Up Above: The Geography of Suburban Sprawl in Southern California’s Antelope Valley

Matt Jalbert

Subtopia in the Desert

THE PHENOMENON OF THE ANTELOPE VALLEY is disturbing evidence that our society has learned little from decades of suburban sprawl. Even though the Antelope Valley has been called a “fifth-generation” descendent of the ancestral Los Angeles, this lineage has not bred in any detectable degree of evolutionary advancement. Rather, the Antelope Valley’s recent boom embodied a subset of the most troubling components of American suburbanization.

The case of the Antelope Valley highlights a number of problems endemic to suburban sprawl. Foremost may be that governments at all levels are ill-equipped to guide development in such a way as to ensure that its costs are recognized and equitably shouldered. At an even higher level, government is virtually impotent to prevent a repetition of past follies or to effect more sensible, sustainable modes of development. Instead of growth based on realistic expectations of economic performance and recognition of certain limits, the Antelope Valley’s recent build-out matched earlier suburban sprawl patterns and resulted in a monotonous collection of subdivisions reliant on distant sources of income. The Antelope Valley developed as a place with little internal control over its design; that is manipulated by the decisions of remote capital interests; that demonstrates an almost total reliance on automobile use for the most mundane of daily tasks; that suffers the social fragmentation brought about by insular, single-use development; that sees the steamrolling of rural communities by urban expatriates; and that exhibits a disregard for the environmental costs of its growth despite the intentions of its current planners.

The Antelope Valley demonstrates that unguided, unlearned growth will often result in communities that generate considerable negative consequences for themselves. This is because the developers of boomtowns such as those in the Antelope Valley are invariably real estate speculators who have but one overriding concern: the maximization of profit. In just a few short years, the explosive growth of the Antelope Valley (and countless communities like it) incurred a social and ecological debt that is already contributing to far-reaching consequences, the effects of which will dog the region for years.

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© Matt Jalbert 1995–2002