Photo by Sandy Huffaker, Jr.

North County Fair

This is a tale of two cities, both in north San Diego County. One is a small agricultural town surrounded by orange groves and avocado orchards thriving in fertile soil and abundant California sun. Pickup trucks line curbs of the busy central district while their owners, who are downtown to shop, chat with friends they've bumped into on the sidewalk, in the hardware store, or in the coffee shop. Children play on the grassy hillocks and in parks, fields, and open lots dotting the landscape of the sunny town.

The other city is a dynamic urban center of over 120,000 people. It offers every amenity of modern city living. A 1500-seat concert hall and adjoining art museum stand proudly in the towns center, next to the palatial new city hall. The metropolis has a large, state-of-the-art shopping mall with upscale retailers. Next to the eight-lane freeway bisecting the town is an automobile park sparkling with rows of new cars. Rolling hills covered with $300,000 homes ring the city, while more moderately priced houses, condominiums, and apartments fill the tree-covered valley in which the town sits.

Escondido

Photo by Sandy Huffaker, Jr.

The name of the first city? Escondido. The second city goes by the same name. They are both Escondido, 20 years apart. Such has been the change in Escondido’s face and flavor in the last two decades.

The tale of Escondido’s growth is best told by residents who have lived through it, because they remember what the town was like before. They are the ones who saw their country town slowly disappear and become something else. Marie Tuck works for the Escondido Historical Society. Now in her 60s, she was born and raised in Escondido and has lived here all her life. “On Saturday nights,” she recalls, “we would go downtown — if it was Saturday night, that’s what you did. Being a girl, you’d wash your hair, and you’d think about what you were going to wear. Your parents would sit in the car and just watch people walking down the street and, if they saw someone they knew, they’d roll down the window and say, ‘Hey, Mabel, come and sit in the car with us and let’s talk.’ The kids would meet each other and go for ice cream. The movie theater was always a big thing — we had two downtown. There was a sweet shop right next to the theater, and that was a favorite spot. Then, we had three drugstores with fountains where you could get ice cream. Those were great places to meet your friends.”

Bob McQuead, who operates a bed-and-breakfast near downtown, moved to Escondido with his family in 1959, when he was ten. “I remember a situation,” he says laughing, “this is real small-town stuff, where I did something I shouldn’t have done, and my dad knew about it before I got home, because somebody called him and told him, ‘Hey, Bob was looking at a Playboy magazine down here at the store. You ought to talk to him about it.’ ”

Bert Verger owns a dairy just outside city limits in the San Pasqual Valley. In 1950, at age 19, he came to Escondido from Holland to work on one of Escondido’s thriving dairies. “In 1950, our population was a little over 6000. We had one grammar school and one high school, and the kids came not only from Escondido, but also from Poway, Valley Center, Rancho Bernardo, Pertasquitos, and San Marcos. We had one set of traffic lights on the corner of Grand and Broadway. All the stores were on Grand Avenue four blocks on either side of Broadway. We had two restaurants, the Red Coach Inn and one in the middle of town, which was a family restaurant and would close at 8:00 p.m. Our Catholic church was the old little church between Ninth and Seventh Streets where Broadway ended. Its capacity was about 120 persons, and there was parking for only 30 cars. If you were under 40, the pastor would ask you to park on Seventh Street and use the 200-step concrete stairway up to the church. Our parish boundaries went to Highway 67 and Miramar base on the south, Vista on the west, and Palomar Mountain and Temecula to the north. Now we have 3 Catholic churches in Escondido, 2 in Poway, 3 in Rancho Bernardo/Peñasquitos area, 1 in Valley Center, and 2 in San Marcos, covering the same area as the old church, and each of those 11 churches holds perhaps six times as many people as the little church on the hill.”

After working two years at a dairy. Verger started his own at Lincoln and Ash, “which in the ’50s was way outside of town.” In ’67, already feeling squeezed by the growing population, he moved to the San Pasqual Valley. His dairy is now one of only two remaining in the valley. Verger recalls the time when dairies and agriculture in Escondido were thriving. “Six other dairies were inside what is now the city limits of Escondido,” he says. “All the industries we had at that time were agriculture related: grapes, citrus, the dairies. It used to be that everybody in Escondido was related to or worked in agriculture. It’s just a population [center] now; it’s not agricultural anymore.”

Population growth creates a paradox. As more and more people move into your town, you seem to know fewer and fewer people. Also, you see the people you do know less and less often. “[It used to be] you never went to town to do your shopping that you didn’t see two or three people you knew,” Verger explains. “Now, you can go to town three times and not see anybody you know.”

“Well,” Marie Tuck says, “it’s lost that small-town feeling you had when you knew everyone. When you went downtown, it was a social thing. When you went to shop, you knew you would see many, many people you knew. Now, it’s very seldom I go anywhere and see somebody I know.”

Though he agrees that Escondido has changed, McQuead feels the country-town atmosphere is still to be found. “Now, as an adult, you don’t know as many people,” McQuead says, “but as you move through the town you see lots of people you know. The street fairs on Tuesday nights, when they have all the growers come in with their produce, that’s country-town stuff. It’s one of the best parts of living in your hometown. It really is still here if you look for it.”

The postwar era was when Tuck noticed Escondido starting to change. “World War II was the big change to me,” she says. “I can’t really tell the ‘70s from the ’80s.” For others, the change came in the 70s and especially the ’80s, when the town of 64,000 saw 44,000 new people arrive. As Verger puts it, “In the ‘70s it really took off, and in the ’80s it was galloping.”

Forty-year-old Mike Todd, who asked that his real name not be used, has lived in Escondido since he was three. “In the ’80s,” he recalls, “it really started picking up. People were moving in, and they were building all these new homes, and tracts, new businesses, and warehouses, and apartments. A lot of people came in, and the population nearly doubled.”

The numbers surrounding Escondido’s population boom tell quite a story. In 1970, its population was 36,792, spread out over 31.4 square miles for a modest average of 1172 people per square mile. By 1980, the population had grown to 64,355, or 2050 people per square mile. The last federal census, in 1990, showed Escondido’s population to be 108,635, a 68.8 percent increase from 1980. That brought the population density up to 3439 people per square mile and made Escondido the fifth fastest growing city in the United States (among cities with populations of 100,000 or more).

A conservative estimate places the current population at about 120,000 people, though some will tell you it’s more like 135,000. Between 1980 and 1989, the fastest period of its growth, the city issued 19,662 building permits, and the total number of housing units in Escondido rose 50.3 percent, from 27,153 to 40,815.

One factor in Escondido’s growth was the completion of Interstate 15 in the early ’70s, affording easy access for commuters. A more important factor, perhaps, was the general prosperity of the ’80s. Escondido City Councilman Jerry Harmon explains, “There was a very strong economy, not only in Escondido, but in the country as a whole. There has always been a tendency for people, if they were thinking about relocating to California, to do so when the economy was strong and it was easier to either change jobs or transfer jobs. I think there was a lot of that going on.”

It has cooled a bit, but starting in the early ‘70s and continuing through the ‘80s, growth was the hottest political topic in Escondido. If you were a politician, your stance on growth defined you. It still does. There is the school of thought best described by one prominent local businessman we’ll call Mr. Smith, who says, “There was growth, there was progress, there was prosperity.” Then there’s the other school of thought that believes unfettered growth could be the death of Escondido by costing the city more money than it brings in and by diminishing the quality of life.

Councilman Harmon is to the slow-growth movement in Escondido what John Brown was to abolitionists before the Civil War. Harmon built his 22-year city council career on the issue of controlling growth. It started in 1972 when he ran for city council. Growth wasn’t yet a political issue in Escondido. “I tried to make it an issue,” he says. “At that time, the mentality was still ‘bigger is better, and we’ve got to attract development because that is good for business.’ My approach was to say, ‘Wait a minute, you’ve got a jewel here. Why give it away? It’s going to happen whether you like it or not, but why give the assets away at the same time?’ What I meant by that was, growth costs money. That was contrary to popular belief. Popular belief was if you grow, there’ll be more people paying more taxes, and therefore you’ll have more money, and therefore everybody will be better off. I think it stems from our mental set culturally. Americans say bigger is better; you know, Horace Greeley, ‘Go west young man. Seek your fortune.’ It’s that whole pioneer spirit and work ethic. So if bigger is better, what town in its right mind wouldn't want to increase its population?”

Bert Verger

Photo by Sandy Huffaker, Jr.

Hannon lost the 72 council race by a 50-vote margin, but he had succeeded in making growth an issue. For the next two years, Harmon and a group he headed called Escondido Citizens’ Ecology Committee researched the idea of managing growth and polled the city’s residents on the matter. Convinced that residents wanted growth control, he ran again in ’74 and this time was elected. Then, he “spent the next 14 years on the council in a minority position, basically four to one.”

Jim Rady was a city councilman from 1976 to 1988. He was one of the four holding the majority over Harmon. Rady promoted business developments that would bring tax money to the city. “There were types of growth that we encouraged,” he explains. “For example, I was head of the North County Fair shopping center. I thought that was good for the community. I still think it’s good for the community. Jerry Harmon opposed it. He didn’t think it would be good, and his reasons were that he thought having a shopping center would encourage people to come here and live and bring their attendant problems. My perspective was that people were going to come here anyhow. If you had North County Fair, then you’d have a larger pool of jobs, and they weren’t the types of jobs that would encourage people to move in. Someone is not going to leave Detroit and come to Escondido to sell shoes at Nordstrom. But somebody living in Escondido that is looking for a second job, or a co-wage earner in a house, might find a job at North County Fair.”

Rady says, “Having the income stream from North County Fair, to me, is a way of providing some of the services these people are going to demand. North County Fair is a tremendous income generator for the City of Escondido. The car park, where auto dealers are clustered together, is a tremendous source of revenue for the City of Escondido. Harmon opposed that also, thinking that somehow that encourages growth, that jobs encourage growth. I just looked at it differently.”

Whichever way you look at it, growth continued. How did it affect Escondido residents’ lives?

“Well,” answers Smith, “I think it has changed for the better. It’s a much bigger trading area than it was. It now offers every kind of supply and service you could be looking for. [Before], an awful lot of our supplies had to be obtained in downtown San Diego or even in Orange County. Now we can get everything we want right here. So in terms of convenience, it’s much better. I would say prices of services and supplies are down because there’s some competition.”

Read Mecleary, a 40-year-old airline pilot who has lived for 17 years in the southwest section of Escondido known as Quiet Hills, disagrees. “I think they’ve made steps to improve the quality of life,” he remarks, “but from my own personal viewpoint, I think the quality of life was better when we had fewer people, less traffic, and more serenity. We didn’t have the mall, but we had plenty of places where you could get shoes and food. Now, it seems every time there is a vacant lot on a corner, somebody wants to build a mini-mall on it. One of the reasons we came up here was because of the rural nature of Escondido and the fact that it was so quiet. I think anytime you increase traffic, you can’t say that enhances your quality of life.”

The increase in traffic near Mecleary’s house is due largely to North County Fair, which sits just across I-15 from Quiet Hills. “When we moved in, the exit off 15 was a stop sign. There were no lights; there was no mall. There was just a stop sign at Via Rancho Parkway, which was a two-lane road. [The mall] dramatically increased traffic on Via Rancho Parkway. Now, metering lights? You’ve got to be kidding me. I couldn’t believe it when they put those things in. That’s increasing the quality of my life? I don’t think so.

“The mall means nothing to me,” Mecleary adds. “I’d rather have the park back. That was all open. It used to be part of Kit Carson Park. There was a little trout pond where the kids could fish. It just was much more rural and rustic.”

“The one thing that that city council did and the current one still does is they take parkland because they have easy access to it,” says Jerry Calhoun, who sells sports memorabilia for a living. “They steal parkland and put these things in like North County Fair, the new city hall, and the center for the arts. [For city hall and the California Center for the Arts, Escondido], they took part of Grape Day Park because they could get it easily. I would never, ever spend two cents at those places for that reason.”

Mecleary also believes that growth has had an ill effect on city schools. “One of the reasons we came to Escondido,” he says, “is that we heard that the schools were excellent, but we don’t feel that way anymore. Some of them are good. I don’t feel San Pasqual High School is as good as it used to be, to the point where I’ve put [my son] in a private school. I think it’s overcrowded. They have gangs, from what I understand, they didn’t used to have. Probably the biggest problem is the overcrowding, the size of the classes. When I went to the parent indoctrinations, when we were thinking of sending our son there, the only thing they really talked about was their sports. They didn’t talk about how many merit scholarships they had or where their academic achievers had gone on to college. It didn’t seem to me that the emphasis was on academics. Overall, I think the quality of the school has declined.”

Mecleary isn’t the only person to complain about traffic and schools. Mike Todd says traffic in his neighborhood has increased “about 500 percent” in the last 15 years. Like Medeary, he doesn’t send his child to public school. “Not with all the nonsense going on there,” he says. “I’ll make the sacrifice to put her in private school.”

Patti Pettigrew is a teacher at the same junior high she attended in the mid-’60s, Grant Middle School, near downtown Escondido. In fact, she grew up just across the street from the school. Now 43, she teaches language arts, literature, and science. She says of Grant in her school days, “We were about 650 or 700 students, and we were the only middle school in Escondido. Grant has always been considered a tough school. When I was in eighth grade, Del Dios school opened up, and that was considered the good school. Grant was considered the ‘hood school,’ which it really wasn’t, no more than it’s a gang school now.”

Grant’s enrollment has about doubled since Pettigrew was a student. “When I first came back to Grant in 1986,” she remembers, “it was pretty rough. It was living up to its reputation. There was a lot of fighting and there were weapons. I think that has changed, and I really have hope for the future.” Pettigrew believes most of the school’s problems stem from a lack of funds. For example, she has only “one set of books for three sets of kids, because there isn’t money to buy more.” A problem she attributes directly to population growth is an ever-changing student body due to the mobility of the school’s families, many of whom live in apartments. “When I was a kid,” she says, “I had the same classmates all the way through junior high and even high school. Now we have many kids who are transient,” she explains. “Their families move a lot, and they come in and out.”

Calhoun lives near Lake Wohlford, about five miles northeast of Escondido. He moved there two years ago after the downtown neighborhood he had lived in since 1960 changed. He explains, “What happened was, there used to be a few fields there, and there were houses. But next door to us went in four or five apartments on one side. In back, there was a large complex they put in, and it brought in a whole lot of people. Then it became really noisy.”

After the noise came gangs and that was when Calhoun decided to get out. “I just got tired of the gang influence, people playing loud rap music."

As thousands of attractive new homes were built around the outer areas of town during the late 70s and ’80s, many of the quiet old working-class neighborhoods near the center of town became more like inner-city neighborhoods. Apartment complexes increased the population density and subsequently the crime rates. After that came gangs. Of course, we’re not talking about South Central L.A. here, but there is a growing drug-and-gangculture in some of Escondido's old neighborhoods.

California Center for the Arts, Escondido

Photo by Sandy Huffaker, Jr.

Todd saw it happen to his neighborhood on the east side of town. “There are just a lot more gangs now in Escondido,” he complains.

There was drug use when Todd was growing up in the ‘70s. “They were smoking dope and drinking,” he says. “In the ‘70s, you didn’t see meth. In the ’80s, you started seeing designer drugs; the crack started getting in. I’d say up until the ’90s, they cranked meth like you’ve never seen.” He adds, “Escondido is the meth capital of the world. Down the street from us, we had a drug dealer who was cooking meth in his fireplace until the cops finally popped him. That crap is everywhere!”

Describing the safety level of his neighborhood, Todd says, “At dusk, you don’t want to go out unless you have to.”

Escondido used to be essentially a two-race town, with whites and Hispanics. But when the dust settled after the population rise of the ’80s, Escondido found that it had many different races represented in significant numbers. Following the pattern seen in Los Angeles and San Diego, gangs formed according to race. Todd says, “There are a lot of Mexican gangs. There are gangs that have come down from L.A. now, like the Vietnamese and Koreans, and there are some black gangs.”

Deacon Ken Finn lives south of downtown near St. Mary’s Catholic Church, where he works. As a clergyman, he sees in the many cultures represented in the parish an ecclesiastical challenge. “Now you have Asians, Europeans, African Americans, and Hispanics, all bringing their cultures and their spirituality together,” Deacon Finn says. “Everybody is coming with a whole new set of values. So the challenge is, spiritually, how is there enough room at the table of the Lord to feed them all? I think it’s a monumental challenge.”

In 1988, Escondido citizens elected slow-growth candidates Kris Murphy and Carla DeDominicis, creating a three-to-two slow-growth majority.

“At that point,” Councilman Harmon recalls, “we had probably just passed the 100,000 mark. Then what we did was to say, ‘Let’s make growth pay for itself so that existing residents don’t have to subsidize future growth. Let’s figure out what our quality-of-life standards are going to be, and let’s write them into our general plan.’ So, part of the quality-of-life standards in Escondido deal with how many books per capita should we have in our public library? What level service do we want on each and every street in this community? What kind of response time do we want from our police? What kind of response time do we want from our fire and paramedics? How many acres of parkland do we want per capita in Escondido? What kind of recreation facilities and so forth? So we basically used a businesslike approach and said, ‘Let’s define our quality of life. Let’s not be talking in some general, ethereal terms about quality of life. Let's define it. Here’s what it is; let’s put that in our general plan. Once we do that, let’s ask our engineers to tell us what the capital improvements are going to cost so that we’ll know exactly how much we need to charge for every single building permit we issue in order to have the dollars to build the capital structures, be they streets, libraries, police facilities, or whatever.’ ”

The fees they came up with amounted to a seemingly astronomical average of $25,000 to build a three- or four-bed-room house. Councilman Harmon has no problem with that number. “That’s what the true cost of providing those services really is,” he says.

That slowed down building in Escondido, because developers were unwilling to pay the high costs. But did it stop the population growth?

Smith says no. “In Escondido,” he says, “the notion was adopted that if we don’t build houses, they won’t come. But the fact is, the population has gone up, and that means the per capita occupation of every dwelling unit has gone up.

There’s doubling up, sharing, extended families, etc. That isn’t particularly good. It doesn’t lend to a good environment for living. The fact is, the housing stock has not risen in proportion to the population.” Smith goes on, “When it was growing, things were fine. Then, Escondido politically adopted a notion of no growth, or restricted growth, or little growth. In effect, what they said was, ‘Let’s sock the developers. Let’s make the developer pay extremely high permit fees.’ So that stopped the growth. Now, the city is stagnant, in my opinion. City councilmen say, ‘If we control growth, everything will be hunky-dory.’ The fact is, everything isn’t hunky-dory.”

Asked if he thinks Escondido handled growth well in the’70s and ’80s, former councilman Rady answers, “I don’t think anybody in Southern California handled growth well. I don’t think it could have been handled well. It was of such volume that if you tried to keep people out through outrageous fees and by not allowing the division of real estate land, then you would have been an enclave completely surrounded by county residents — in our case, San Marcos and San Diego — and we still would have suffered some of the negative effects, but we wouldn’t have had any money to mitigate those effects.

“One hundred years from now,” says Rady, “we —well, not we — people will look back and argue about the issue of growth in Escondido in the ’80s.”