Don’t Tread on Us

ORANGE — Vera Mater spent a few years back in the ‘70s dabbling in local politics, helping various candidates in the city of Orange knock on doors and distribute campaign leaflets. But then family life and business duties--she and her husband Fred own an auto-repair shop--began taking up more and more of her time.

So she gave up politics.

Neighborhood change brought her back into the fray. Two years ago, plans surfaced for a new senior citizens housing complex down the street, near a Montessori school that had also recently opened. The problem, as Mater saw it: increased traffic through the already overused T intersection in front of her house.

“We just finally had to stop it,” said Mater, 51, who speaks with the small-town familiarity of her rural Indiana upbringing. “We had accidents, hit-and-runs. Cars would run up on our yard. We’d park the cars out front to protect the house.”

It’s almost an article of faith that whenever a community project is proposed in Orange County--or anywhere else in the country, for that matter--someone will rise in opposition. Newtonian physics merge with behavioral psychology: For every proposed action, there is a sometimes equal but opposite reaction.

Nimbyism, policymakers and academics call it, making a word of the acronym for “not in my backyard.” The term carries a bit of a sneer, lumping neighborhood opposition groups in with Luddites and other foes of development, be it technological, scientific or simply a matter of not wanting Disneyland to consume yet another neighborhood.

Yet some who have watched and taken part in neighborhood battles argue that the call to nimbyism merely reflects one of our nation’s founding principles--citizen participation in our democracy. Civic duty is not the same thing as civic requirement, so getting involved is an option most don’t pursue, as evidenced by declining voter turnout. But people do get involved when confronted with an issue they fear will change the way they live.

To rework Tip O’Neill’s observation, all politics are neighborhood.

In Mater’s case, renewed political involvement grew from frustration. Motorists routinely cut through her neighborhood to evade backups at the nearby intersection of Tustin Street and Taft Avenue.

“We couldn’t even sit in the living room and hear the TV because of the noise,” said Mater, who has lived in the house since 1971. “When I worked in the yard, all I could hear was starting up, shifting and slowing down. We couldn’t get out of the driveway. I’d have to stand out in the street and block traffic while Fred backed the car out.”

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Then word of the proposed seniors’ complex fueled fears of even more traffic. Mater rallied neighbors to speak out against the complex and to petition city officials to limit traffic on their streets. To buttress their argument, she took time off work, set up a lawn chair at the intersection and counted cars one by one as they passed by. The tally: about 3,800 over an 18-hour period.

Mater’s campaign of neighborhood agitation worked. After a two-year battle, a scaled-back version of the seniors complex was approved. And in April, the city barred through-traffic from the neighborhood. The daily tally now: about 1,300 cars over an 18-hour period.

“It’s unbelievable,” Mater said. “One lady neighbor said she wanted to jingle her keys, just to hear some noise.”

It’s no surprise to some academics that while more Americans are turning their backs on political involvement, people still get drawn into local issues. Similarly, it’s no surprise that the involvement comes as points of opposition.

“These are doorstep issues,” said Michael Elliott, an associate professor in the graduate city planning program at Georgia Tech’s College of Architecture. “They have to deal with the quality of everyday life. People protect and worry about, and get engaged in, threats to their own home much more than they will anything else.”

Some of that reaction stems from the belief that the political system does not automatically look out for everyone’s interests.

“That they organize around these sets of issues reflects, in part, a lower level of trust in government,” Elliott said. “It’s also the fact that urban areas have become more intense and that threats to neighborhoods on average have become more palpable to people. They have a stronger sense that they have to protect their communities because there is such rapid change.”

Typically, such involvement is fleeting. An issue surfaces, opposition rises, the conflict is resolved and those involved settle back into their routines.

That’s not been the case for Steve White, a 49-year-old Anaheim real estate agent who, in more than 20 years of challenging local proposals and initiatives, has become an apostle in the church of malcontents. He serves on the steering committee of the Committees of Correspondence, a coalition of local-issue groups that grew out of Orange County’s bankruptcy.

White’s pet issue: Disneyland expansion and what he sees as sweetheart deals between officials from Disney and the city of Anaheim.

“If you don’t get involved . . . then you’re abandoning the playing field to the bad guys, and they will take advantage of it,” White said sitting behind a worn brown wooden desk in his office. “They will use politics for their own particular ends.”

The “bad guys,” he said, are developers on the county level and “whoever the big dog is”--the dominant economic power--on the local level.

In a sense, he said, relatively small neighborhood issues have taken over the role that small-town politics played before our communities grew larger and their governing bodies less responsive.

“People live anonymous lives,” said White, whose faith in participatory democracy was forged as a student at Cal State Fullerton in the late ‘60s. “They don’t get involved in their communities, whether they’ve been here three weeks or 30 years. They don’t care because they’re turned off by politics.”

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Russell and Jeri Miller do care, and they have not been turned off by politics.

The couple live with their 6-year-old daughter in a comfortable two-story house in the northern part of Buena Park, a block or so from the First Southern Baptist Church they’ve attended off and on for nearly a decade.

It’s a neighborhood of small, densely packed single-family homes, some new and some a little worn by time. Children meander about after school, and so, occasionally, do homeless people, drawn to the area by the Rev. Wiley S. Drake’s program allowing the homeless to camp in the Baptist church’s parking lot.

That program drew the Millers into local politics, even defying their pastor--Drake.

In part, the Millers’ involvement arose from chance timing. The Buena Park homeless issue was percolating as they were buying their own home last May from Russell Miller’s parents, who had it built eight years ago.

“We worked hard to buy a house, and if we weren’t lucky we wouldn’t be living here,” Russell Miller said. “We’ve been saving many years for the down payment, just like every other young couple in this country. This has been a dream of ours, to own our own house and put down roots in a community.”

For the Millers, putting down roots also means getting involved in local issues. Hearing their new neighbors complain about the influx of homeless people into the neighborhood led them to host a meeting that firmed their role as inadvertent leaders of Drake’s opposition.

“The reason we got involved was because this issue was affecting us directly as homeowners,” said Gerri Miller, a receptionist at Omni Offices in Newport Beach.

Yet her husband, a private banking officer at Union Bank of California, said the issue was simply a matter of timing. The catalyst was a matter of belief.

“All my life, I’ve been very interested in exercising my right to be involved with my local and national government,” Russell Miller said. “But I’ve never had a personal stake in getting involved. Now, I’m a married man with a wife and daughter. Now, I have a deep and abiding interest in getting involved.”

Russell Miller recognizes that others don’t share that interest. He has spoken out at public meetings while members of the church, people he knows share his opinion, have sat silently. Some, he feels, are intimidated into silence. Others, his wife said, might be content just to serve as interested but silent bystanders.

“It could be they see other people speaking out and feel their voice is being heard,” she said. “Also, there are a lot of people who are just afraid of public speaking.”

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For James Howard Kunstler, author of last year’s “Home From Nowhere,” a critical assessment of 20th century American land development, the emotions that lead people like the Millers to act are easy to understand.

Shelters by definition draw people in trouble, and it’s human nature to seek some distance from those who make us nervous.

“These are institutions for people who are not functioning very well,” Kunstler said by telephone from his home outside Saratoga Springs, N.Y. “People who think they are functioning OK don’t want to be around people who aren’t functioning that well.”

Kunstler believes such responses also grow out of people’s uncertainty.

“Americans have very little faith in the future, as far as the physical fabric of their communities goes,” Kunstler said. “For the last 50 years, every new thing that’s been promised to them has made their lives worse. Every new strip mall, every additional housing subdivision has made their everyday world incrementally less pleasant.

“So what we’re dealing with is a complete failure of faith in the future, that it’s even possible to build anything new that will make our lives richer or more civically fulfilling.”

Kunstler recommends enticing neighborhoods to open themselves to unavoidable change.

“Give people a reasonable financial incentive to allow some public services to take place near their property,” he argued. “There are plenty of people who would be willing to live near a halfway house or a shelter if they received some compensation. The alternative to that is really an endless set of quarrels that will never be adequately arbitrated or mediated, endless problems that can’t be solved.”

Yet they do get resolved. Sometimes the neighbors get their way; sometimes they don’t.

But sometimes, just taking a stand can be enough.

Since Mater led her neighbors to pressure City Hall to ease their traffic troubles, she has retained an active interest in civic goings-on. She rarely misses a City Council meeting. But she also rarely speaks out, preferring politics as a spectator sport.

“I’m fascinated with it,” she said, sitting at the desk in the family car-repair garage on Collins Avenue, as traffic streamed by the open bay door. “I’m learning something new every time I go. Just the way the whole government works.

“What really makes you feel good is when you walk in there and the council members will acknowledge you with a little smile, or wave at you.”

Mater plans to keep her involvement local, speaking out only on issues that affect her neighborhood. And she has no interest, despite her new-found fascination, in running for office herself.

Participation has its limits, even for a woman who spent days counting cars and two years pushing a cause.

“I wouldn’t have the patience to put up with all the criticism they get,” Mater said. “I couldn’t handle it.”