In the fall of 1973 home prices in Southern California were $1000 below the national average; six years later they were $42,400 higher (fifteen years later, $143,000 higher). If in the flatlands of the Valley home values only doubled, they tripled or quadrupled in the hills or near the beach. In Beverly Hills, median home values increased $200,000 in a single year. Averaged over all of Southern California, homeowners were reported to be earning 30–40 per cent on their equity per annum, in adjusted terms, in the late 1970s, and home values increased almost three times faster than income. As ‘the purpose of housing units came to be perceived more as investment and speculation than as shelter’, house trading became a mass mania. In the course of the decade 164,000 new realtors’ licenses were issued (bringing the total to nearly 400,000 by 1981), and homeowners were reported to be mining billions of dollars from their equity (via second trust deeds) to pay for grander lifestyles.63

At first it seemed that Los Angeles could save itself simply by sticking a gilded finger in the dike at Hyperion: a $2.3 billion renovation. But anxious engineering reports to the Mayor, immediately leaked to the press, revealed that the entire system was on the verge of collapse. As the Times caustically observed, ‘planning procedures have been so slack that nobody made that most basic connection between population growth and the carrying capacity of a sewage system’. Although the old trunk sewers were large enough to accommodate the ten million gallons of new flow added each year by urbanization, the treatment plants had exhausted their capacity. The Mayor’s attempt to abate the crisis through voluntary water conservation was ignored, especially in affluent, ‘slow-growth’ Westside and Valley neighborhoods with their swimming pools and acre-sized lawns.

Possibly there is a significant internal divide in non-Anglo communities between renters and homeowners, with the latter more inclined toward slow growth. But the crucial point is that the polls themselves, by the exclusive way they frame questions (pro and contra economic development, for instance), simply reproduce the distorted dichotomies of growth war ideology. It is not surprising that poor people, especially renters, will choose jobs over environmental quality when the two are artificially counterposed. If it were the only choice offered, most people would also opt to cut their toe off rather than their leg. Such dubious, but ubiquitous survey methods only reveal people’s relative anxieties, not their substantive opinions.