Palmdale and the American dream

I know it's bad when I'm citing USA Today articles (I promise to more substantive when my civic duty is over). In any case, the first color paper has an article about commuting which says 3.4 million people have what they call an "extreme commute" where they drive more than 90 minutes each way:

To afford a house in a neighborhood with good schools, low crime and Saturday morning youth soccer, extreme commuters keep high-paying jobs in the big cities and buy houses well beyond the traditional metropolitan area.

In California's Antelope Valley, across a mountain range from Los Angeles, commuters call it "driving until you qualify."

John Brooks, an economic analyst for Palmdale, a commuter boomtown 65 miles from the heart of Los Angeles with a population of 116,670, says residents literally get on the freeway and drive away from Los Angeles until they find a house with a mortgage payment that they can afford. Every mile away from the city drops the price of a house thousands of dollars.

Can I just say I really don't get it. At least three hours of my life every day to have the privilege of lawn mowing--I don't get it. But then, I never craved offspring and I thought it was a good idea to spend more than a decade of my life and tens of thousands of dollars so that I could earn the sniggering nickname "doc," so I am clearly out of step.

You may recognize the Antelope Valley from the opening of City of Quartz:

The best place to view Los Angeles of the next millennium is from the ruins of its alternative future. Standing on the sturdy cobblestone foundations of the General Assembly Hall of the Socialist city of Llano del Rio--Open Shop Los Angeles's utopian antipode--you can sometimes watch the Space Shuttle in its elegant final descent towards Rogers Dry Lake. Dimly on the horizon are the giant sheds of Air Force Plant 42 where Stealth Bombers (each costing the equivalent of 10,000 public housing units) and other, still top secret, hot rods of the apocalypse are assembled. Closer at hand, across a few miles of creosote and burro bush, and the occasional grove of that astonishing yucca, the Joshua tree, is the advance guard of approaching suburbia, tract homes on point.

The desert around Llano has been prepared like a virgin bride for its eventual union with the Metropolis: hundreds of square miles of vacant space engridded to accept the future millions, with strange prophetic street signs marking phantom intersections like "250th Street and Avenue K." Even the eerie trough of the San Andreas Fault, just south of Llano over a foreboding escarpment, is being gingerly surveyed for designer home sites. Nuptial music is provided by the daily commotion of ten thousand vehicles hurtling past Llano on "Pearblossom Highway"--the deadliest stretch of two-lane blacktop in California.

If you live in So. Cal. and haven't read City of Quartz, you really should. And yes, before you comment as such, I know I should read Ecology of Fear. It's on the list.