's helping us face some hard choices,
about sewage, transit, road construction and the rest, and it's
helping us understand that you can't have it all."

    Not all Northwesterners are so charitable. Many have
refined the art of California bashing, good humored and
otherwise. One auto dealer makes it a point to steer his
auto-financing business to local rather than California lenders.
The Puget Sound National Bank boasts in TV commercials of being
the last locally owned bank in the state. TV anchors play to the
crowd by deriding Californians for building show-off "French
chateaus." And radio station KEZX has been airing a new local
folk song, Don't Come to Seattle.

    Emmett Watson, a curmudgeonly columnist for the Seattle
Times, has conducted an anti-California crusade for years. MOUNT
THE RAMPARTS! FIGHT CALIFORNICATION! exhorts the headline of a
recent Watson tirade. The columnist is the founder of Lesser
Seattle, an antibooster organization that seeks to "keep the
bastards out" by exaggerating the city's negative
characteristics, such as its notorious rainfall. The
organization's slogan: "Have a Nice Day -- Somewhere Else!"
Watson insists that his crusade is tongue in cheek, but many
newly arrived Californians take less satirical slurs to heart.
"Our very first day the Welcome Wagon lady called on us and told
us that people here think Californians fail to recycle, pollute
the air, ruin natural resources, litter, and bring smog,
congestion and overgrowth," a transplanted housewife recalls.
"Some welcome."

    Margot and Howard Grim, a young couple who moved with three
children from Sonoma County, Calif., to Woodinville, Wash., so
they could afford to buy a house, say they have not encountered
overt antagonism so much as occasional turns of a subtle cold
shoulder. In their case it has been directed at their North
Californian "alternative life-style" preferences such as Zen
meditation and organic gardening. "Oh, you guys are so granola!"
one staid neighbor told them early on. As a result, they have
become gun-shy about admitting their California origins and tend
to socialize mostly with other Californians. "The irony is that
now I've become antigrowth myself!" Margot Grim says, laughing.
"Here I am, a Californian, wishing that other Californians would
stay away."

    How long will the California rush continue? Real estate
brokers expect the trend to intensify further before it
subsides. A few immigrants, however -- just a few -- are turning
around. Consumer finance representative Terry Maxwell, 35, and
her husband John, 33, a wine-company salesman, brought their
year-old child to Seattle from Orange County just five months
ago. Recalls Terry: "We came here to try to live a simple life
on one income. I wanted to be June Cleaver; you know, `Honey,
I'm ho-ome!'" But they soon became disillusioned by the
surprisingly high cost of living -- including what they call
"sneak taxes" on housing, autos and services -- and convinced
that opportunity knocks louder back in Southern California. "I'd
love to take our house and lake with us, but I can't wait to get
back to the whole Southern California scene," Terry Maxwell said
as she left last month.

    When the Maxwells put their house up for sale, they noted
that ten of the 30 prospective buyers who came to see it were
from California. None of them would admit it at first, for fear
the Maxwells might not sell them the property.