Making the San Fernando Valley: Rural Landscapes, Urban Development, and White Privilege

Conclusion

264 conclusion The processes that I have analyzed in this book are far from obsolete. Nor are they limited to a few neighborhoods on the fringes of the San Fernando Valley. Rather, the central practices of rural urbanism persist in shaping the linked development of metropolitan regions and racial formations in the contemporary American West. In this brief concluding chapter, I apply the book’s key findings and insights to understand how urban interests at the turn of the twenty-first century continue to produce rural places as a project of American empire and whiteness throughout the U.S. West; similar processes are under way in many former European imperial nations. In 1997, the New York Times reported that, after nearly a century of urbanization , the national trend of rural to urban migration had been reversed. At the turn of the twentieth century, people from rural areas of the country had flocked to booming U.S. industrial cities seeking opportunities in employment , recreation, and culture. By the turn of the twenty-first century, however, a new generation of migrants abandoned city life and sought sprawling ranches and country homesteads in places such as New Mexico, Illinois, Oregon, and Wyoming.1 During the 1990s, 75 percent of the nation’s rural counties experienced rapid growth.2 And by the close of the millennium, nearly two million people had moved from metropolitan areas in California and on the East Coast to the mountain West, the Upper Great Lakes, the Ozarks, and the Appalachian foothills.3 Urban-to-rural migration is propelled, in large part, by the changing geography of investment and employment among the nation’s top firms. In the past two decades, high technology and professional service firms have increasingly relocated to rural areas to take advantage of lower land and energy costs and to capitalize on technological innovations such as high-speed Internet access and affordable overnight shipping. In doing so, they are remaking the metropolitan West and redrawing the boundaries of urbanity. In 1999, for example, Forbes highlighted the town of Fairfield, Iowa (dubbed “Silicorn Valley”), which has been dramatically transformed by the Internet economy and Airborne Express’s decision to locate its national headquarters there; numerous high-tech firms now cluster in what was once a small rural town. Economically struggling rural towns and small cities compete for capital investment by offering a wide range conclusion • 265 of incentives, including subsidized infrastructure development and tax breaks, and by promoting the virtues of their communities that are likely to appeal to migrating workers and investors. In this respect, the collaborations between growth-machine interests in the twenty-first-century West mirror those that transformed Los Angeles into a major urban industrial center a century ago. In the decades before World War II, city boosters in Los Angeles sponsored agricultural lectures and financed irrigation systems, while also promising that urban amenities such as opera, symphonies, and well-stocked libraries were just a short ride away, in order to lure gentleman farmers to buy property in the San Fernando Valley. They contrasted the Valley’s semirural landscapes with the dense, crowded, older cities of the East Coast and the Midwest. Now, in the first decades of the twenty-first century, city boosters in rural areas such as Fairfield promote their excellent schools, plentiful open space, and all-American values, which they contrast both explicitly and implicitly with older urban areas like Los Angeles. As in decades past, real-estate developers, planners, boosters, the media, and cultural producers are collaborating to produce rural places that appeal to the romantic longings and frustrations of urbanites and suburbanites. Some contemporary urban-to-rural migrants are moving to small towns and hamlets , where they purchase and renovate inexpensive older homes, but others are moving to mass-produced subdivisions, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, built by established development corporations, financed by global capital, and easily accessible by interstate highways and regional airports. Urban growthmachine interests continue to incorporate and mobilize ideas about rural land andthefrontierWestintotheirreal-estatedevelopmentplans.Sprawlingmasterplanned communities, many of them gated, dot the edges of cities throughout the desert and mountain West. They feature names such as The New Frontier, Saddle Creek Ranch, Huntsman Springs, Frontier Trace, and The Ranch Club. Like the Weeks Poultry Colony in the west San Fernando Valley in the 1920s, or the Porter Ranch subdivision completed in the mid-1970s, these residential communities promise that home buyers will be able to capitalize on all the latest luxuries (promoted as...