TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/111891/1118998.000

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                                                                                ISSUES, Page 42

CALIFORNIA

The Endangered Dream


The land of golden opportunity is becoming a land of broken
promises

BY JORDAN BONFANTE


    The contours of California's endangered dream reach north
to Seattle, where Dr. Bill Portuese, 32, a facial plastic
surgeon, moved in July because "there is no way I was going to
raise a family in Beverly Hills."

    And to the foot of Mount Hood in Oregon, where Lila
Foggia, 44, a former Hollywood studio vice president, now fishes
for steelhead outside her family's forest-shaded house on the
bank of the Salmon River and exults, "God, I love living among
normal people."

    And to La Jolla near San Diego, where Bennett Greenwald,
49, a developer who runs his own $50 million company in the
depressed commercial-property business, is thinking about
pulling up stakes and starting over in Arizona "because I'm not
sure I can continue to operate in California."

    If Greenwald goes, he will join the 510,000 others who
left -- they might say escaped from -- California in the past
12 months. That exodus is still smaller than the continuing
migration to California from other states of about 570,000 a
year. But it shows that to an increasing degree, California's
fabled magnetism is reversing itself, repelling as well as
attracting many of the get-up-and-go Americans who have flocked
to the Golden State in search of the California Dream. The
escapees are being driven away by an accelerating deterioration
in the quality of life: clogged freeways, eye-stinging smog,
despoiled landscapes, polluted beaches, water shortages,
unaffordable housing, overcrowded schools and beleaguered
industries, many of which are fleeing, with their jobs, to other
states. The very qualities that have lured millions to
California for 50 years are threatening to disappear.

    For something as ephemeral as a dream, Californians have
always had a fairly exact fix on what theirs consisted of:
economic opportunity; the freedom to jump in a car and drive to
the beach or mountains; and, perhaps most important of all, what
economist Steven Thompson, director of the Assembly Office of
Research in Sacramento, describes as "a little house in the
suburbs with a barbecue and -- if you make it -- a swimming
pool." But these days, from Chico in the north to Chula Vista
in the south, Californians are anxiously debating whether that
straightforward dream can be attained or should even be pursued.

    Optimists, in which the state traditionally abounds, brush
off the gloomy predictions. They point to unique underlying
strengths such as the nine-campus, Nobel-rich University of
California, which some educators think may be the best public
university in the world; the unsung incorruptibility of most of
the state's civil servants; the magic copper light that descends
on mile-wide beaches at sunset; even the savage majesty of
streaming headlights on the freeways on a clear night. Finally,
they single out what Mark Davis, an aide to Governor Pete
Wilson, extols as "a new pioneer spirit" among the waves of
recent foreign immigrants that may infuse California with a new
dynamism.

    Pessimists, on the other hand, are ready to conclude that
California is over the hill, descending a spiral of
environmental, fiscal and social calamities. There is even a
group of so-called declinists, like UCLA economist David
Hensley, whose downward forecasting has been caricatured by
others as a Blade Runner vision of economic stagnation,
environmental plunder, surging crime and ethnic conflict.


    TOO MANY DREAMERS

    In between are unsmiling realists like San Diego Tribune
editor Neil Morgan, a sharp-eyed and increasingly skeptical
expert on the region. Morgan worries most about the demoralizing
effect of California's problems, which is all the more damaging
because of the high hopes the state has always harbored.
"There's a deep disenchantment that I've decided goes a lot
beyond traffic, smog, crime and too many neighbors," says
Morgan. "There's a dejection born of overblown dreams."

    The main problem underlying California's malaise is
simple: the state is attracting far more people than it can cope
with. A population of 20 million in 1970 zoomed to 23.7 million
in 1980 and 29.8 million in 1990 -- 3 million more than all of
Canada. Fully 85% of the 7 million births and newcomers of the
1980s were Hispanic or Asian. Today, according to the 1990
census, white Anglos account for 57% of the population, an
overstated figure because minorities were undercounted. By the
year 2000 there will be no ethnic majority in California, only
minorities. And even if California were to close its borders
tomorrow, the birthrate among young immigrants is so high that
the state's population would still grow by 4 million this
decade.

    Though the influx has ushered in a vibrant multicultural
society, it has also had dire effects. Smog, from smokestacks
and refineries but most of all from the 25 million vehicles on
the freeways, was already fouling the air in Los Angeles; now
it has billowed east as far as San Bernardino. In the inland
reaches, near Los Angeles, from Burbank to Riverside, it is not
unusual to schedule high school track and football practice at
night after the evening cool dispels the pollution. Glendora,
a middle-class town in the San Gabriel Valley, at times has
visibility of scarcely a quarter-mile and last year experienced
28 Stage-1 smog alerts, when any strenuous exercise is judged
unhealthy. That is actually an improvement over the late '80s,
owing to a combination of strict emission limits and still
mysterious climatic trends, but the Los Angeles Basin's smog
remains the worst in the country. Said Glendora football coach
Dean Karnoski last month as he installed a new set of field
lights for evening practices: "What we've done may be the worst
thing of all: we've adapted."

    Suburban sprawl has meant clogged traffic over ever
greater commuting distances as residents move farther and
farther from the urban cores in search of affordable homes. Take
Temecula (pop. 37,000), a sudden-growth city in the so-called
Inland Empire of Riverside County that has doubled in size in
just five years to accommodate young families in search of
relatively reasonably priced ($150,000) houses. The lights go
on in Temecula at 4 a.m. By 5 one can stand on the hill above
the Winchester Collection tract and, to the sound of sheep
bleating in the darkness, look down at the streams of headlights
coming down the feeder roads to the Route 15 Freeway, two hours
to San Diego, 2 1/2 hours to Los Angeles.

    When Andrew Cotton, a 32-year-old architect, leaves his
computer-firm job in Irvine at 6:45 p.m. for the two-hour trek
back to Temecula, he eats his dinner at the wheel, tries to stay
awake with a Larry McMurtry book-on-tape and finally, at about
8:45, after his 20-month-old baby is asleep, spends a
quarter-hour with his wife and six-year-old son. "I keep telling
myself, now, this is only temporary," says Cotton. "But it's
been three years. My wife Jill calls herself a single parent."
At 9 the lights go out at the Cottons' home, and alarms are set
for next morning's repetition.


    TROUBLE IN PARADISE

    The mushrooming population growth imposed new strains on
resources, especially land and water. Questions of land use have
come to dominate the agendas of most local governments. And
support for slow growth has become politically unassailable,
like motherhood or patriotism. Slow-growth advocates have
discovered that their cause can unite liberal environmentalists
with fiscal conservatives into a new coalition covering as much
as 80% of local public opinion. In exclusive Laguna Beach last
fall, residents voted to tax themselves $20 million to start
buying an adjoining canyon before it could be developed. Says
city council member Robert Gentry: "In Southern California, open
space is becoming the symbol of quality of life. And the only
way people have of limiting the rapid urbanization of land may
be to buy it."

    Nowhere has massive, sudden growth struck more
dramatically than Orange County. Robert Haskill, 39, a Newport
Beach insurance man who is a fourth-generation resident of the
county, still remembers how his grandfather lost his orchard to
a freeway in 1960 and how, even in the late 1960s, fields of
sugar beets and lima beans and perfumed orange groves stretched
along Route 55 from Santa Ana to Costa Mesa. That arcadian
vision lasted until nearly 1970. Then, in just 20 years, Orange
County grew by nearly 1 million people as 90,000 acres were
transformed into commercial "edge cities," freeways and houses.
Industry then rushed in and created hundreds of thousands of new
jobs, but not enough new housing was built to accommodate the
needed workers. That in turn triggered a surge of commuters from
neighboring Riverside County. Incipient growth controls were
washed away in the flood tide. With horizon-to-horizon
development came sharp disillusion among the then largely
conservative, white Orange County migrants.

    "I called it the trouble-in-paradise gap," says Mark
Baldassare, an urbanologist at the University of California at
Irvine. "People rushed here seeking paradise with a set of
specific expectations: a small residential community, detached
house, stable environment and homogeneous neighbors -- people
who acted and thought like themselves. Well, instead, the
reality they soon lived in was a vast sprawl, unaffordable
homes, landscapes that changed before your eyes. Meanwhile, a
county that in the 1950s had been 90% white Anglo now had
800,000 Hispanics, Asians and blacks. So much for homogeneity
of neighbors."


    THE FISCAL CRUNCH

    Services have become as overstretched as resources. That
is especially true of health and welfare, and public education,
which each year has to accommodate 200,000 more pupils, almost
the equivalent of Nebraska's whole student body. Because so many
of California's newcomers were males between 16 and 30, the
group most likely to commit offenses, crime rose even faster
than the population during the 1980s. That prompted the state to
go on a 10-year, $3.4 billion prison-construction spree, which
coincided with a law-and-order furor that led to growing demands
for stiffer sentences. By the end of the decade the state's
prison system was more overcrowded than before. With almost
102,000 convicts -- far more than any other state and nearly
double the total in federal cells -- California's prisons are
near to bursting.

    San Diego County's jails are so overburdened that "we
operate on the revolving-door principle," says Daniel
Greenblatt, a sheriff's official. A decrepit branch jail in El
Cajon practically invites escape with some walls made,
literally, of Styrofoam. To accommodate new prisoners, sheriffs
go through San Diego's six facilities every day and turn loose
all inmates nearing the last one-tenth of their sentence.
Arresting officers naturally concentrate on the most serious
offenses. "If you shoot your neighbor, you go to jail," says
Greenblatt. "For repeated assault-and-battery misdemeanors, you
go home."

    Local courts, some of them set up temporarily in hotels
and manned by overworked "bag judges" who push their piles of
briefs from courtroom to courtroom in shopping carts, are just
as inundated. A defendant charged with heroin possession claimed
that he couldn't find his assigned courtroom. He was let off by
the appeals court, which called the county courthouse "a
crumbling, dysfunctional moving target."

    The speed with which these problems intensified took the
state almost completely by surprise. The boom of the '80s
fostered the delusion that California could pay for, or
postpone, the cost of rectifying such deterioration. Boom-driven
tax revenues more than covered former Governor George ("Just say
no") Deukmejian's tightfisted, short-term budgets. Many
Californians, meanwhile, assumed that because their state's
diverse economy had thrived during earlier national economic
downturns, it was somehow recession proof. But when the current
recession struck last year -- later than in the rest of the
country, though with equal force -- tax revenues plummeted. That
led to a state deficit of $14 billion, the largest any state
government has ever incurred.

    The deficit laid bare the basic fiscal plight of a state
that can no longer afford the services to which it has become
accustomed. The new immigrants, many of them poor, put
additional demands on schools and health and welfare systems.
That happened just after the landmark ballot initiative of 1978,
Proposition 13, which froze property taxes and launched the
national tax revolt. At the same time the middle class, hit by
recessions in the early '80s and the early '90s, was becoming
less and less willing -- or able -- to pay for the expanded
services.

    With more help from assembly speaker Willie Brown's
Democrats than from his own Republicans, the newly elected
Wilson managed to pass a bold budget in a down-and-dirty
legislative battle last summer. It covered the deficit with $7
billion in new sales and upper-bracket income taxes, slowed
"automatic-pilot" increases in state wage and welfare spending,
and attempted to put California on a pay-as-you-go basis. But
Wilson acknowledges that the popular tax revolt is still in
force and that a hike of either the general income tax or the
property tax remains taboo. If the recession continues,
presaging another big deficit, Wilson will have practically no
margin for any more tax increases and will be forced to make
drastic cuts on the spending side.

    Wilson is short on political capital as well. A TIME poll
of Californians taken in September showed that only 26% rated
his performance as good or excellent, a 10-point drop since
June.

    The story is told of how Wilson, still a U.S. Senator and
thinking about running for Governor, met with Stu Spencer, the
California Republican consultant. Spencer warned him off,
observing that with all its problems, the state was perhaps
"ungovernable."

    "That's O.K.," Wilson responded cheerfully. "I'll manage
the problems."

    Easier said than done. Wilson is finding that running
California is immensely complicated by three major political
gaps:

    1) In a state so big and populous that campaigning
politicians can reach voters only through multi-million-dollar
TV blitzes, public indifference runs high. When developer
Greenwald insisted that his 21 office employees go to vote or
lose their jobs, he discovered that 15 of them didn't even know
where to start. Ballot initiatives, once a major font of
sweeping reform legislation, have become less popular since the
long delays in applying "Prop 103," a plan adopted in 1988 to
roll back exorbitant auto-insurance costs.

    2) A glaring political divide separates "the voters" and
the rest of "the people" who inhabit the state. California's
representatives, as Sacramento Bee political columnist Dan
Walters points out, are still elected by a bloc comprising
suburban whites and urban blacks, while the new Hispanic and
Asian minorities are lamentably underrepresented because they
tend not to vote or are not yet citizens. Even in the postcensus
reapportionment, currently before the state supreme court, the
lion's share of seven new congressional seats is likely to go
to suburban Republicans.

    3) Problems have outgrown the grid of city or county
jurisdictions, and now require regional action -- for
transportation and water, or congestion and hazardous waste.
Many Democrats argue that only full-fledged regional government
can do the job, and proposals for three such schemes are being
discussed in the legislature. The most elaborate, a bill
introduced by speaker Brown, would create seven regional bodies
to oversee growth and planning and provide a new industry, say,
with "one-stop shopping" for all regulatory approvals demanded
by a variety of state and local agencies.

    Most Republicans oppose regional government as a costly
additional layer of bureaucracy, and the pragmatic Wilson frets
that in the years it would take to establish regional
government, neglected problems would just grow worse. His newly
appointed Growth Management Council advocates tighter
coordination of existing regional agencies. Says council
chairman Richard Sybert: "It's a question of making them all
more sensitive, more sensible, more focused -- and probably
leaner."


    DEFLATING THE DREAM

    In the end, California's destiny will have to ride on its
economy. But will the state's economy grow quickly enough to
keep up with its population? That was far easier in the '80s,
when growth reached a full-steam 7%. During those years,
however, an exodus of businesses from California was also
beginning, and manufacturing quietly declined 18%. States from
Nevada to Oklahoma are trying to entice California companies
with lower taxes and wages, less regulatory hassling and far
more affordable housing. One aerospace-component manufacturer
with a 40-worker factory in the Sacramento Valley got phone
calls from Texas Governor Ann Richards and was invited to go
turkey shooting with the lieutenant governor of Oklahoma, and
is in fact weighing a possible move. A Baldassare poll showed
that 1 out of every 7 medium-to-large companies (those with more
than 100 employees) thinks about relocating outside the state.
Warns Wilson: "We have to face the fact that California is no
longer irresistible to business."

    In the current slump, economic growth has fallen to 0% (in
contrast to 1.1% growth for the nation), while demand for state
services is increasing 11%. That is the most crucial gap of all,
and the reason Republicans and Democrats both give highest
priority to pumping up the economy. "It's economic growth more
than anything else that has sustained the California Dream,"
says economist Thompson, "and that's what is jeopardizing the
dream now." But rekindling the economy, Thompson and others
agree, may require scaling down or at least changing the fabled
dream.

    Habits, appetites and, most of all, expectations have to
change. To ease congestion, solitary life at the wheel must be
replaced by mass transit and carpooling. Companies must adopt
flexible work schedules and "telecommuting" -- taking advantage
of the electronic revolution so that a bank's back-room
operations, for example, can be located far from its
headquarters. The single-family house has to be taken off its
pedestal. Multiple-family dwellings and smaller lots will be
required for the higher-density cities of the future. "Everybody
would like to live in a mansion," says Sybert. "Well, it's not
a perfect world."

    Orange County, for one, will have to acknowledge the need
for more housing, and more concentrated housing, to accommodate
its work force and allow people to live as well as work there.
"If nothing's done, eventually there will be job development in
[adjoining] Riverside and San Bernardino counties that will
catch up to the housing, the same way it caught up in Orange
County," warns Sybert. "And then you get 20 years' worth of
family disruption, personal frustration, lost productivity,
traffic congestion and bad air. Companies will say, `Heck with
this, we're leaving.'" Some new centers, such as Rancho Santa
Margarita, under development in Orange County, are attempting to
combine multi skill workplaces and multi-income housing in one
site. That is the equivalent of the small town in much of the
world, but a near revolutionary departure in that part of
Southern California.

    Upbeat experts like Sybert foresee a changing but still
vital California on the horizon. "California isn't that
different, it's just first," he says. "That's why it's so
shortsighted for some businesses to say, `Well, we're going to
Arizona.' For we here are going to be dealing with the problems
when they are still struggling with them there."

    For others, though, that equation conveys a disappointing
sense of joining the club, of becoming just another locale beset
with urban woes. "We are paying for a wild excess of
expectations," says Morgan. "We all came out here because it was
going to be the Golden State, where all our dreams were going
to click and fall into place, and all of a sudden -- presto! --
the vision of a magic society that we have all raved about since
the gold rush, it's threatening not to happen. We see the same
things happening here that happen -- do I dare say it? --
everywhere else." For Californians, losing their sense of
uniqueness may be the most painful consequence if the California
Dream collapses.


________________________________________________________________
WHAT CALIFORNIANS THINK: A POLL


                                            THE BEST      POOR
    Perception of California as a
    place to live:
                                   1985        78%          2%
                                   1991        51%          6%

                                           EXCELLENT/     POOR/
                                             GOOD       VERY POOR
    Job performance rating of
    Pete Wilson as Governor:
                                 Feb. '91      36%         12%
                                 June '91      36%         24%
                                Sept. '91      26%         27%


    [From a telephone poll of 1,012 California adults taken for
TIME on Sept. 11-14 by The Field Institute. Sampling error is
plus or minus 3.2%.]