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Point of View
California's fertile valley now grows houses
By Carl Heintze
I remember the first time I flew into Los Angeles International Airport. We dropped down over the San Gabriel Mountains and then suddenly there before us, the Los Angeles basin spread away under the plane in all directions, miles and miles of streets and houses, urban sprawl at its most sprawling. It took my breath away. It staggered the mind. The whole basin had been covered with houses, streets, automobiles and people.
The other day I read that small-plane pilots are taking public officials on slow flights up and down the Central Valley for the same reason, to show them how urban sprawl is pushing out like a virus, swamping the fertile land of the Great Valley with houses, streets and more houses.
The flights are to dramatize what has become a matter of concern for California. We are in danger of killing the very thing that has made this state so great. The increasing spread of population, like a virus, is sweeping out over land so valuable for raising California's fruits, vegetables, grains and wines and filling them with human habitation. It reminds me of the paradox of Tahoe-Donner, a mountain subdivision above Donner Lake in the Sierra Nevada.
Years ago, Dart Industries bought what appeared to be worthless land--it was covered mostly with second-growth pinyon pine--laid out streets and paved them, put in sewer lines and water mains and electricity and sold 4,000 lots. The subdivision was developed on the premise that everyone wanted a little place in the mountains as a second home not far from a lake--Donner Lake, as a matter of fact, a natural lake formed by a glacier. Donner Lake is three miles long and a mile across at its widest point, icy cold most of the year.
There was only one problem with this scheme. The Tahoe-Donner subdivision needed water for the 4,000 lots. So it went to the nearest source, the lake itself. Dart Industries built a pump house and sank what amounted to a syphon below the natural low-water mark of the lake, and began sucking up water and pumping it up to the new houses as they were built.
The developers seem not to have realized that aside from chopping down many of the trees that drew prospective buyers to the mountains, they also were drying up the very lake which they advertised as its chief attraction.
In time, residents around the lake became aware of what was happening and after a struggle of several years stopped it. The lake remains; the subdivision has grown, although with other water sources and urban sprawl, it has spilled over the mountains.
Now the same thing is happening to places along Highway 99. From the air, the sprawl still looks a lot like a virus, spreading out on either side of the highway at intersections, galloping over the fields.
It is the same process which took place at an even more rapid rate here in the Santa Clara Valley in the 1950s and 1960s, when developers knocked down whole orchards in a week, plowed up the land for streets and sewers and water mains and then built houses, sometimes whole streets at a time.
Now it is happening in the Great Valley, which has always been one of California's greatest assets, the heart of its agricultural wealth.
To a lesser extent it also is taking place along Highway 101 in Monterey, San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara counties. Although the Salinas Valley is struggling to hold its own and to protect its fields, housing farther south contends with another phenomenon, the plowing of hillsides for vineyards. The wine boom has hit the Central Coast along with urban development.
That, in the end, may save agriculture as it has in the Napa Valley, where vineyard acreage is more valuable than land for housing. But don't count on it. The little towns along the way, Gonzales, Soledad and Greenfield, are growing, too.
Everywhere in California we are seeing the struggle between growing crops and housing people, and the crops--without votes--are losing the battle.
Perhaps someday, perhaps someday soon, we may see what, like the subdivision built by a lake it was about to destroy, we are doing to our real gold. Let's hope we see it before it is too late.
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Saratoga, California Since 1955
