Photo by Robert Burroughs

2x4 cut short

"I used to look at myself as the worker," he told me over coffee at a truck stop off Interstate 8 in La Mesa. “I was proud of being in the construction trades. When I was just starting out with my dad, the builder was the chubby little guy with the baseball cap that would come out with a six-pack of beer on payday. And he’d pay you and sit around and chat. And the homeowner would come out and say, ‘You guys are doing a great job!’ And each house was a little different. It was a personal statement.”

Tony Bochene checks vertical square of corner support.

Photo by Robert Burroughs

I want to say that Tony Bochene doesn’t look like a defector, but what does a defector look like? Troubled? Devious? Bochene is wholesome and earnest. A short, energetic, intensely wide awake man, he has the well-scrubbed look of a choirboy. He’s broken not with some political faith but with a way of life. He says throughout the twenty years that he worked in construction he became so disgusted with the industry — particularly as it’s practiced in San Diego County — that he’s turned his back on it. And more. He’s made a new career of trying to catch the shoddy and deceptive building practices that he says are ubiquitous. He’s become a traitor to the trades.

Bochene looks at bolt alignment in a slab.

Photo by Robert Burroughs

“I’m thumbing my nose at the business. I’ve burned all my bridges,” Bochene acknowledged that morning in the coffee shop. Of course, bridge-burning is most poignant when you’re past your prime, and Bochene is only thirty-five years old. He points out that he started doing construction work years earlier than do most men.

Measuring rough window framing

Photo by Robert Burroughs

Born in Cincinnati, he was the son of a general contractor who typically built nine to twelve houses a year. “So I started when I was twelve. If I could carry bricks, I didn’t have much choice. You got two arms, two legs, and your dad’s a builder, you don’t get much choice.” Bochene went to college, but by seventeen he also had started his own business as a flooring subcontractor, and he says from the start he was earning $25,000 to $30,000 per year.

Checking level of a slab

Photo by Robert Burroughs

He liked that, and he liked the hours. He also enjoyed working outdoors, so he decided to stick with construction. When flooring work would slow down, “I’d get a job as a plumber’s helper, or whatever, just to learn the other trades.” Now Bochene boasts, “I’ve served apprenticeships in every phase of construction. Every phase. I’ve served apprenticeships in electrical and plumbing. I didn’t finish them, so I’m not licensed in those areas. But you learn by osmosis. The trades overlap. An electrician knows a little bit about plumbing because he’ll come into a situation where he’s got to deal with the pipes. If you’re good with your hands and you’re good with tools, it’s applicable to each trade.” Besides flooring, electrical, and plumbing, Bochene says he’s also worked with masonry, rough carpentry, finish carpentry, roofing, concrete work, and dry wall. “I could build a house. Literally, build a whole house myself.”

As he learned these various trades, Bochene says he dabbled in many avocations. Always interested in writing, he says he produced three (still-unpublished) novels in his spare time. He did a lot of photography, some professional. He scuba-dived. He hunted. He learned to fly a small plane. Construction work provided him with the income and the spare time to indulge in all this and more. “You have to run through the [tract] houses, but you make $400 [a day], and you get off at three in the afternoon, and you go play handball, and it’s great.” Bochene, moreover, says he never saw construction work as merely a means to his leisure-time ends. It had an innate dignity and a wonderful independence, he thought. Only gradually did he begin to change his mind.

Today he has trouble precisely pinpointing the origins of his apostasy. He says in his teens, he tended to do more work on custom building projects, where craftsmanship and individuality are hallmarks.

But “you get into new tract housing because that’s where most of the money is. It’s fast. It’s quick.” After traveling around the eastern U.S. for several years, Bochene moved to San Diego in the mid-Seventies and worked here, principally on big new housing tracts, until the building slowdown that came at the end of that decade. Then he moved to Dallas, which was exploding with growth, and he stayed there until that boom collapsed. Bochene returned to California, and in about 1985 he started working exclusively as a subcontractor for Design for Living, a big San Diego flooring shop. This marked a career shift, he says. “Up to then I had never really worked full time. I’d work six hours a day, on average, for maybe nine months out of the year. And I’d make $65,000 to $70,000.” The commitment to the flooring shop, however, required him to work at least five days a week, week after week, for almost two years straight. It was during this period that Bochene says he finally decided, “I’m not enjoying this. I don’t like it anymore.”

Bochene says that from his earliest years in construction he had witnessed or heard about all-too-frequent building “horror stories.” He remembers one incident in Cincinnati, for example, in which the foundation setters forget to install the normal iron bolts in the concrete block foundation. The rough framers never complained about the absence of the bolts, even though that meant they had no way of fastening the house frame to the foundation. They simply went ahead and built the frame, and when it was complete, only the force of gravity held it to its concrete base. And sure enough, when a bulldozer one day accidentally hit a corner of the house, the entire structure shifted, slightly but perceptibly. Instead of taking drastic steps to fix the problem, the general contractor merely ordered the walls built out so that the problem wouldn’t show. “We [construction workers) called it the lazy-susan model,” Bochene says with a snicker.

He has dozens of other stories like that, and he says he used to recount them with a smirking cynicism, like dirty little jokes. But by the mid-Eighties, the stories — along with a number of other things — had come to disgust him. So one day about a year ago, he put away his tools.

Bochene says by then he had already conceived of an alternate way to earn a living: as a “construction consultant.” That’s not a brand-new idea. You can look in the Yellow Pages and find others offering like-named services. Still, Bochene says for him the idea evolved gradually. He says for years, “I had been giving away free advice, to friends and so on. Telling them how to find contractors and how to get a better tract house. You can actually get a better tract house by being a smart consumer.” In Dallas, he finally started charging for some of this work, but it wasn’t until this past January that he began devoting all his time to it.

“What totally amazes me is the consumer’s unawareness of the building industry and how it works,” Bochene exclaims. Besides selling his consulting services, he’s also begun working on a book aimed at home buyers, and he invited me on an impromptu tour of local building sites. “We can go out and pretend to be some of the workers!” Bochene enthused. “We’ll just go out there cold. Then later we can pretend we’re shopping for a house. I think you’ll be surprised by what you see.”

So it was that one recent morning we climbed into Bochene’s pickup truck and headed north on Highway 15. As he drove, he declared that San Diego had “the cheapest, chintziest, put-together-the-fastest type housing” he’d seen in any part of the nation. Bochene conceded that some of that could be attributed to our mild weather here; houses need not withstand the wrath of harsh northern winter. But Bochene seems to put more of the blame on the rapacity of both builders and buyers alike.

“You got builders that don’t care about quality. And homeowners that are camping — literally camping! — at the offices, waiting to buy these pieces of junk.” In such a milieu, the ordinary worker loses respect for everybody involved in the industry, Bochene asserts.

We were a mile or so north of Miramar Road on i-15, where the raw new subdivisions lurk like giant organisms off the east side of the freeway. “Look here,” Bochene trumpeted. “Here we go. Showtime! Showtime! And look at the colors here; every one of those is the same. Look how they chop off the hill and put these houses so close to the edge of it. These are $180,000 homes. Maybe $220,000. They’re probably $220,000 now.”

I asked Bochene why he thought the developers so often favored monotone color schemes.

“It’s cheap. It’s fast. It doesn’t take any imagination. Once in a while, they’ll use different colors, use them nicely. But you gotta pay more for it! If you want creativity, you gotta pay more for it. If you want individuality, get your checkbook out, because it’s gonna cost you.”

Soon, on our right, we were passing a large boulder bearing the letters that announce the giant “Carmel Mountain Ranch” development. It looks like a boulder, that is, but Bochene told me that the look was deceptive. “I watched these guys work on it for about a month. That’s imitation rock. The whole chunk there is concrete painted to look like rock. It’s all part of the illusion of a quality community.”

One of Bochene’s favorite themes is to draw attention to the importance of illusion in housing projects today. “They want to get your attention off what you’re actually paying for. And believe me, it is a deeply entrenched attitude in this industry, and it’s not accidental. They want to get your mind off the quality. They don’t want you walking through these houses, nitpicking about the quality of the carpet or the quality of the floor, the countertops. They don’t want you looking at that. They want you looking out the window at the landscaping. Because landscaping is cheap. Landscaping is nothing. All this stuff that you concentrate on is the stuff that costs the builders the least amount of money.”

At the exit past the phony boulder, he pulled off the freeway and headed east, toward the skeletons of new houses taking shape. Soon we were driving over nascent streets, shaped but not yet surfaced. In every direction, a forest of raw lumber seemed to be reaching toward the sky, and giant earth-moving machines rumbled here and there amongst them like prehistoric beasts.

Bochene had never been in this development before; he was cruising blind, alert for things to criticize. We went down one street, where homesites were just being graded, one of the first steps in the construction phase. On the ground lay long stretches of PVC tubing for the sprinkler systems in the making. Pointing to one row of nearby houses nestled up against a steep bank, Bochene commented, “About eight out of ten of those people are going to have moisture trouble in their house. They have to put sprinkler systems in because they’ve got to get some vegetation on these hillsides, or else when it rains the hillsides will just disappear. But when they put those sprinkler systems in, where’s all the water from the hillsides going to run? Let’s deal with logic. It’s going to run down to a flat spot, and it’s going to settle underneath the slab. Now, the concrete’s porous and the moisture will evaporate up through the slab and it’ll start to mildew the floors; that type of thing. That’s a real, real common problem.”

Bochene added, “That’s borderline stuff that you can get away with. These houses are not going to fall down. They’re just going to have little, tiny, nitpicky problems that you could have avoided if you’d known what you were looking for in the beginning and didn’t buy one of the houses up close to the hillside.”

Around a corner, we came to a stretch of houses where the wooden frames were just beginning to take shape. Bochene pointed out the extreme specialization within a major project such as this.

‘‘It’s like building cars. It’s an assembly line,” he said. ‘‘In the framing stage, for example, they’ll have guys who are stackers. All they do all day long is stack lumber over next to the guy who’s going to do the cutting, and he’s the cutter. And all he does all day is cut lumber.” There’s nothing wrong with that, Bochene says, although the mindless routine does tend to make workers “time-oriented and not detail-oriented.”

He stopped his truck, jumped out, and strode over to measure the distance between the foundations. These will be commodious houses, most of them more than 2000 square feet, and yet only fourteen feet separate one from the other, according to Bochene’s measuring tape. Back in the truck, he shook his head. “People don’t realize that their house itself depreciates. It’s worth less each year, unless you keep updating the style and everything. But the dirt’s worth more. So what we’ve got here is an expensive-looking house on a little dinky, tiny lot. What’s that worth? How do you decide what the value of that is and what it’s going to be worth in five years?”

We drove for another few minutes, then parked on a paved street containing houses already fully framed. A lunch wagon had just made its call, and dusty workers were lining up to buy a morning snack. Bochene lined up too and bought an apple, then he confidently strolled into one of the half-finished houses, as if he were one of those building it. He scrutinized the framework for a few minutes, then announced that this work appeared to be pretty decent. “This is high-quality tract housing,” he said begrudgingly. “Each stage depends on the previous stage. If you’ve got a foundation that’s out of square, then the house is going to be out of square. The cabinets are square and they’re going to be out of square. They’re going to have to caulk that to cover that up. So the mistakes that are made in each stage follow all the way through to the end. And often they don’t correct them. They just cover them up.”

Bochene began looking for what he called the “plumbing wall” — the wall harboring all the water and sewage pipes that go up to the second floor.

Given the size of those pipes, this wall always should be built six inches deep, instead of from standard two-by-fours. In this particular house, Bochene found that this was being done correctly. Many times, however, he told me, builders will instead make do with the cheaper two-by-fours, crudely bending the dry wall around the bulging pipes. “So he saves the money of fifteen or twenty two-by-fours instead of two-by-sixes. But heck, that’s not so bad,” he said sarcastically. “I’ve seen other houses built without drains.”

Back in the truck, we drove a block or two through streets with names like Royal Melbourne Square and Royale Row, filled with houses already occupied by happy homeowners. The finished products made it clear that the architectural theme of this particular development, “Royal St. George’s,” was phony-baloney Tudor. There were lots of different versions of half-timbered garage doors, lots of gables. I couldn’t tell how many different types of houses the street contained, though Bochene knew in an instant. “They’re using four designs, and then what they do is flip the design to make it look different. Then your subcontractors don’t get confused because they know there’s an A, a B, a C, and a D plan.”

Our next stop was the sales office on Port Rush Row, where a woman with a British accent and a condescending manner appraised our scruffy attire sharply. Houses here had started selling in March of 1987, she told us, and were almost all gone; prices ranged from $201,000 up to $287,000. When Bochene asked if those were negotiable, she curtly informed us that they certainly were not and might be going up within a week, given the hot market.

She handed us a fat brochure dripping with hokey prose.

• “A long, long time ago there was an idyllic English village that was threatened by a fire-breathing dragon....St. George slew (it), forever freeing the good people from harm and allowing them to live their lives as they so desired. The spirit and determination of St. George and the villagers lives on today at Royal St. George's....ideal living conditions, freeing you to pursue and command a lifestyle that is uniquely yours.”

She told us we were welcome to look at the models, to which Bochene proceeded with alacrity. Inside the smallest of the homes (the “Royal Turnberry”), he dropped to his knees and briskly rubbed the pile of the creamy carpet back and forth. When it failed to “shed,” he pronounced it to be of high quality. But in the living room, he quickly noted how paint had sprayed onto the top of the dark wood wainscoting. “Just careless. In a hurry.” In the bathroom, fine scratches on the sink drew his eye. “You should see this stuff in about a year. It’s soft plastic. It can turn color, and if the ladies start using scratchy cleansers on it, it’ll look like a mess.”

He peered into cabinets made of pressed board, upon which a fake wood grain had been imprinted. “If you get a water leak in here, this thing will blow up like a balloon when it absorbs water. These are cheap cabinets. The finish will start breaking down within a year. They’re probably Korean.” The guest bathroom shower stall — one-piece plastic made to look like tile — also provoked scorn. “Who are they trying to fool? These things yellow; they crack. A lot of them make noise.” Bochene sprang into the shower and stomped around, but he couldn’t elicit any embarrassing creaks.

Instead, in every room, music was piped softly. The low hum of an air conditioner added another soothing note, one that contrasted with the jazzy decor, obviously assembled by the hand of some deft decorator. ‘‘So the buyers look at how pretty the carpet is, and the colors. And they’re distracted from the quality. They’re not thinking, ‘What’s my home going to look like in a year?’ You go back and look at some of these houses after two years, and you wouldn’t believe what kind of trash they look like. Carpet’s worn out. The kitchen floor is destroyed, a mass of cuts because it was garbage when it was put in.

But those things are only guaranteed for a year. That’s worse than your car!”

On the way out the front door, something caught Bochene’s eye, and he dropped once again to his knees in the tiled entranceway. In one small section, the grout was disintegrating, turning into powder and falling out of the cracks at the slightest touch. “Didn’t get a good mixture in the grout,” Bochene grunted.

He reminded me that we had just seen a model home, where the construction quality invariably is higher. “Everybody knows when they’re working on a model,” he asserted. “They know they’ve got to be better.” To test that assertion, Bochene suggested we ask the saleswoman if we could walk through the same version of one of the regular tract homes, complete but undecorated. She handed us the key and we were off. As soon as Bochene and I entered this structure, he pointed out hairline stress cracks clearly visible in the ceiling. “The house is settling already,” he murmured. Here when he knelt to rub the carpeting, his efforts were immediately rewarded by little clumps of carpet fiber. “This is cheaper stuff. It’ll shed and shed, and before long the pile won’t stand up. It’ll lay down and mat. You start seeing little walkways wherever you walk through the house.”

Bochene pronounced the linoleum in both the bathroom and kitchen to be one of the cheapest grades available. “I recommend you do what I call the fork test. Take a kitchen fork and drop it from countertop height. And if it sticks, don’t buy it. You wouldn’t believe what it will look like in a year.” Within ten minutes, he had pointed out at least three obvious flaws that had been absent from the model: a concealed bump in one of the bathroom floors (“It’s the concrete. Usually they have problems with it around the drain”); a sloppy, uneven grout line around the tile in the master bathroom; and a crooked track on the sliding glass door in the master bedroom. “They cannot fix that,” Bochene declared flatly.

“Of course, you can go through anything and nitpick and tear it apart,” Bochene commented as we left. In fact, he said he judged this housing tract, built by Barratt, to be above average. “Barratt builds a good home. Barratt’s one of the best. He’s up there with McMillin.”

Bochene simply doesn’t think much of any new construction. “A new home is not a good investment,” he states. “You’re speculating. A worse-case scenario is you buy one of these homes and you’re at the peak in the market.

What’s the economy going to do? You never know. Whereas if you buy a used property — ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty years old — you don’t get into that false fair-market value thing.” You can judge how the structure has settled and worn over time, Bochene says.

If someone is determined to buy a new home, he thinks they can take some steps to get a higher-quality product. They can try to buy one of the models, for one thing, he says. If that’s not possible, Bochene recommends first signing a contract with the builder. ‘‘Remember, you’re buying a product sight unseen. So after they’re obligated to build you a house — the same quality as the model, for a fixed price — then you start making your demands. And I guarantee that the builders will hate you for this.”

Among the demands, for example, Bochene says buyers should obtain the names of both the general contractor and all the subcontractors who will be working on his particular house. Call or write each subcontractor and politely let them know that you’re going to be a tough customer, he recommends. He says the home buyer should try to obtain from the general contractor the precise construction schedule, which is usually fairly rigidly fixed. ‘‘You might try to go out the night before a subcontractor is scheduled to come in and leave a little note for them.

Let them know, in a nice way, that you’re going to be doing spot inspections.”

He says homebuyers acting on their own may face some resistance. ‘‘They’ll discourage you from coming out. They’ll say, ‘For insurance reasons, we would rather you not come out to the job site. Don’t come out and bother the workmen.’ ” Bochene adds that the workman also know better than to talk to homeowners. ‘‘Homeowners come in and ask you this stupid question every time: [in a dopey voice) ‘What do you think about this quality of these homes?’ They’re asking a guy who’s getting paid to do the work!” But don’t be discouraged, he concludes. “Be picky and demand quality workmanship in every phase. It will make a difference."

We had left the St. George’s compound and were cruising again. Within a few minutes, Bochene had pulled into another new neighborhood. No signs of construction were visible here, but almost immediately, both of us were struck by the profusion of For Sale signs, some five or six in one two-block area alone. Bochene’s eyes lighted up; maybe this project had suffered from such dramatic design flaws that occupants already were trying to bail out. He quickly located a small knot of neighbors chatting in front of one house. “How come so many places are for sale?’’ Bochene called out pleasantly. “They’re making money and they want to move to a larger place,” one of the ladies replied. Homes here had sold for $139,000 two years ago and now were commanding prices in the range of $180,000, she told us.

Bochene seemed chagrined and troubled. “I guess they’re speculating and they’re making out — so far. Is that the way to do it?” he asked in a dubious tone. He pressed on, entering another new development called Cambridge. Here, the homes were smaller and only nine feet apart. The half-built house that we entered, uninvited and unobserved, seemed particularly dinged up by worker clumsiness. Our inspection tour was cut short, however, when a young blond man in work clothes approached us and politely told us that we weren’t permitted to wander through the building sites. When Bochene engaged him in conversation, he discovered that this twenty-one-year-old was the acting supervisor for the entire project. Normally, he was the assistant, but his boss was on vacation. He told Bochene that he’d lucked out in getting the job. He’d only had two years of construction experience, working first in customer service and then as a laborer.

“He’s in charge! He has no journeyman experience, no trade experience whatsoever,” Bochene exclaimed as we rode off. “That’s part of the problem with the lack of quality. A lot of supervisors are young kids with walkie-talkies. They ride around on dirt bikes through the project, and all they do is coordinate the scheduling and keep contractors from fighting each other when they get in each other’s way. But if he comes upon a situation where a contractor is doing something wrong, and he doesn’t recognize it ’clause he hasn’t had the trade experience, the contractor’s going to get away with it. And most of the subs don’t care [whether they’re doing things right or wrong] because they get into this assembly-line thing where everyone knows that the whole priority is just to get the job done, man. Just finish it.” Bochene remembered one tract, a townhouse project. “It was called Las Playas and was off Poinsettia Lane in Carlsbad. They had a design flaw. Everybody knew about the design flaw from the day that the model was built. I thought it was serious.” A structural problem, it involved the floor beams. Bochene explained that in every house, these beams occasionally must change direction, and “where they change direction, they butt up against each other. Well, everybody in the trades knows that where beams change direction, you may have a fluctuation in the floor. There may be a hump or there may be a low spot there. Because beams sag. They settle down a little bit.” The proper way to compensate for this is to design the beam directional changes so they come underneath a wall, “where it won’t be noticeable.” In this case, however, the architect had called for a beam change right

in the middle of a bathroom floor. “So there was this hump right in the middle of the floor.”

Bochene says that as a flooring subcontractor, he told the job supervisor that the bump was going to be a significant problem, but he was ordered to go ahead and apply the linoleum. So he did, but after the homes were completed, he wound up replacing no less than fifteen floors, he says. “First they had to cut out the floor and cut off the top of the beams to lower it in no less than fifteen bathrooms. And you [the flooring subcontractor] laugh at them. At that point it’s funny. I got paid to do the bathrooms twice,” he says cynically.

Why didn’t the supervisors fix the problem in the first place? “Because the assembly line is in motion,” Bochene says. “And there’s nothing more important than time. You see, all these trades are scheduled on certain days.

And one subcontractor may be working on a whole bunch of jobs; I’ve worked on twenty-

five or thirty different tracts at the same time. If one guy at the beginning has a problem, he’s going to throw the scheduling off all the way down the line, and it will snowball. One problem may hold up a project for a month. So rather than correct it, they just do it. And see if it’ll slide by. In an upward market where there’s demand, people want to get into their homes.”

What about building codes?

I asked Bochene, and he retorted, “Building codes do not protect the consumer. There’s a word called ‘interpretation,’ and with the codes there are gray areas.

Building inspectors for the city are yes-men. They do what they’re told to do. If they inspect the property and it doesn’t meet the code and they come back and tell the city about it, the city has the authority to override their decision. So if decisions are made at a higher level saying, yes, you will okay this property, then the property gets okayed. The inspectors are just yes-men.”

This discussion reminded Bochene of another horror story from his mental collection, a housing tract called Sweetwater Highlands, located in Spring Valley just east of Lemon Grove. “The developer [the Stafford Gardner company) built the whole project on top of a natural spring. I talked to the guys who did the grading; they put the pipes and drains in. They said the developer knew from the beginning that there v«ere natural springs all over the hillsides. Whenever a natural spring popped up, the backhoe operator said they’d divert it somewhere with an underground drain. Then it would pop up again, and they’d divert it again.” Though the completed development contained a honeycomb of such drains, Bochene says he still was called in to replace a dozen or so floors. “You’d pull the floor up and there would actually be standing water, moisture, laying on top of the concrete underneath the floor. You could just grab the floor and the glue had broken down; you could pull it up. The builder knew about it ahead of time,” Bochene reiterated. “Now, how did those houses get built? The city inspector probably had to wade through water to get to them!” Suddenly, Bochene had an idea. Although he had not set foot in Sweetwater Highlands since he’d installed the replacement flooring, we should try to find the neighborhood, he suggested. Maybe some of the residents could tell us what effect the underwater springs had had on the community.

So a few days later, we headed for the southeast part of the county. Bochene got lost a few times, but he finally recognized his surroundings when he turned off Sweetwater Road onto a street called Ildica. After a few blocks, a sign announced Sweetwater Highlands, and Bochene stopped to question a man in his thirties who was puttering around his open garage. A friendly fellow, he told us he didn’t have water problems (although he’d had his floor fixed twice), but he’d heard that various neighbors were having trouble.

We continued on, driving up a hill where Bochene spotted water running out of curbside drains and down the gutter.

We parked and tried ringing doorbells at random. Finally, at one house a young woman with red face and puffy eyes told us we’d have to talk to her husband, who turned out to be a painting contractor. He was there, though about to leave the house. He nonetheless told us that he didn’t have a problem with water — but the slab in his garage seemed to be cracking. The builder also hadn’t fixed numerous other small items he had complained about.

At the top of the hill, we approached another man, a bookish-looking fellow, carrying garbage out to the curb. He hadn’t had any moisture problems himself, he told us, though he could testify there was plenty of water in the ground. He’d seen it when he had a swimming pool excavated; his neighbor, furthermore, had water squirting out of the ground. A moment later this man mentioned that he happened to own all the easement property in the back of his lot, giving him a total of 2.2 acres.

“You must have been early on in the tract,” Bochene commented, impressed.

“Very late,” the man replied. “I just know how to go down and look at the records.”

When Bochene asked if he knew about the underground springs when he bought his property, the homeowner said, “It’s very obvious. If you walk down the street, you’ll see that there are drains cut into the hills with water running out continually. You’ll see slime on the street.” Before he had purchased his home, he continued, he had gone down to the county administration building and obtained the grading maps. “I wanted a lot that was a 50-50 cut-fill at the most. And if you cut into granite, you obviously have a lot of water running through the lot. That’s just the way it is. It’s doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to have any problem with settling. I wouldn’t want to be on one of those lots during an earthquake because of liquefaction. But aside from that, the homes were an excellent value at the time.”

He had bought his two acres for $120,000, he added, and already had been offered $179,000 for the property.

“So overall, you feel like you got a good house for the money?” Bochene pressed him.

“For $120,000? I got an excellent house for the money,” he said. He was absolutely sure of himself.

“You don’t have any problems or didn’t have any problems?”

“It’s a $120,000 home. I question whether the stucco is to spec, but we’ve got ten years to check that out. The ceiling attachments I’m not crazy about.” Some of the wood trim, which was sealed, would have to be replaced within a few years. “It’s a $120,OCX) house,” the man repeated, as if stating the obvious, “not a $150,000 house.”

“Would you have any recourse if you did have any problems?” Bochene asked.

“I’d have recourse, yes.” At the time of the final walkthrough, he had listed about 250 items that were not acceptable, “but many of them I passed on and said, ‘I’ll consider this part of a ten-year structural warranty, instead of having it fixed right now.’ ” Bochene pointed out that development companies often acquire different principals or even go out of business after a given project is built. “So what happens then. What if the company is out of business, or they’ve changed their name? Would you still have recourse with somebody?”

“I went back to them for fencing my entire back lot,” the homeowner replied, revealing just the tiniest hint of bemused cockiness behind his mild demeanor. “Their brochure said the lots included fenced back yards. Mine just happened to be two acres. They said no. But I had them served. I not only had the company served, but I had each of the nine partners served with a subpoena, and* researched them.” To be most effective, he continued, the secret was to be as irritating as possible. “If you can find they’re at a dinner party and have them served there, so much the better.”

Bochene could hardly contain his curusity. How did this guy get so crafty about dealing with ract home developers? te demanded. It turned out aiat the man was director of purchasing for Hotel del Coronado owner Larry Laurence’s property development company. “So I’m a buyer by trade,” he said with a modest shrug, adding coolly, “I don’t take any shit from anybody.

“They replaced my driveway once, and they’ll probably replace it again,” he continued. “Believe me, I ask for a lot more than I get. But I settle. I very honestly believe that if you yell loud enough, you get what you want.” He said he also didn’t think it was fair for anyone to lay all the blame for inferior quality on developers. “A lot of it has to do with the people living in the houses. There are an awful lot of people here —" He rolled his eyes and looked disgusted. “I mean, you walk down the street and hear [softly bovine), ‘Moooo. Moooo.’ ”

As we walked away, Bochene was buoyant. “See? He’s in the same tract. He signed the same contract as all the other people did. And he’s happy, all because he wasn’t afraid to ask for, and later to demand, quality.”

Bochene and I didn't find very many other people who were home that hot afternoon. We did talk to one young woman who hadn’t lived there long, but she told us that her fiance’s house contained linoleum that was discolored in several large splotches. She also showed us a spot out in the front yard where she said water regularly seeped out.

So we left. As we drove back to San Diego, I asked Bochene what he thought of the various proposals now being debated that would limit growth. “I think they’re great,” he said. “Builders aren't going to stop themselves. And I’m not sure whose responsibility it is to stop them. But at some point, the city facilities have to keep up with the builders."

At the same time, Bochene told me that he’s genuinely torn between feeling outraged at builders and understanding their position. “Sometimes I feel as if there are two people inside me. There’s the sign-waving, slogan-shouting hippie, but then there’s the businessman, that’s inbred, from my father.” If builders are guilty, then “the consumer is just as guilty,” he added.

“In a free-enterprise system, the consumer is responsible for the quality of the end product. When the majority of the consumers accept trash, the builders are going to keep building trash. In San Diego, these people are unloading their moving vans before the builders finish the house.

You’re in there doing repair work and sweeping up, and the people are bringing their furniture in. And what they’re doing is, they’re making a statement: ‘We don’t care about the quality of this; we just want to have a place to live.’ A year later, when they’re stuck with this piece of junk, then they want to crybaby to somebody. So it’s all tied in. Everybody’s guilty.”

What's up?

According to the San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG), 173,000 units have been added to the San Diego metropolitan area housing stock since 1980, a twenty-four percent gain. Growth in the recession years oftfie early 1980s kept housing construction down to about only 12,000 units a year, compared with an average annual increase of more than 32,000 units in the last few years. Last year brought the biggest single increase in history — more than 37,000 new homes (apartments, condos, and single-family houses). SANDAG says by early this year the San Diego region included nearly 900,000 housing units, fifty-six percent of which were single-family homes. (This year the average number of persons per household in the region was 2.62.)

The following table shows the number of multiple- and singlefamily homes completed in the San Diego region every year during the Eighties:

1980-1987 HOUSING UNIT INCREASE

Multiple Single-family

1980 6,213 4,843

1981 7,180 5,988

1982 3,476 3,895

1983 5,298 6,854

1984 12,762 10,111

1985 20,490 13,457

1986 22,538 12,881

1987 22,087 14,084