The New York Times boasts of its prowess from time to time. It claims it's been "following the saga" of Beth Court, a "troubled cul-de-sac" in an LA suburb where four of the eight homes have undergone foreclosure.

Beth Court rose from desert scrub in the city of Moreno Valley during the development boom that spilled over from Los Angeles a dozen years ago, its tidy tile-roofed homes, each roughly 1,800 square feet, arranged in a horseshoe pattern behind leafy trees and palms.

The Times' writers go on to describe the rise of the neighborhood, which is the ultimate suburb in the sense Atrios rails against: car-dependent, fueled by commuter jobs miles distant, built in an unsustainable and unsupported bubble. The gold mine analogy explained by one of their sources seems oddly apt:

But a region that thrived almost solely on development has fallen mightily. Building permits for properties valued at a record $12.5 billion were issued in Riverside and San Bernardino Counties in 2005; in 2008, the figure was $3.8 billion, according to John Husing, an economist whose expertise is Southern California.
“You have to think of it like a gold-mining town in a Clint Eastwood movie,” Mr. Husing said. “Money comes to a place where there has never been any, and next there are tool stores, a saloon, a general store and so on. But the saloon doesn’t exist without the gold mine, and the gold mine here was construction.”

The boom went bust. This is not different in California's Inland Empire -- the counties running back from the borders of LA County and Orange County to the borders of Arizona and Nevada -- than it is in, say, the DC suburbs or than it was in the 1980s in Houston and Dallas.

But this time the attitude of the "survivors" is the one the Times chooses to designate as virtuous, and that of the "newcomers" is the one the Times chooses to designate as sinister.

American citizens who've waited patiently, worked hard, combined the incomes of their family members to afford decent housing -- these are painted as the invading horde, the dangerous and illicit, the somehow unworthy. The Times doesn't quote a cul-de-sac resident for this, but the "mayor of the block" who lives on a corner adjacent:

Ted Hanson, 71, who lives with his wife, Connie, at the entrance to Beth Court, on adjoining Parkland Avenue, views the changes in the neighborhood through three basic prisms: falling home values, growing safety concerns and blighted lawns.

Money uber alles. The people who lost those homes treated them like ATMs during the boom, and when the bubble burst they were unable to keep the payments -- sometimes payments amounting to several times the total value of the house -- current.

Equity soon became irresistible.

Ms. Sanchez and Mr. Winkler, the couple with two daughters, wanted a new car. So they pulled $15,000 out of the house. Mr. Godfrey and Ms. Saldamando, the schoolteachers, dipped into their equity to landscape their back yard. Mr. Blanco, the electrician, used it to invest in a lot in the desert, and Mr. Soto, the landscaper, picked up a rental home in the Central Valley, an agricultural area northwest of here.

The block’s first residents, Ms Hernandez and her husband, bought a shiny commercial truck, with dreams of expanding his trucking business. He pulled money out of the house nearly annually. And the couple from South Los Angeles used their house — bought for $152,500 in 1997 — as a veritable cash machine, refinancing three times before selling it in 2006 for $440,000.

Prudence was not part of the national psyche, but it's the prudence of those who didn't buy in at the peak of the bubble or use multiple equity loans on overpriced construction to finance their American dream, but who scraped and saved and worked to move up to more-sanely-priced homes, the Times excoriates.

And now, as most of the empty houses have filled up, long-term residents face contiguity with strangers, who have seized the moment to buy into a neighborhood that just two years ago was beyond their means.
A carpet cleaner who had moved from a small apartment near Los Angeles was brought to tears the first time he cleaned the rugs in his new four-bedroom home. A maintenance worker at a bakery who had waited two years for the bank to accept his offer on a foreclosed home now spends weekends proudly building an addition. A multigenerational family arrived in Beth Court from a mobile home.

It's the newcomers who are at fault, says the Times:

The blockwide birthday parties, neighborly fence-building and Friday chitchat sessions at dusk have become fragile antiques of the preforeclosure days as the new neighbors keep to themselves and the old-timers struggle to keep their footing. The street is staggering toward recovery, but for every step forward, there are three back.

The snobbery oozes out of every line, doesn't it?

Mr. Hanson has no truck with those who do not mow their lawn, keep their music down or clean their cars regularly, and he is widely recognized as the mayor of the block. While not the sort for gossip, he does try to keep a sense of order. He also pumps bicycle tires for children, employs them to watch his pets, picks up litter and investigates doings in unfamiliar cars.

“It breaks my heart to see what is happening here,” he said.

The Times considers itself the nation's flagship. If this is the attitude of the Times, it's no wonder the national media can't equate progress with change.

Twelve years ago every family moving into Beth Court was a family of newcomers. Twelve years ago appears to have been long enough to legitimize, in the eyes of the Village, a group of newcomers as the "old guard."

For three decades of relatively good times, Moreno Valley, the second-largest city in Riverside County, represented escape. The city’s first population boom came in the 1980s, fueled by newcomers who pushed prices up. Its first economic bust arrived in the early 1990s, through a combination of a statewide recession and the deactivation of a nearby Air Force base.But as always in California, boom times came again. During the 1990s, Moreno Valley became one of the fastest-growing cities in America, and it now has 190,000 residents. Now Moreno Valley, and Beth Court, can be seen as microcosms of life in much of Riverside County, where the unemployment rate — 14 percent in July — and the foreclosure numbers have replaced growth rates as among the highest in the nation. In Moreno Valley, 76 percent of sales from July 2008 through July 2009 involved foreclosed houses, according to the research firm MDA DataQuick.

It's not 1997 anymore (the year I bought my house, so maybe my prejudice here, as somebody who bought a VA Repo and clawed for every buck to pay the loan off early, and feels fortunate not to be in danger of finding myself homeless if my joblessness continues). Building booms are cyclic; economic tides are as sure as the tides in the sea, if far less predictable. I got my house as somebody moving out of a mobile home.

This year, in 14 ZIP codes in Southern California, including Moreno Valley’s, median home prices have fallen below 1989 levels, making places like Beth Court affordable for the first time to many new homeowners.

Their influx has brought complex crosscurrents of envy and gratitude — the sincere hope of established residents that the newcomers will fit in, accompanied by the gnawing suspicion that they are not unlike magpies.

The Times' condescension is grating. I didn't treat my home as an investment, in the sense of a money-machine. I treated it as an investment in the sense of a permanent residence, a home, somewhere to live and have my kids grow up.

I'm not a lawn-farmer.