The Endangered Dream

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 multiskill 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.