© Peter S. Morris, All rights reserved.
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I've long had a love-hate relationship with Orange County. I grew up just across the LA county line in Diamond Bar, the self-professed center of "country living" in Southern California. Diamond Bar is more an OC kind of place than either an LA or Inland Empire kind of place. But it's also clearly on the margins of Orange County, leaving me feeling like neither a true OC insider nor a complete outsider. Absolutely seeping in stereotypical suburban sprawl, greater OC has long offended my geographer's sensibilities and preferences for both urban and rural landscapes of the traditional kind. The area's oppressive political conservatism certainly didn't help my attitude either. (Despite a steady drift left, OC remains a solidly "red" county in a no-less-solidly "blue" state.) Thus, it should be no big surprise that come college time, I fully embraced my new Berkeley-centered, NorCal identity.
Truth be told, though, many of my fondest memories have taken place in OC. They include iconic days and nights on the Balboa peninsula, at Huntington Beach, and, of course, Disneyland. But they also include less stereotypical experiences such as hiking, running, and riding through the north-county hills and canyons above La Habra and Brea, or simply cruising down generic commercial strips, such as Beach or Harbor Boulevard, in search of the next great cheeseburger or taco plate. More recently, now that I have two young sons of my own, my wife and I frequently make the drive down the 405 from our Los Angeles home for a day of fun in OC. This photo essay is derived from a handful of those outings, including the two most recent on back-to-back days over the Memorial Day weekend (2005).
One thing that fascinates me about Orange County--like Southern California as a whole--is how it both lives up to and defies its popular OC image. That image recently has taken a higher profile thanks to both an underrated feature film starring Jack Black ("Orange County") and, more importantly, the Fox prime-time soap/drama, "The OC", which I'm somewhat embarrassed to confess became a guilty habit of mine. The show's appeal to me was two-fold. First, as a geographer, I found simple pleasure in recognizing all of the LA county locales (Palos Verdes, Redondo Beach's King Harbor, Marina del Rey, Dockweiler) that stand in for coastal Orange County as the show's exterior backdrop. Second, the show's over-the-top portrayal of angst-ridden, master-planned, uber-affluent, ultra-materialistic, lily-white, Newport-focused suburbia was not only palatable, but actually provocatively entertaining, because of how self-aware the show's cast and writers were of their myth making. This is tongue-in-cheek caricature at its best, and it provides a great foil against which to compare/contrast the real Orange County.
So what exactly is the "real" Orange County? According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Orange County is home to nearly three million people, making it the second-largest county in the largest state in the country, and the fifth-largest county nationwide. Indeed, if it were its own state, Orange County would rank in 30th place, about a half-million souls behind Connecticut in 29th place and just ahead of Iowa in 31st place. Besides being a big place, Orange County is also far more urban (rather than suburban) than its popular image would suggest:
Orange County is densely populated. According to the 2000 Census, out of more than three thousand counties nationwide, OC ranks all the way up in 26th place with 3,606 people per square mile. Only the entirely urban San Francisco county is denser in the state of California. While a simple measure of crude population density is not the only, or even the best, way to measure "sprawl", OC's high national ranking certainly runs counter to what many would expect for such a suburban place.
The detached single-family home does NOT dominate Orange County (at least not any more than it does the rest of the USA). Yes, at 51%, detached single-family homes are the most common type of housing in OC, followed somewhat distantly by large apartment buildings with 20+ units (13%) and attached single-family homes (13%). But the detached single-family home is actually more common statewide (56%) and nationwide (60%) than in OC.
Orange County is ethnically diverse. True, for a major metropolitan county, OC has a remarkably small Afro-American population, with its approximately 50,000 blacks accounting for less than two percent of the population. But OC isn't generically "white" either. Close to 400,000 Asian-Americans of various identities and nearly 900,000 Latinos together account for as much as 45% of the county's population. For every Newport Beach and Mission Viejo in the south county, there's a Santa Ana or Westminster in the north county.
Orange County is not uniformly affluent. While median county-wide housing values and household incomes do indeed compare favorably to the national average, as much as 10 percent of the county's population is officially living in poverty.
There is, however, at least one stereotype that fits the real OC like a glove: Orange County is beholden to the automobile. Fully three-quarters (77%) of the employed workforce in 2000 reported driving alone to work, and another 13% carpooled. That leaves just one person in ten who walked, biked, skateboarded, worked at home, took public transportation, or found some other means to get to work. These numbers aren't all that different that either the nationwide or statewide figures, but compared to other highly-populated metropolitan counties, OC is all about the car. Up state in San Francisco, for example, 31% of the workers take public transportation and only 40% drive solo. Across the country in Baltimore, only 55% drive solo, and more people there walk to work (7%) than all the people in OC who take anything other than a private car combined. Of course, the antithesis of automotive Orange County is New York City, where on Manhattan, just 11% drive or carpool to work, while 60% take public transit and 22% walk. Even in neighboring Los Angeles County, as much as 7% of the workforce takes public transportation and "just" 70 percent drive solo.
The focus of this photo tour, then, is the experience of walking in Orange County. Given my interests, I'll put together a similar presentation in the future regarding cycling in OC, but since my sons are still on training wheels and tricycles, my family and I pursue the OC outdoors (both rural and urban) on foot. I'm not an automobile-hater; I very much love to drive and am a keen fan of many motor sports. Also, I don't want to paint too one-sided of a picture, because if walking in OC was so bad, then we wouldn't keep returning. Nonetheless, for all that is very much worthy of celebrating in Orange County, it's definitely missing something. Spaces and places built for the pedestrian, with all of the energy and creative and enjoyable serendipity that vibrant pedestrianism makes possible, are simply too few and too far between. As long as that remains the case--which seems likely far into the foreseeable future--Orange County will never live up its potential status as a truly world-class (sub)urban place.
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