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CIAO DATE: 5/5/2007
The Third California: The Golden State's New Frontier
Joel Kotkin, William H. Frey
March 2007
Abstract
For most Americans, California evokes coastal images, the sunny beaches of south or the spectacular urban vistas of San Francisco Bay. Yet within California itself, the state’s focus is shifting increasingly beyond the narrow strip of land between the coastline and its first line of mountain ranges.
This interior region—which we define as “the Third California”—extends from the outer suburbs of greater Los Angeles to the foothills of the high mountains of Northern California. It covers a vast and diverse series of places, from urbanized areas like Sacramento to great suburban regions to some of the most fertile agricultural regions in the world.
To a large extent, what defines the Third California is how it contrasts with the increasingly congested, expensive, and physically hemmed in coastal region. Virtually all the fast-growing regions of the state, from Riverside-San Bernardino to the south to the burgeoning suburbs around Sacramento are located in this area.
Yet not much public commentary about the Third California is positive. To some this region of California represents an increasingly failed geography, a place of rising poverty, environmental, and aesthetic ugliness. The Central Valley, for example, has been described as a product of “malign neglect”, shifting from an agricultural cornucopia into “an almost unbroken chain of smog-choked cities and suburbs.”2 Local media descriptions of the Inland Empire are rarely any more charitable. “Activists,” reported the Los Angeles Times,“believe the Inland Empire is evolving into an ecological catastrophe.”
