California Dreamers Take Their Nightmare East

ERIC ELLIS, Los Angeles

03/14/1997

Don't it always seem to go

That you don't know what you've got

Till it's gone They paved paradise

And put up a parking lot.

JONI Mitchell took the suburbanisation of then pristine California as her inspiration but a generation later, her Big Yellow Taxi may well be the anthem for a new era of grumpy Americans.

The children of the same "immigrants" to California whose American Dream skewed into drive-by shootings, gang wars and gated suburbs are upping stumps and moving in what is one of the biggest populations shifts in US history.

Overwhelmingly white, wealthy, professional and Republican, Middle America is vacating its crime-ridden suburbs of Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and Detroit to find their place in the sun in cities like Denver, Salt Lake City, Las Vegas and Phoenix.

Not only is it denuding the US's biggest and most crime-ridden cities of its professional class, it's also turning these third-tier centres into boomtowns with industries primed for the world economy.

In just five years, the 13 states of the American West have suddenly become the most urbanised regions of the United States, defying the city dweller's romantic image of the area as a hostile land of "good ole boys" and wide-open spaces.

According to the US Census Bureau, 87 per cent of the residents of the God-fearing State of Utah are urban dwellers, as against 80 per cent for New York State.

The gambling mecca of Las Vegas is America's fastest growing city as once-seedy casinos are transformed into massive family theme parks.

With the Nevada desert blooming suburbia off the famous Strip, Vegas leads the six Western cities that form more than half of the US's top 10 boomtowns.

US multinationals are finding these cities more than than places where State tax breaks mean they can base a back-office infrastructure. In Salt Lake City, for example, firms such as computer giant Novell are mining a rich employment seam of linguists for offshore operations, taken from the ranks of expert young Mormons who have honed their language skills proselytising the developing world.

The 100 km strip from Denver south to Colorado Springs is sprouting literally hundreds of glass-clad 10-storey office buildings that the locals have dubbed Silicon Valley II, competing with the real Silicon Valley outside San Francisco.

Denver is increasingly the cable and television and communications capital of the US, home to Rupert Murdoch's new partner Echostar and John Malone's TCI group. Against a national unemployment rate of 6 per cent, the figure in the western States averages half that. Concurrent with the shift to the south-west is the rapid rise - Republicans say alarming - in foreign immigration to the big cities like Los Angeles. While it is not polite to say so publicly, analysts contend that the white shift inland comes as LA Latinises, an issue that played heavily among Republican voters in last November's president poll.

The Immigration and Naturalisation Service estimates that illegal immigrants now account for 2 per cent of the US population, a figure of five million people and rising by 275,000 a year.

These new arrivals are overwhelmingly Hispanic and have congregated to cities such as Los Angeles, where they are increasingly blamed by residents for rising crime and violence and forming an ethnic underclass that steadfastly refuses to assimilate into the American mainstream, that is one usually defined by white Americans anxious over becoming the racial minority.

But far from escaping the social ills of their big city cousins, these new growth centres are developing many of the characteristics their new populations left behind.

As the booming South-West is transformed into the US's most urbanised region, Coloradans, Utahans, Nevadans and Arizonans are less than impressed.

These refugees tired of big-city life so they moved to what white America redefined as Lotus Land. Their friends, neighbours and relatives soon followed and pretty soon the region started looking a lot like the places that had been vacated - endless kilometres of traffic jams, strip malls, car dealerships and junk food outlets.

A growth industry in Denver isn't just computer chips but smog-checking centres due to LA-style traffic gridlock.

Similarly, the air along the 120 km conurbation from Provo to Salt Lake City through Utah's Salt Lake Valley has been rated worse for carbon monoxide emissions than the New York-New Jersey metropolitan area.

Fully employed Seattle, whose residents like to say is the US's most liveable city, now is among the nation's top five in traffic congestion and the statistic is set to get worse as the fortunes of Microsoft and Boeing carry the population up by an estimated 40 per cent over the next three to four years.

In Phoenix, severe traffic congestion and a growing crime rate have prompted a civic progress association that goes by the name of "Not LA". Seattle and Denver, both traditionally whiter-than-white and economically homogenous, are developing an inner city underclass populated by illegal immigrants and locals unable to keep up with the faster pace.

And, horror of horrors for strait-laced Salt Lake City, a video store was prosecuted last month for stocking pornographic tapes.

The story led the evening news and prompted spirited talkback radio discussion, viewers and listeners satisfied but also horrified that the demand was caused by "out-of-towners". Now many towns and cities are tightening zoning laws to limit the influx, their city fathers perhaps one day thinking (fearing?) that when the Latinos make rich in the once-white suburbs of LA, they too will descend on Denver.