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

Matt Jalbert

Not Learning Lessons of the Past

LOOKING AT THE GROWTH IN THE ANTELOPE VALLEY and its connection to Los Angeles, one can not help but wonder: what are the limits of the Los Angeles metropolis? The Antelope Valley is a “fifth generation” outlier of Los Angeles. Will there be a sixth? A seventh? What should alarm us about developments such as the Antelope Valley is that the patterns identified as unsustainable and even destructive continue to be repeated. The lessons of sprawl go unlearned because those who learn the lessons hardest (the residents who endure its fragmentation and dislocation) are not its promoters—namely, landowners and real estate developers.

Virtually everything city planners know about bad design found outlet in the boom years. Why? Because the economic efficiencies of traditional suburban sprawl served the interests of the developers. All the lessons in the world could not have applied to growth in the Antelope Valley, because those with the vision to guide development were not vested with the capacity to do so. Consequently, the Antelope Valley’s growth is best described as developer-planned on the subdivision level. Each subdivision came about as its own node, oblivious to the cultural and environmental milieu in which it was sited.

One of the consequences of this is an increased propensity to flooding. As the desert surface is paved and built over, large areas of land are made impermeable. Rainwater that once percolated down to aquifers now slides off roads and rooftops to collect in gutters and culverts. With no outlet to the sea, all the water that falls in the Antelope Valley and the surrounding mountains collects on the Valley floor, while a decrease in permeable surfaces has resulted in a dangerous increase in surface runoff. Coupled with a lack of any coordinated flood control plan, the Antelope Valley has developed itself into a position of extreme flood vulnerability. This could have been minimized had the area’s governments made a greater effort to implement a regional flood control plan before development was entrenched.

Another way in which the Antelope Valley seems not to be learning is in the design of its single-family homes. Despite today’s small average family size, new homes in the Antelope Valley are bigger than they’ve ever been. Compared to the 1950s’ low ranch-house designs, the developments of the 1980s typically feature stucco homes on a scale that would have been considered extravagant in earlier decades. These voluminous homes can only be considered wasteful, most critically in terms of energy consumption for heating and cooling. Their building has undoubtedly consumed a disproportionate share of natural and capital resources for the numbers of people to whom they provide benefits (figs. 18, 19).

Despite the ecological and social consequences of the single-family home as it proliferated in the Antelope Valley, it is clear that the financial incentives were there to encourage their building. Since the Great Depression, the policies of the Federal government through the Federal Housing Administration have promoted the construction of suburban single-family homes and the resultant population dispersal. Decade after decade of home building, particularly after World War II, has resulted in a sheet of single-family homes around every American city. The Antelope Valley is just the latest example of this. The tax advantage of buying a home, in the form of mortgage deductions, constitutes one of the major financial incentives for the consumer. So important is this point that Kaufman and Broad provides a pamphlet to potential buyers, detailing the tax advantages of home ownership (fig. 20). Thus, the most effective way of guiding development toward economic and environmental soundness—through financial incentives—is slanted toward the perpetuation of sprawl. Until the financial structures which promote suburban sprawl are changed, we can reasonably expect that alternatives will remain available only to a small minority of homebuyers.

NEXT | Social Friction and Crime

© Matt Jalbert 1995–2002