Californians Keep Out!

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.