logic of their subdivisions, in sterilized sites stripped bare of nature and history, masterplanned only for privatized family consumption, evokes much of the past evolution of tract-home Southern California. But the developers are not just repackaging myth (the good life in the suburbs) for the next generation; they are also pandering to a new, burgeoning fear of the city.
Social anxiety, as traditional urban sociology likes to remind us, is just maladjustment to change. But who has anticipated, or adjusted to, the scale of change in Southern California over the last fifteen years? Stretching now from the country-club homes of Santa Barbara to the shanty colonias of Ensenada, to the edge of Llano in the high desert and of the Coachella Valley in the low, with a built-up surface area nearly the size of Ireland and a GNP bigger than India’s – the urban galaxy dominated by Los Angeles is the fastest growing metropolis in the advanced industrial world. Its current population of fifteen million, encompassing six counties and a corner of Baja California, and clustered around two super-cores (Los Angeles and San Diego–Tijuana) and a dozen major, expanding metro-centers, is predicted to increase by another seven or eight million over the next generation. The overwhelming majority of these new inhabitants will be non-Anglos, further tipping the ethnic balance away from WASP hegemony toward the poly-ethnic diversity of the next century. (Anglos became a minority in the city and county of Los Angeles during the 1980s, as they will become in the state before 2010.4)
Social polarization has increased almost as rapidly as population. A recent survey of Los Angeles household income trends in the 1980s suggests that affluence (incomes of $50,000 plus) has almost tripled (from 9 per cent to 26 per cent) while poverty ($15,000 and under) has increased by a third (from 30 per cent to 40 per cent); the middle range, as widely predicted, has collapsed by half (from 61 per cent to 32 per cent).5 At the same time the worst popular fears of a generation ago about the consequences of market-driven overdevelopment have punctually come true. Decades of systematic under-investment in housing and urban infrastructure, combined with grotesque subsidies for speculators, permissive zoning for commercial development, the absence of effective regional planning, and ludicrously low property taxes for the wealthy have ensured an erosion of the quality of life for the middle classes in older suburbs as well as for the inner-city poor.
Ironically the Antelope Valley is both a sanctuary from this maelstrom of growth and crisis, and one of its fastest growing epicenters. In the desperate reassurance of their gated subdivisions, the new commuter population attempts to recover the lost Eden of 1950s-style suburbia. Older Valley residents, on the other hand, are frantically trying to raise the gangplanks against this ex-urban exodus sponsored by their own pro-growth business and political elites. In their increasingly angry view, the landrush since 1984 has only brought traffic jams, smog, rising crime, job competition, noise, soil erosion, a water shortage and the attrition of a distinctively countrified lifestyle.
For the first time since the Socialists left the desert (in 1918 for their New Llano colony in Louisiana) there is wild talk of a ‘total rural revolution’. The announcement of several new mega-projects – instant cities ranging from 8,500 to 35,000 units, designed to be plugged into the Valley’s waiting grid – have aroused unprecedented populist ire. On one recent occasion, the representative of the Ritter Ranch project in rustic Leone Valley was ‘ambushed by an angry mob . . . screaming and bitching and threatening to kill [him]’. In the Valley’s two incorporated municipalities of Lancaster (the international headquarters of the Flat Earth Society) and Palmdale (the fastest growing city in California for most of the 1980s), more than sixty different homeowners’ associations have joined together to slow down urbanization, as well as to contest the state’s plan for a new 2,200-bed prison for Los Angeles drug and gang offenders in the Mira Loma area.6
Meanwhile the myth of a desert sanctuary was shattered shortly after New Year’s Eve 1990 when a stray bullet from a gang member’s gun killed a popular high-school athlete. Shortly afterwards, the trendy Quartz Hill area, advertised as the emergent ‘Beverly Hills’ of the desert, was wracked by a gun-battle between the local 5 Deuce Posse and some out-of-town Crips. The grand peur of L.A. street gangs suddenly swept the high desert. While sheriffs hunted fugitive teenagers with dogs – like escapees from a Georgia chain-gang – local businessmen formed the semi-vigilante Gangs Out Now (GON). Intimidated by official warnings that there were six hundred and fifty ‘identified gang members’ in the Valley, the local high school attempted to impose a draconian dress code banning ‘gang colors’ (blue and red). Outraged students, in turn, protested in the streets.7
While the kids were ‘doin’ the right thing’, the local NAACP was demanding an investigation of three suspicious killings of non-whites by sheriffs’ deputies. In one case the deputies gunned down an unarmed Asian college student while in another a Black man accused of wielding a three-pronged garden tool was shot eight times. The most egregious incident, however, was the slaying of Betty Jean Aborn, a homeless middle-aged Black woman with a history of mental illness. Confronted by seven burly sheriffs after stealing an ice-cream from a convenience store, she supposedly brandished a butcher’s knife. The response was an incredible volley of twenty-eight rounds, eighteen of which perforated her body.8
As the desert thus announced the arrival of the fin de siècle with a staggering overture of bulldozers and gunfire, some old-timers – contemplating the rapidly diminishing distance between the solitude of the Mojave and the gridlock of suburban life – began to wonder out loud whether there was any alternative to Los Angeles after all.
THE MAY POLE
Class war and repression are said to have driven the Los Angeles Socialists into the desert. But they also came eagerly, wanting to taste the sweet fruit of cooperative labor in their own lifetimes. As Job Harriman, who came within a hair’s-breadth of being Los Angeles’s first Socialist mayor in 1911, explained: ‘It became apparent to me that a people would never abandon their means of livelihood, good or bad, capitalistic or otherwise, until other methods were developed which would promise advantages at least as good as those by which they were living.’ What Llano promised was a guaranteed $4 per day wage and a chance to ‘show the world a trick they do not know, which is how to live without war or interest on money or rent on land or profiteering in any manner’.9
With the sponsorship not only of Harriman and the Socialist Party, but also of Chairman W.A. Engle of the Central Labor Council and Frank McMahon of the Bricklayers’ Union, hundreds of landless farmers, unemployed laborers, blacklisted machinists, adventurous clerks, persecuted IWW soapbox orators, restless shopkeepers, and bright-eyed bohemians followed the YPSLs to where the snow-fed Rio del Llano (now Big Rock Creek) met the edge of the desert. Although they were ‘democracy with the lid off . . . democracy rampant, belligerent, unrestricted’, their enthusiastic labor transformed several thousand acres of the Mojave into a small Socialist civilization.10 By 1916 their alfalfa fields and modern dairy, their pear orchards and vegetable gardens – all watered by a complex and efficient irrigation system – supplied the colony with 90 per cent of its own food (and fresh flowers as well). Meanwhile, dozens of small workshops cobbled shoes, canned fruit, laundered clothes, cut hair, repaired autos, and published the Western Comrade. There was even a Llano motion picture company and an illfated experiment in aviation (the homemade plane crashed).
In the spirit of Chautauqua as much as Marx, Llano was also one big Red School House. While babies (including Bella Lewitzky, the future modern dancer) played in the nursery, children (among them Gregory Ain, the future modern architect) attended Southern California’s first Montessori school. The teenagers, meanwhile, had their own Kid Kolony (a model industrial school), and adults attended night classes or enjoyed the Mojave’s largest library. One of the favorite evening pastimes, apart from dancing to the colony’s notorious ragtime orchestra, was debating Alice Constance Austin’s design for the Socialist City that Llano was to become.
Although influenced by contemporary City Beautiful and Garden City ideologies, Austin’s drawings and models, as architectural historian Dolores Hayden has
