CALIFORNIA DREAMIN'

The Golden State Has A Rendezvous With Destiny

California is everything and nothing at all. It is the cutting edge of the
American dream -- a utopia. But it could also become the paradigm of the
dream lost -- a nightmare dystopia.

As we once again find ourselves in the national spotlight, how will this
disjunctive scenario play itself out to help the Golden State strike the
appropriate balance between growth and the environment, freedom and
government, privacy and civic participation?

The long-range problems are stunning.

First, there's the simple matter of population. Even a moderate growth rate
- -- approximately 2.5 percent annually -- will put the population of
California around 60 million by 2040. Ten to 15 million of those people will
be born in or move to California in the next decade or so.

The most immediate challenge presented by such growth relates to housing and
land use. Sixty million people, after all, have to live somewhere. Will they
exist in a condition of sprawl -- with vast portions of California engulfed
in suburbia -- or will we be able to find a comfortable meeting point
between density and open space?

Much of the current fascination with Italy, I believe -- its culture, food,
hill towns, forests, open spaces and quality of life -- derives from the
fact that California and Italy have so much in common, not just in terms of
land mass, topography and climate, but in the imagination. In the 1880s,
when Californians began the process of suburbanization, they turned to Italy
as a model.

Today, Californians are asking themselves -- at least subliminally -- "If
Italy can sustain a 50 million-plus population on a comparable land mass in
balanced rhythms of density and open space, agriculture and forest preserve,
why can't we?"

That means learning to live more densely in urban spaces without losing
quality of life; indeed, with the enhanced quality of life that comes from a
sophisticated, nuanced suburbanism.

Already, there are signs that this can be done:

*-- Marin County-based Bridge Corp. has demonstrated how previously marginal
or recently abandoned properties in urban areas can be redeveloped into
townhouse and apartment complexes.

*-- The Great Valley Center in Merced has joined with the Irvine Foundation
to research models for growth in the Central Valley.

*-- The Packard Foundation, following the lead of the Marin Agricultural
Land Trust, is helping farmers keep their properties through subsidies that
hold development at bay.

*-- Orange and San Diego counties have been remarkably successful in
channeling growth into existing areas of development and preserving
agriculture and open space.

Either we become a true second Italy with sustainable land patterns -- or we
run the risk of turning into the planet Trantor in Isaac Asimov's
"Foundation Trilogy": a completely developed environment, with nature not
even left as a metaphor.

Sixty million Californians! What will they be like? Will they be educated,
hopeful, civil, in tune with and enlivened by their institutions?

Or will they descend further -- as so many are now devolving -- into a more
or less permanent mode of alienation, with a certain feral, scruffy
dysfunctionalism?

The drift of a large portion of the population into the criminal class is
alarming. California has more people in prison in proportion to its total
population than any other commonwealth on the planet. Many blame the war on
drugs and/or persistent poverty for the loss in certain communities of
nearly an entire generation of young men, either to violent death or the
criminal justice system. Drugs have their most devastating effect on the
poor, whatever their color.

Witness the epidemic of homicide among the young men of Oakland. At some
point in the foreseeable future, the entire nation -- not just California --
must ask: Is not the war on drugs, paradoxically, the major force in
institutionalizing the drug culture?

In a dystopian scenario, the California of future decades will have even
more of its poor in prison or on parole. In one way or another, the drug
culture (including the war on drugs) will have trumped every other influence
- -- family, church, school, employment, conscience, fear of the police, even
fear of death -- that tends to keep communities stable.

Pockets of future California, mostly inhabited by the urban poor but
including back-country settlements and trailer parks, will be for all
practical purposes off-limits to the rest of society.

Of course, it's possible that drugs will be decriminalized: not made legal,
but treated through prescription, clinical therapy or, when necessary, mere
maintenance of the habit. This would at least have the advantage of
separating -- as a matter of perception and public response -- the drug
culture from the otherwise blameless condition of merely being poor.

No longer would the deserving poor have to carry the drug culture on their
backs. Once again, young men might turn to sports, including midnight
basketball, instead of joining a gang or running drugs. The liberated poor
could once again, as in the days of the Great Society, enlist the sympathy
of the larger populace. Billions now spent on the futile drug war could be
channeled instead to education, housing, employment development, health and
family therapy programs.

When it comes to jobs and the economy, Californians also face hard choices.

The high technology so vaunted as the leader of the California economy has
betrayed us -- or, rather, we've allowed ourselves to be betrayed by its
unsubstantiated promises. When the dot-com economy went orbital in the
1990s, we Californians boasted of a second Gold Rush. We made folk heroes
out of college dropouts who became billionaires.

Glutted with a glucose-rush of revenues, we ballooned the size of our state
government by one-third in four short years -- to noble purposes, perhaps,
but when the balloon burst, time-tested programs disappeared in the vortex
of a $38 billion deficit.

As a result, we need to renegotiate a sustainable public sector at state and
local levels -- one that, with proper adjustments, can see itself through
further boom-and-bust cycles.

If we fail to do so, Californians, tired of the inability of state
government to manage its household expenses, will devolve toward a fierce
localism that will inevitably render even more stark the contrasts between
rich and poor, educated and illiterate.

If we resuccumb to our recent obsession with high-tech speculation, the
state will grow increasingly unstable.

Will the future witness a growing population of Californians excluded from
traditional employment through lack of verbal, mathematical and computer
skills If so, then the permanently destabilized permanently unemployed --
and increasingly institutionalized -- sector of the population -- will grow
even higher.

Already, we see around us -- especially on our downtown streets -- people
who for all practical purposes have ceased to cope with what the English
novelist Evelyn Waugh called the unequal struggle with life.

The increasing numbers of the homeless people are obviously leading lives
filled with drug and alcohol abuse, unhealthy nutrition and almost
nonexistent hygiene. They are also creating squalid environments around
them. Imagine even more homeless people in the future, and you have the
frightening possibility of whole sectors of society that are basically
off-limits to the coping part of the population.

Not everyone is destined to lead a tidy middle-class life, yet there's a a
huge distinction between the exuberant untidiness of a dense but adjusting
citizenry and sheer squalor.

But if we do somehow find a way to successfully deal with the problem of
homelessness, the future California could be home to cities animated by what
author Mike Davis calls "magical urbanism": a sense of personal well-being
- -- festivity even -- dominating our streets.

The Broadway of downtown Los Angeles already foreshadows what this future
might be like. San Franciscans can remember Market Street in the 1950s, when
it teemed with miscellaneous and spontaneous vitality, cutting across all
social classes.

The future of urban California might be Rio de Janeiro without the crime,
Paris with the chic. The next decade will witness either the ghettoization
of large sectors of urban California and the withdrawal of the middle-class
behind closed doors or a successful effort to take back the streets, and
once again render our cities livable.

California's future is one of increasingly complex technological and social
changes.

Notwithstanding the current political and economic meltdown, the question
remains: Will the benefits of those patterns belong to a privileged few? Or
will millions of Californians, including those of ordinary abilities, find
themselves participating in what promises to be the most interesting social
experiment on the planet?