Projects
Dream Street
“I won the right to name a street in southern California,” writes author and photographer Douglas McCulloh. The chance win at a charity event launched McCulloh into an obsessive relationship with a yet-to-be-developed subdivision in Ontario, California. Curious about the construction process, McCulloh haunted Dream Street with his camera and interviewed the builders, workers, and prospective homebuyers to chronicle the evolution of this new neighborhood.
McCulloh’s work centers on the men and women who work in construction and the first-time buyers struggling to purchase a piece of the California dream. As the tract of land progresses from an abandoned strawberry field to a jumble of wooden frames to the prototypical California suburban neighborhood, McCulloh builds a portrait of an industry whose workers—most of whom are non-union and poorly paid—know the American dream is far out of their reach. Many of the hopeful buyers who visit Dream Street are turned down for loans as well, and by mid-2008, more than two hundred houses in the surrounding area were in some stage of foreclosure.
In the tradition of noted photojournalists such as Robert Adams and Bill Owens, McCulloh’s photos and interviews offer an insight into the human side of the process that has changed so much of Southern California from open ranchos to endless city in a single century. A prescient view of the crisis that was to befall America’s housing market, Dream Street’s story lends authority to the history and fate of Dream Streets everywhere.
Here is McCulloh’s own account of Dream Street’s beginning and an epilogue that explores Dream Street in light of today’s foreclosure crisis:
I won the right to name a street in southern California. I didn’t get to choose the location, just the name. The location was left to chance circumstances within the county planning department. That suited me.
The prize was provided by Jerry Eaves, chairman of the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors, shortly before the FBI charged into his offices and carted off papers and computers, and a federal grand jury indicted him on multiple charges of bribery and corruption.
The occasion that set this project in motion was the regional food bank’s annual celebrity chef fundraiser. I left my wife and friends and worked my way along the silent auction tables, not knowing I was taking the first steps into an obsessive endeavor. Papers on brown clipboards described each offering in the auction and gave a minimum bid. There were three twelve-foot tables of unappealing items—bottles of suspect zinfandel, a pair of movie tickets, coupons for a pedicure, dinner for two (beverages excluded), and two hundred dollars’ worth of free gambling at San Manuel Indian casino. But on the fourth table one clipboard spelled out these terms: name a street; minimum bid $25; winner will have three years to pick a name; the San Bernardino County Department of Transportation will apply the name to a new residential street. This was irresistible. I wrote the first bid of the evening on the top line—“Douglas McCulloh, $25.”
I told my friends that I was bidding on the right to name a street. “Cool. What are you going to call it? McCulloh Street?” As the evening progressed, others began bidding on the prize. I spent my time monitoring the progress and upping the ante. Thirty, thirty-five. Forty, forty-five. Fifty, fifty-five. When my bid of seventy-five dollars was trumped I gave it up. I’d already paid fifty bucks just to get in.
The live auction commenced for big-ticket items. I briefly leapt into the bidding for a trip to Rome, but the lawyers and businessmen quickly escalated the cost beyond my limit and I hadn’t had enough beer to do anything stupid. Then the food bank president announced the silent auction winners. “Winner of the right to name a street—Douglas McCulloh.” My wife had been slipping away behind my back to bid in my name. “How much did this cost?” She refused to say. I still don’t know.
After months of listing and weighing possible street names, I sent a letter to the county. “The name I have chosen is Dream Street,” I wrote. “I would like to find out the location of the street as soon as it is named. As I think you know, I am a photographer. I make this request because I would like to do a small project taking photos of this new residential street as it develops. Ideally, I could shoot photos starting with rough grading through construction and up to the point when the houses are inhabited. I hope you are not offended if I periodically phone to check on the situation. I’d hate to miss the start of things. You don’t name a street every day.”
Four months later, I received an email saying that my chosen name would be applied to an as yet unbuilt street planned for a new housing development. The site was a forty-acre field under the flight path of the Ontario airport. The farmer who worked it shipped to the LA markets and sold produce at a classic California fruit stand under the eucalyptus trees at the northwest corner of the property—strawberries, sweet corn, cantaloupes, melons.
I drove there within the hour. I parked my car on a side street and set off into the field under scudding clouds and the threat of rain. Since then I’ve spent hundreds of hours with a camera and tape recorder capturing Dream Street’s passage from strawberry field to neighborhood. The project is a penetrating look at the process that has changed the entirety of southern California from open rancho to solid city in a single swift century. Dream Street is now the largest street in a subdivision of 134 new homes.
Epilogue
Dream Street is in trouble. Dreams are open-ended affairs. By definition, they’re beyond your control, and some can break your heart.
On March 12, 2009, the Arroyo family was evicted from their house—one of the original model homes. A sheriff’s eviction notice was taped to the picture window. The following weekend someone came and gouged four palm trees right out of the front lawn and tried to dig up a lemon tree in the back yard. The place is now locked up tight. Paperwork on the front door states that the home is owned by “Aurora Loan Services, Limited Liability Corporation, Littleton, Colorado, a Lehman Brothers Company.” Aurora abruptly ceased originating new loans in 2008 and fired 1,300 employees. The Arroyo family owed $437,000 on the house. The County Assessor pegs the home’s current value at $225,000. An intruder has smashed the side gate and heat has killed the fescue.
Southern California’s Inland Empire is ground zero of the region’s housing crisis. Dream Street is at the heart of the trouble. As of March, 2009, more than forty-four percent of homeowners in the two county area were upside down on their homes. Foreclosures and forced sales have hit hundreds of homes surrounding Dream Street. From December 2, 2006 to March 2, 2007, five homes were sold in the 92316 Dream Street zip code, all standard sales. The same three month period ending March 2, 2009 saw 210 homes embroiled in what are called “distressed sales”—foreclosures, short sales, bank takeovers, or forced auctions. With one house on Dream Street already empty, the owners of three others tell me they are just hanging on.
As the sub-prime mortgage crisis savaged the housing construction business, I heard about the mansion Dream Street developer John Young was building for himself high in the Chino Hills. I decided to take a look, and managed to get the gate code. It’s “an exquisite custom estate in [the] prestigious gated community of Oak Tree Downs,” quoting Jack Luce, Century 21 “superstar” real estate agent. Widely spaced homes are set on hillsides dotted with oaks high in the rolling terrain where Los Angeles and Orange counties meet. A black BMW Z4 glided behind me on the undulating road. The place struck me as a new money version of Chandler’s neighborhood of privilege in Farewell, My Lovely: “Great silent estates, with twelve-foot walls and wrought iron gates and ornamental hedges; and inside, if you could get inside, a special brand of sunshine, very quiet, put up in noise-proof containers just for the upper classes.”
John Young’s house faces south onto oak-covered hills and has an elaborate Mediterranean roofline, smooth plaster finish, copper rain gutters, and a mirage-edge pool. It’s lovely, but looks like a wallboard doublewide compared to the Frank Gehry-designed Brentwood estate of housing developer Eli Broad. Broad was a pioneer who remade the single-family home into a mass production commodity assembled like any other by a mobile assembly line of workers shuffled from site to site. In doing so, he’s built half-a-million houses and a Forbes ranking as the 119th richest person in the world.
By all accounts, Young Homes is among the best, most honorable southern California homebuilders. But every production homebuilder in the country operates within the system initiated by Eli Broad and his competitors. It may be tough, efficient, or even brutal, but the system is firmly in place. Buck the system and you’re a builder headed for bankruptcy.
A worker who toiled on John Young’s house said it had been under construction for two-and-a-half years and totaled 11,000 square feet. I counted seventeen workers installing landscaping. Along the broad walk to the recessed front door, four men dug holes for what looked like sweet-blooming salvia. I wondered how much they were getting paid per hole. I thought about Eli Broad’s Brentwood lawn, big enough to accommodate Richard Serra’s 60-ton COR-TEN steel sculpture titled “No Problem.” Then I drove back down the winding roads and out the wrought iron gate.
About the Author and Photographer
