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

Matthew Jalbert

Bust in the Antelope Valley — Again
THE GROWTH RATES IN THE ANTELOPE VALLEY were destined to collapse, and indeed they did. The national recession hit in late 1989, and by the early 1990s, housing development was grinding to a crawl. The recession, which affected Southern California particularly badly, was the over-arching cause of the Antelope Valley’s bust. Not insignificantly, Edwards Air Force Base and Plant 42 were not negatively affected by the Cold War’s end and the accompanying military slowdown. For instance, despite Plant 42’s B-2 bomber contract expiring in the late 1980s, the effect of layoffs there are virtually imperceptible in the Antelope Valley economy. Otherwise, as military consolidation and scale-down occurred, Edwards and Plant 42 actually became the recipients of personnel and contracts from other newly-shuttered sites. For instance, Lockheed’s top-secret Skunkworks (developers of the Stealth aircraft) relocated to the Antelope Valley from its other Southern California site in Burbank as that company was forced to scale back operations (fig. 10).

A second major precipitator of the Antelope Valley’s recent bust, right behind the national recession, was the Valley’s growth itself. Housing was so hot, so in demand by homeowners hoping to flee the Los Angeles area, that prices moved ever-upward and out of the reach of first-time buyers. Farmland, the land of choice for real estate developers, was driven up to $7,500 an acre and more, [Footnote #42] well over double its pre-boom price. Other properties fetched upwards of $12,000 an acre in 1985, and increased in the later speculative frenzy. [Footnote #43] The enormous amount of activity in the market attracted hoards of speculators, pushing land values up beyond any pretense of normalcy, profitability, and reality.

Developers were among the first to feel this pinch. In some cases, they grossly overpaid for land which they were planning to subdivide. With the collapse of the housing market, they were stuck with overvalued land on which it would be prohibitively expensive to build. Other developments finished during the boom were extremely difficult to sell and home prices plummeted, often putting speculators at risk of financial ruin. In at least one case, a Savings & Loan-backed developer collapsed completely, leaving behind unfinished homes and stung buyers who prepaid for their piece of the subdivision. [Footnote #44]

Homeowners themselves were often devastated by the coincidence of inflated home values and a collapsing economy. Within a couple of years, property values plummeted, leaving homeowners saddled with huge debts and an evaporation of equity. Combined with job losses in the recession, many new homeowners couldn’t make payments and simply walked away from their homes, especially in the distant unincorporated communities such as Lake Los Angeles. U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development repossessions shot upwards and the market was suddenly flooded with unsalable houses, their valued dropping like a speculators worst nightmare. “HUD REPOS” painted in fluorescent block letters has become a common calling on real estate office windows, signalling bad times in the Antelope Valley housing market (fig. 11).

Overbuilding, too, precipitated the Antelope Valley’s recent bust. Not only had homes gone unsold, but huge speculative projects were scrapped. The largest of these was California Springs, a 35,000 household mega-development birthed in the go-go late 1980s sited for the western Antelope Valley, some eighteen miles from the Lancaster city center and six miles from Lancaster’s current western border. In the end, California Springs was nothing more than a pipe dream, but other huge projects, like the 7,200 home Ritter Ranch development (fig. 12) and Kaufman and Broad’s 2,000 home City Ranch, have made it through the application process. To date, however, nothing in these projects has been built and city planners are uncertain about their eventual build-out.

Today, in early 1995, the slump continues in the Antelope Valley. Landowners who once hoped to get thousands of dollars an acre for property sold to real estate developers are happy to earn peanuts letting sheep graze their barren tracts or to have onions, the Valley’s latest cash crop, grown there. Space in commercial business parks, heavily promoted by a regional economic development organization, went totally unsold in 1991, 1992, 1993, and 1994. [Footnote #45] At the county offices in the Antelope Valley, sited in the midst of a desert-scrub dotted plain close to nothing at all, the Building and Safety permit counter is desolate all day long. Meanwhile, a steady stream of residents makes it way to the welfare office a few doors down.

Developers who survived the bust often did so by shifting strategies in the midst of the crisis. In some subdivisions, developers were trying to attract a “move-up” market of second-time home buyers hoping to invest accrued equity in larger homes. These “upscale” developments dotted the Palmdale and Quartz Hill foothills, often taking the form of gated communities (fig. 13). Developers were hoping to take advantage of a move-up market generated right from within the Antelope Valley. Such a market never developed, though, and many of these homes went unsold. With the housing bust, the more agile developers quickly down-sized their plans and built more small homes for first-time buyers, typically a 1,700 square foot home on Palmdale’s 7,000 square foot minimum lot.

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© Matthew Jalbert 1995–2002