A 1950s-style filling station and retro-looking McDonald's at the nearby shopping center help Ladera market itself by selling nostalgia for the past. It's "a place where you truly belong," reads the sales brochure. "It's the modern experience of an old-fashioned community," says Ladera spokeswoman Diane Gaynor. Yet it's unclear what "past" Ladera is trying to re-create; with homes in no less than 24 architectural styles, Tuscan villas sit next to American farmhouses and Cape Cod cottages. "Times are unsettling," says Penn State sociologist Stephen Couch. "We long for the manufactured past that popular culture has given us. We construct a small-town setting as something we'd like to get back."
Ladera is indeed idyllic. There is no trash or grime—just lots and lots of landscaping and jasmine-scented air. But 1954 it is not. New SUVs dominate the streets and residents often drive instead of walk the few blocks to the Ladera Flower Shoppe or Maggie Moo's Ice Cream.
Still, for Steve Fife, Ladera helps create the small-town feel he always dreamed of. The 37-year-old owner of a home-inspection business, Fife paused during his Boys Night Out to boast that residents take the time to say hi to each other and that his wife has become part of what he calls the stroller brigade. "She'll be like, 'We're having dinner with the Johnsons on Wednesday.' I'm like, 'Who are they?' And she'll say, 'I just met her at the park. They have a three-year-old, too.'"
Fife feels so comfortable in Ladera that he often leaves his front door unlocked. "We have an open-door policy. It's 'Come on in!'" he says. "Once you cross the bridge, your blood pressure drops. You're like, 'I'm home.'"
Leisure, Strife And Civic Life
What Fife likes about Ladera is precisely what the 1950s bred aplenty and what has been draining from our lives ever since. Sociologists call it "social capital"—the informal networks of people that not only provide a sense of social cohesion but also bring demonstrable benefits of health, happiness, feelings of safety and the civility of public life. Robert Putnam, author of the 2000 bestseller Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (the title refers to the disappearance of bowling leagues), argues that a community's level of social capital predicts even the educational performance of its children. The Harvard sociologist has also shown that the steady decline of social capital since the 1960s is paralleled by a decline in the ability to trust others—and sharply reflected in a doubling in both number and proportion of lawyers, uniquely among professionals. The transformation of social bonds has required a shift from informal to formal means of contract enforcement.
For Heather Parker, a lifetime of diminishing social capital made its sudden appearance in Ladera "too close for comfort." She points to the design of Ladera's villages with one entrance and exit. "Everyone knows when you're coming and going. It got on my nerves." That, contends Penn State's Couch, is "the good news—everyone looks out for everyone else. The bad news is that everyone knows everyone's business." In traditional subdivisions, he observes, people keep more distance. Parker and her husband are, in fact, moving to a bigger house in another part of Ladera Ranch that feels more like a traditional suburb.
Is it really possible to jump-start a meaningful sense of community on a large scale in 2005? "It goes beyond events and how to have a party," Couch insists. In the 1950s, developers didn't have to do anything to create intense civic life, notes Robert Fishman, a history professor at the University of Michigan's Taubman College of Architecture and Planning. "There was instant community based on a mass of young children. People wound up with too much of it. There was a sense of being swallowed up." As the 1956 best seller The Organization Man made clear, the suffocating sameness of the suburbs chipped away at individuality and identity. And residents in developments like Ladera do have a lot in common because they're mostly young families who are self-selected joiners in search of an idealized lifestyle.
Despite Ladera's relative homogeneity, people are most likely to connect through what Ann Forsyth calls the "pioneer effect." A professor of urban design at the University of Minnesota and author of Reforming Suburbia, she finds that real bonding occurs when communities fight a challenge together, such as the effort to promote mixed racial housing in Columbia, Maryland. Or they face the hassles of dealing with the tail end of construction or fighting the housing developers. "People initially have a lot of common interests because they all moved in together," she says. But as a development ages, that effect diminishes.
New Town Blues
There are some who think that the intensive social engineering that distinguishes Ladera may ultimately work against it. Becky Nicolaides, associate professor of history and urban studies and planning at the University of California at San Diego, is one. She argues that if people want to socialize, they will, whether developers build them a bench and organize an apple-bobbing contest or not. "It's an artificial attempt to create something that should be happening on its own," she says. "People are inclined to interact. You just do it." Citing urban planning legend Jane Jacob and her 1961 classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Nicolaides echoes the belief that too much planning can thwart natural community involvement. It has to grow organically, over time, to be real, she insists.
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