Camarillo
Last week I worked in Camarillo and witnessed a Californian story come to life. The stretch of highway up the Gold Coast has a plot that revolves around the fight between farmers and suburban sprawl, as the franchises bordering the freeway look on, goading the sprawl to victory.
I ate dinner one night in a small bar, watching as the Red Sox dueled the Yankees. The hopelessly drunk construction manager sitting next to me, in between the tale of his ill-fated divorce and slurred cheers for the Red Sox, told me that it was difficult to build in Camarillo or anywhere in Ventura County.
“People complain about the cost [of housing], but they don’t want anyone to build anything.”
Camarillo is a community that caught on to a small movement in California that sets municipal ordinances against using any land previously zoned for farming for residential use. As a result, big plots of land stare down tract homes across the freeway. In traffic, you can see low wage immigrant workers (Mexicans) pick their way between the rows of crops on your way to work in the morning. The farming isn’t as mechanized as what I’ve seen in South Dakota; there are so many cheap labor options that having a few hundred acres tended by hand is short shrift.
But, invariably, even despite the success of local legislation, it’s a losing battle. The parking lot of Home Depot skirts the edge of one farm and the hills above another are filled with new homes. The Orange County Effect1 is poised to take place: franchises, chains, nouveau riche, and only the occasional Mexican day laborer to do some gardening. In a state where cities that didn’t exist2 in 1980 easily surpass the 150,000 mark3, growth is not something to be catered for; it’s a juggernaut for which you get out of the way.
1This isn't an official term, I just mean an effect similar to Orange County which was primarily agricultural land even 25 years ago. In 1971, 14,000 people lived in Irvine.
2Try, for starters, Moreno Valley and Santa Clarita. But there are many others.
3Sioux Falls, South Dakota's largest city, is comparable in population, to these cities of sprawl.
10:49:53 PM 
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