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Computer Graphics	A Tale of Two Suburbs: Santa Clara County, California, and Prince George's County, Maryland A mustard-colored haze hides all but the shadowy outlines of the mountains on either side of the long, flat valley. Automobiles push and shove through crowded concrete corridors of stores, service stations, car lots, and taco stands. Isolated groves of the last surviving fruit trees fight asphyxiation from the polluted air and strangulation by the surrounding homes, shopping centers, factories, and freeways. The houses huddle together, back to back and side to side, in cities of subdivisions without open spaces, parks, or even sidewalks. Many homes just ten years old slouch in ready-built slums, their gravel roofs leaking, concrete slab foundations cracked, flimsy veneer doors and walls warped, stick fences rotting, and sparse dirt yards alternately flooding and heaving. This is Santa Clara County, California, a jigsaw puzzle of intertwined suburbs beginning forty miles southeast of San Francisco. The once unusually fertile Santa Clara Valley stretches almost due south from the southern tip of the San Francisco Bay for about sixty miles between low ranges of wooded mountains. Its balmy Mediterranean climate has always produced sufficient rainfall in a few weeks each year for the thriving agriculture and left the sun shining warmly the rest of the time. Not so very many years ago, residents of Santa Clara County called it the "Valley of Heart's Delight," and not without good reason. "It was beautiful," remembered Karl Belser, who once was the county's chief land planner, "it was a wholesome place to live, and it was one of the fifteen most productive agricultural counties in the United States." In a retrospective analysis written after he resigned his post in dismay over the ravages of suburbanization, Belser described in detail what the real estate speculators were destroying: The land in the valley was of the very highest quality. Two alluvial fans had been laid down over the millennia by systems of streams which had coursed from the mountains to the sea during the rainy season, flooding the lowlands almost every year. Topsoil of fine loam thirty to forty feet deep in places overlaid water-bearing substrata of gravels and clays. A tremendous underground water storage basin with a capacity of roughly one million acre-feet spread itself out beneath this wonderful soil. In many places the water gushed forth from artesian wells. Here was nature's handsome gift: soils second to none in the state and perhaps the world, indigenous water enough, if properly used, to serve that soil adequately, and a mild climate with a year-round growing season. For centuries this gift of nature was used appreciatively and conservingly by man, first by the Indians who fed off the land, then by Spanish settlers who grazed cattle there, and finally by European immigrant farmers who introduced into the valley grapes and prunes from France, and pear, apricot, and other fruit trees. For a time the valley produced a third of the world's prunes and became nationally known for its fruit and nut orchards. "Wild urban growth attacked the valley much as cancer attacks the human body," said Belser, who found himself virtually powerless to slow or channel that growth. "What so recently had been a beautiful, productive garden was suddenly transformed into an urban anthill." Today the majority of the orchards are gone. The paving and building over of so much absorbent soil has brought about serious flooding of many populated areas during the rainy season, while the heavy demand for water the rest of the year threatens to exhaust the underground supply. The water table already is so depleted in many places that the land over it is sinking. The onceclean air has been discolored and poisoned by the glut of automobiles and some of the county's not-so-clean industry, and smog from San Francisco and Oakland, trapped by the mountains, adds to the pollution. The cost of borrowing money to rapidly install sewers, pave streets, build and staff schools, and provide police and fire protection for so many people over so large an area has put the county and several of its cities deeply into debt and burdened their residents with steadily increasing tax bills. No money is available, for instance, to pay for a mass transit system that could eliminate some of the automobile congestion. The welfare rolls are lengthening with the names of fruit packers, canners, and other low-paid and otherwise unskilled agricultural workers who cannot find jobs in the county's new highly skilled, technical economy. Crime has increased so much that all of the county's jails are overcrowded, and its officials have borrowed space in an underused facility in San Mateo County. The views of the mountains, the deep green of the orchards, and bright colors of the fruit blossoms have almost completely disappeared, and little public park land has been developed to replace them. Indeed, the most scenic spots left in the valley may be the carefully tended and regularly watered tropical greenery along the shoulders of the county's many freeways. A private park advertises its trees and flowers for those who wish to pay to wander among them for a few hours. Otherwise, only the giant, enclosed shopping center of Eastgate, with its artificial climate, gaudy metal sculpture, concrete and tile terraces, and man-made fountains is left for families who once enjoyed weekend drives through the lost outdoor beauty of the "Valley of Heart's Delight." Santa Clara County has become the mass media's favorite symbol of the evil of rapid suburbanization. "Urbanists cite it as the archtypal slurb, a sprawling confusion," Business Week noted. "Growth came so fast . . . and with such disastrous results," Newsweek concluded, "that the experience serves as a dire warning of what can happen if residents fail to watch what is happening to their community." Prince George's, surrounding the eastern half of the District of Columbia, was definitely on the city's wrong side of the tracks. The main thrust of previous growth had been from Washington's more fashionable western and northern neighborhoods out into Virginia and Montgomery County, Maryland, where the higher, more attractive wooded ground was. But a growing demand for less expensive housing for younger families, new residents in the area, and lower-income whites running from an expanding black population eventually sent developers like Rocks out to the less desirable low ground of Prince George's. Fortunes were made and the face of the county changed in a generation. Nothing of such obvious value as the orchards of the Santa Clara Valley was destroyed by the exploitive development of Prince George's. Instead, it was the potential for decent living that was ruined. Today, the county's streets are congested with traffic and dangerous to travel, regular public transportation does not serve most of the county, nothing can be reached on foot, and sidewalks themselves are nonexistent in many places, Schools are still overcrowded in some neighborhoods, there are far too few parks and recreational facilities, raw sewage from overloaded sewers and septic tanks flows into streams and rivers, and poorly graded denuded soil has eroded so badly that some parts of the county look like abandoned strip-mining sites. Housing just a decade or two old is deteriorating into slums. Unemployment is rising steadily in a suburb with little industry, and local taxes have been raised to the highest levels in the high-tax Washington area in a nevertheless ineffectual attempt to cope with these problems. Even before its staggering population expansion slowed, Prince George's County had rapidly become the poor man of the Washington suburbs. Garden apartments were built most frequently in Prince George's County because they promised the biggest profits for the smallest investment. Three stories was the height limit under county regulations for a building without elevators or expensive deep foundations. Fireproofing, parking, open space, and other requirements were also much less stringent, and hence less costly, for these buildings than for high-rises. The garden apartments, moreover, could be built on ground too steep or otherwise unsuitable for singlefamily houses. Of course, when costly precautions were not taken, steep ground eroded badly when trees were uprooted and dirt bulldozed around. Buildings constructed as cheaply as possible, and then traded among owners interested in them only as lucrative tax shelters, also were bound to deteriorate quickly. Predictably, some of the apartments in Prince George's County came almost to resemble South American hillside barrios. But profit, rather than sound housing or environmental protection, was the goal in Prince George's, and the key to the largest profits was zoning. Even in a suburb where overly rapid growth has proved to be so obviously disastrous, the "growth is good" syndrome has not been defeated. Rather than stopping to patch the tears rent in its fabric of life by past development and then carefully making and sticking to workable plans for the county's future, the new government is rushing ahead to compete with Washington's other suburbs for still more development. The real estate speculators are still the real planners of what is left to become the Prince George's County of the future.