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

Matt Jalbert

Government (Dis)Functions

THE INTERRELATIONS BETWEEN GOVERNMENT AND ECONOMICS are richly complex; to do them justice is not possible in the context of this thesis. Rather, I would like to suggest simply this: that government has the power, and indeed the responsibility (if not the moral imperative), to manage growth; and that it failed to do so in the Antelope Valley. A root cause may be that the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, like many regional levels of California government, is in the pocket of developers. The five-person board, “representing” over eight million people in what must be one of the most underrepresented populations in the nation (fig. 14), lives and dies by its developer contributions. This has resulted in a landscape that satisfies the market for single-family homes, but does so only at great social and ecological cost. Thus, at this high level of regional government, the wishes of developers hold sway; there is little that local communities can do to moderate their own evolution.

At the level of the city government, both Lancaster and Palmdale were slow to respond to their growth. City plans were created in 1977 (Palmdale) and 1980 (Lancaster) that in some ways facilitated their growth. But the intensity of development was far greater that anyone foresaw. With developers literally lining up at city offices to get building permits for their subdivisions, Lancaster and Palmdale were overwhelmed and could do little to mediate their transformation. Since boosterism had so long been the dominant ethic in the Antelope Valley, the growth which visited it so forcefully in the 1980s was eagerly embraced. Lancaster and Palmdale annexed land and the new subdivisions on them and added retail establishments to the tax rolls. Seen as consistent with the general plans, the 1980s’ growth was allowed to happen as it did—at the behest of developers—with little thought given to the various long-term consequences growth would bring.

And developers had but one objective: to reap a new cash crop from the Antelope Valley’s coarse soils. They succeeded wildly, planting row after row of single-family homes and strip malls. Thus, it was developers such as Kaufman and Broad—privately held, distantly controlled capital—which fabricated the home-rich Antelope Valley of today: not the city government, not the public it ostensibly represented, not the people who actually live there (fig. 15).

The lack of a jobs-housing balance is one of the most striking economic aspects of the Valley’s development, one which has several consequences. The last thing people went to the Antelope Valley for was a job; indeed, most workers who moved there kept their jobs down below and began a long commuting routine. This points to an entire set of problems which will be addressed later; here, we need merely recognize that rampant suburban sprawl was almost totally unmitigated by job creation (excepting low wage retail sector employment) (table 10.7). Government’s inability to balance growth in housing with growth in jobs resulted in a dislocated economy that is heavily reliant on remote sources of wealth. And it forced the Antelope Valley into a catch-up game of civic economic competition.

Now that the dust of the housing explosion has settled, the Lancaster Economic Development Corporation is engaged in a spirited effort to attract wealth-generating business to the Valley. Utilizing incentives ranging from speculative building space to $2,000 per job “rewards” to $10,000 discounts per home bought by an employee (fig. 16), the Lancaster e.d.c. is taking a “very aggressive” approach to improving the jobs-housing balance. Targeting businesses that are in the Los Angeles area and need to remain so, the e.d.c is going head to head with the San Fernando Valley and the Valencia area. The e.d.c. runs advertisements on am news radio stations and in the Los Angeles Times, extolling the pro-business climate of the euphemistically-titled “North Los Angeles County” (figure 17). It is a classic case of civic jostling, as cities scrap for a piece of a shrinking industrial/manufacturing base. Meanwhile, that employment mainstay of many 1980s suburbs, the “back office” jobs, have entirely failed to materialize in the Antelope Valley.

The e.d.c.’s successes to date have been modest; whether a satisfactory jobs-housing balance will be achieved remains to be seen. Lancaster’s 1992 General Plan reported the Antelope Valley’s jobs-housing ratio at 0.72, far below the Southern California Association of Governments’ optimum of 1.22, and barely half of Lancaster’s hypothetical full-local employment ratio of 1.46. [Footnote #46]

When the Antelope Valley was booming in the 1980s, the prevailing attitude was “anything goes.” City governments were elated that new revenues would be added to the tax roles. Lancaster and Palmdale were hopeful that the arrival of new residents would bring new types of jobs, reducing the Valley’s vulnerability to aerospace swings. However, the Antelope Valley was overwhelmed by the intensity of its growth, and could do little to mediate it or direct the form it took. This is where the cities failed so visibly. It was only after the boom, when planners had a chance to look at what was wrought, that they could lay down some design guidelines.

This took the form, in Palmdale’s case, of an addendum to the 1992 city plan. The community guidelines created by the city’s planners suggest ways in which developers can make their subdivisions better reflect the city’s design ideal. For instance, subdivisions surrounded by cinder block walls (one of the most offensive features of Antelope Valley developments) proliferated in the boom years. Palmdale planners recognized the problems with this style of subdivision: they resulted in incohesive neighborhoods, badly misrouted traffic and pedestrian flow, and monolithic street frontages that made walking along the traffic side of the wall an almost terrifying experience. Thus, in the general plan addendum, suggestions are made as to how developers can build without incorporating these walls. The city is even making efforts to knock out sections of the walls to allow pedestrian and sightline flow through the end of cul-de-sacs. Despite such ad hoc adjustments, however, the Antelope Valley’s chance to implement better physical design has been lost. The mile after mile of subdivisions with their walled ramparts are already built; no mitigation efforts could compensate for the lack of planning before the walls were erected.

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© Matt Jalbert 1995–2002