In 2001, four months before the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, I moved from a small town in the Midwest to San Clemente, California. The main artery leading from the sleepy coastal town to the inland community of Irvine, where I worked, was Interstate-5, a freeway best described as a six or seven-lane parking lot on a bad day. To escape the worst part of the traffic jam, I often exited the freeway at Sand Canyon Road and turned northwest onto Irvine Blvd, which provided a quicker, more scenic route to work. The natural beauty, which included several miles of strawberry fields bordered on three sides by towering eucalyptus trees, provided my Zen moment of the day.
But one day, some years after beginning the commute, I turned onto Sand Canyon Road and discovered that many of the stately trees had been cut down, and bulldozers had uprooted the strawberry fields. Within weeks, a foundation had been laid for a large shopping center, and by early 2010; the remnants of the strawberry tracts had given way to rows of upscale homes and condos.
Large-scale construction projects of this nature are common in Southern California; in fact, due to gentrification, Hollywood as it exists today, barely resembles the Tinseltown where I worked as a musician in the 1970s. And while I’m saddened by the loss of popular Hollywood landmarks, the transformation of the Sand Canyon farmland in Irvine represents a political and financial trend even more alarming because it has resulted in the loss of American assets to foreign investors.
Read More
