TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/111389/11138900.050

Text File | 1990-09-19 | 9KB | 150 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.