As Suburbs Change, They Still Satisfy

Myth: The suburbs are full of contented, family-loving, police-admiring, gadget-collecting backyard barbecuers.

Reality: The suburbs are full of contented, family-loving, police-admiring, gadget-collecting backyard barbecuers. With a twist.

When it comes to the suburbs of Southern California, a new Los Angeles Times poll has found that myth is, to a large degree, reality.

Interviews with 2,385 people--from the black-tile swimming pools of Thousand Oaks to the juke box-appointed game rooms of Irvine--found that the people who live in the suburbs generally love their lives. And the farther they get from Los Angeles, the more they love them.

Since World War II, the engine of growth that is Los Angeles has sprouted suburbs the way the Big Bang spun off star systems. But even now, despite a sprawl that stretches nearly unbroken for 100 miles from San Juan Capistrano to Ventura, the poll shows that most people who live in these communities wouldn’t think of leaving, and they want their children to live there when they grow up, too.

At the same time, the poll shows, these aren’t your grandfather’s suburbs. Only 37% of poll respondents said they live in communities that are mostly white, and seven in 10 said minorities moving into their neighborhoods had no effect on the quality of life.

Suburbia is a far more complex place than it was in the 1950s or even the ‘70s, the poll found, with a mixture of affluent and poor, of new immigrants and people who fled the urban core of Los Angeles. One in every six surveyed resides in a gated community or a secure condominium or apartment building, and 22% keep a gun in their homes. Crime and gangs remain a strong concern, despite the sharp decline in violence in recent years.

A significant minority, 29%, think they could be happier somewhere else, and 28% think their children should move away when they grow up. Orange and Ventura county residents in particular were concerned about their communities growing too congested.

Still, most respondents praise their public schools. They support their local police. They gauge their success on the strength of a loving family. And they say they expect the good times to just keep getting better.

“The perception is that the ‘burbs work, and they do,” said Susan Pinkus, director of the Times Poll.

Whites surveyed were more contented than Latinos, whose numbers in the suburbs are growing rapidly, but who are still more likely than non-Latino whites to live in poor neighborhoods. Immigrants were more optimistic about their children than native-born Americans. By one measure of prosperity, home ownership, Asian Americans are doing better than any other ethnic group.

The poll also revealed the extent to which many suburbanites buy into the American dream through home ownership and the acquisition of the latest technological conveniences: beepers, cell phones and full access to the wonders of the Internet. Fifty-seven percent own their homes, 32% have pools, 34% have a home office, and 15% pay someone to clean their home.

To reach people who consider themselves suburban, the Times Poll interviewed more than 500 residents each in the San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys, the traditional enclaves of suburbia in Los Angeles County, and 500 each in Orange and Ventura counties. For comparison purposes, more than 300 were also polled in areas of the city of Los Angeles that are not considered suburban. The poll was conducted between July 10 and July 16 and has a margin of sample error of plus or minus 3 to 5 percentage points.

Some noteworthy findings by area:

* Residents of the San Fernando Valley, the archetypal postwar Southland alternative to urban life, are not nearly as content as those in the other suburbs surveyed. One of every four said the leafy, suburban area has been swallowed up by the big city. They give the giant Los Angeles Unified School District poor grades and are more concerned about crime. Within the Valley, people in the newer west are more satisfied than those in the east. Overall, 39% said they intend to move out within two years.

* Residents of the San Gabriel Valley, a racial melting pot rich with Asian and Latino immigrants, praise their communities’ small-town attributes. Three of every four like the idea of posting the Ten Commandments in public schools, and an even greater proportion say religion is an important part of their lives. More families, 57%, eat dinner together than anywhere else, and 88% are happy with their community.

* In Orange County, 91% say they are happy with where they live. The level of bliss in south Orange County’s planned communities is even higher: 98% of residents rate their neighborhoods good or excellent. Three in five say their local police do a very good job, and two in three live close to family members so they can drop by.

* Three of every five Ventura County residents say they moved there to escape urban problems, and they love what they’ve found. They are as satisfied and feel as safe as Orange County residents. And they are more likely to be armed: One of every four households has a gun.

The Search for the Small-Town Feel

As a warm breeze sweeps off the San Gabriel Mountains, thousands mingle along Monrovia’s quaint main street for a Friday night Family Festival that suggests another time.

Mothers treat children to pony rides. Boys buy flowers for girlfriends. Police pose for pictures with out-of-town visitors.

“Everyone is trying to recapture this sense of a small town,” says Amanda Schachter, 38, a Santa Monica city planner, strolling Myrtle Avenue with her parents and her two young children. “People all over Southern California are looking for a community with a real self.”

That is particularly true in the San Gabriel Valley, a melange of 30 small cities--both old and new--that retain their suburban roots and unique identities. Nearly half the residents cited small-town traits as the best things about their communities.

“It’s easy to get around. It’s very safe. And the smog blows out about 1 o’clock,” said Gerry Baumann of Temple City, who has lived there long enough to see sheep pastures turn into subdivisions. “I have one friend who said he moved here because of all the trees.”

A friendly community atmosphere was also rated high by more than four in 10 residents of Ventura and Orange counties. It was different in the San Fernando Valley, where only about a third of residents cited a small-town feeling and friendly people as the best things about their communities.

“I loved the San Fernando Valley, but after the (1992 Los Angeles) riots it definitely changed,” said Catherine Gobel, 57, who is selling a home in Woodland Hills and shopping for a new one in Ventura County. “Now I go to Thousand Oaks for everything. It’s as different as night and day. It’s small town versus big city.”

Nearly half the respondents in Orange County say they socialize with or are friends with their neighbors, compared to 37% in the San Fernando Valley.

Physical education teacher Bill McGinis, 50, and his wife, Julie, 37, a school counselor, moved from Long Beach to Huntington Beach six years ago, partly for the spirit of community. They built a 2,900-square-foot, three-story house not far from the ocean. The patch of front lawn on their 25-foot-wide lot is large enough for a plastic kiddie slide, and that’s all.

“We’ve got the Fourth of July parade and the pancake breakfasts,” Julie McGinis said.

These community connections help people feel that they are in control of their lives, said William Fulton, whose book, “The Reluctant Metropolis,” traces the growth of Los Angeles and its suburbs.

Fulton, who moved from West Hollywood to hillside Ventura to raise a family, said this attitude differs from the concept behind the nation’s first mass-produced Levittowns of tiny, single-family homes on Long Island, outside New York City.

“In the 1950s, people were moving to the suburbs to get a house they couldn’t afford in the city,” he said. “Now they’re fleeing problems of the city. But in a certain way, the suburbs are not about escape. They’re about control--about being able to control your community.”

Community Control

In much of suburbia, control can be exerted by marching up to city hall with a complaint about your neighbor’s tree. But in an era of harried and unresponsive bureaucrats, it is increasingly secured by making sure your neighbors will behave before they even arrive.

Suburbanites do this by buying into subdivisions with gated entries and strict rules--”conditions, covenants and restrictions,” or CC and Rs--that protect both life and limb and a homeowner’s investment.

In Orange County and the San Fernando Valley, one of every four residents polled said they live in a gated community, security building or development patrolled by guards.

And in Orange County, nearly half the people say they like rules that dictate what color you can paint your house and what plants you can put in your frontyard.

When David Watkins, 32, and his wife, Susan, moved in June from Boston to the gated Oak Creek development in Irvine, their baby, Calais, was only 2 months old. So they liked the extra security.

“I wouldn’t say that I would not have bought here without the gates, but that was definitely appealing,” David Watkins said. “You can never be completely protected. But any opportunity you have to add to your protections, you ought to do it.”

As for community rules and regulations, he considers them a protection of his family’s biggest investment: their new home, worth nearly $400,000.

“I know a lot of people don’t like them, because they think they interfere with their creativity,” he said. “But it’s like anything else: If you don’t like it, don’t do it.”

The two young professionals, a computer program analyst and a marketing specialist, also came to Orange County because of family ties. Susan grew up in Newport Beach. The fact that her parents are still there is important. The same yearning for an extended family nearby is true for nearly two-thirds of Orange County residents.

A few miles south in a red-tiled community in Laguna Nigel, Barbara Doran, 34, and husband Robert, 35, live in another new community protected by CC and Rs.

“It’s as sterile as you can get,” Barbara Doran said. “I call it a Stepford community. Everybody has their manicured lawns. I was sort of against moving into a place like this. But as my friends say, ‘When you get character in your house, you get characters next door.’ I really enjoy it now.”

Perception vs. Reality of Crime

Barbara Doran’s sister lives in a gated condo complex in the San Fernando Valley community of Canoga Park. She feels she has seen it all.

“There’s been murders and robberies around here,” said Tricia Riordan, 32. “I saw a dead body lying on the front lawn just down the street on the Fourth of July.”

If there’s one thing that sends city dwellers fleeing to the suburbs, it is the fear of crime. In the urbanizing San Fernando Valley, 53% of adults rated gangs, drugs and crime as their most important problems, compared to 50% in the rest of the city.

Just 18% of respondents in the Valley’s older, eastern section said they felt very safe in their neighborhoods. Compare that to the 71% who feel very safe in the white-collar communities of eastern Ventura County, where Simi Valley and Thousand Oaks routinely rate as the most crime-free cities in America with population over 100,000.

In a San Fernando Valley tradition, Mary Nichols once joined thousands of teenagers on Friday night to cruise Van Nuys Boulevard. Police stopped that in the 1980s, after gangs started too many fights. Nichols, now 35 and a medical assistant, said she swore off the Boulevard after three men put a gun to her head and a knife to her throat at a gas station and stole her Thunderbird.

Like many others, Nichols, who moved from Panorama City to Granada Hills 15 years ago, said she now generally restricts her movements to select neighborhoods, mostly the more upscale communities against the hills that ring the Valley.

“It’s so scary, the only time I come over here is to take my kids to the dentist because it’s cheap,” Nichols said in an interview on the corner of Victory and Van Nuys boulevards, once the heart of a thriving Van Nuys retail district.

Despite such feelings, crime is more a concern than a reality. Just 5% of respondents in Orange County and 7% in the suburbs as a whole were touched by crime last year, half the rate of the urban parts of Los Angeles, according to the poll.

Even in the San Fernando Valley, four of five residents said they feel at least fairly safe.

The Price of Paradise

Satisfaction may be the watchword in suburbia, but a price is paid for paradise. In Ventura County, 39% said they feel financially stretched to live where they do. For comparison, just 26% feel financially stretched in the San Fernando Valley, 28% in Orange County and 31% in the San Gabriel Valley.

Nearly two-thirds of Ventura County residents own their own homes, the highest rate in the suburbs. And when it comes to technological toys, they also lead the suburban pack: 48% own cell phones and 19% of their children are armed with pagers.

The Internet is also an integral part of Ventura County life, the poll found, with 54% of households wired, slightly higher than the rest of suburbia. A fourth of all households reverberate with four televisions or more, about the same as in the San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys and slightly higher than in Orange County.

“We live such active lives, and we’re all doing separate things at separate times, quick communications are essential,” said Antoniette Barrientos, 39, of Simi Valley.

Of her four family members, three carry cell phones. All carry beepers. Each has a television.

“I’m a student at UCLA, my husband works in Pasadena, my daughter has sales presentations in Ventura and my son is a high school student,’ Barrientos said. “So time is of the essence. We all have deadlines and huge responsibilities.”

The family just bought a new house in Simi for $206,000, trading up from a condo after moving from Glassell Park in Los Angeles in 1987.

“We absolutely sacrifice to live in Simi Valley, because it’s a really nice community and we wanted our kids to have a better life,” she said. “But that gives us the incentive to keep working harder so we’re able to maintain a certain lifestyle.”

How the Poll Was Conducted

The Times Poll contacted 2,069 adults living in the suburbs--533 in Ventura County, 533 in Orange County, 502 in the San Gabriel Valley and 501 in the San Fernando Valley--by telephone July 10-16. In addition to the suburban respondents, the poll contacted 316 residents of the city of Los Angeles (not including the San Fernando Valley). Telephone numbers were chosen from a list of all exchanges in these areas. Random-digit dialing techniques were used so that listed and unlisted numbers could be contacted. The entire sample was weighted slightly for each geographic subgroup to conform with census figures for sex, race, age, education and area. The margin of sampling error for all the suburbs is plus or minus 3 percentage points; for each suburban subgroup it is 4 points and for the city of Los Angeles it is 5 points. Poll results can also be affected by factors such as question wording and the order in which questions are presented. The survey was conducted in English and Spanish.

The Changing Suburbs

This series will explore new aspects of the Southern California suburban experience on occasion through the year. Earlier articles can be viewed on The Times’ Web site at:

http://ukobiw.net./suburbs

Previously:

* Evolution from orchard to subdivision in Ventura County.

* Fear of gangs disrupts an Orange County community.

* The city of Walnut has become a national model of ethnic mixing that works.

* The first resident of Panorama City returns 50 years later.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

The Perception of Crime

Suburbanites say crime is their biggest concern. Yet they overwhelmingly feel safe in their communities, suggesting that crime is often more a perception than a reality.

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Source: Los Angeles Times Poll

The Price of Paradise

While denying they’re keeping up with the Joneses, many suburban residents stretch their financial resources to live in the community they want, and to have the latest conveniences--beepers, cell phones and Internet access.

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Source: Los Angeles Times Poll

The Future

While many in the urbanizing San Fernando Valley are thinking of moving out, the rest of suburbia is more content. Residents in semi-rural Ventura County worry most about maintaining their high quality of life.

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Source: Los Angeles Times Poll