Several of the blogs I follow have been commenting on an interactive map doohickey that lets you chart the people moving into and out of any part of the US you may be interested in. Naturally, I selected my home county, and this was the result I got:

As usual, click the image to enlarge it. If it’s not clear what you’re looking at, black lines indicate people moving into the area, while the red lines are folks who got the hell out of Dodge the same year. The heavier-weighted lines represent the number of people moving between any two destinations. One caveat: the statistics used are all two years old.
Notice where most of those black lines — the inbound lines — seem to originate. That’s right, the newcomers to the Salt Lake Valley are coming in the largest numbers from Southern California, thus appearing to validate one of the most enduring memes of Utah folk wisdom over the past couple of decades: the “Californicator.”

I should explain that, I suppose. As you may have gathered from my occasional bitter rants, er, comments on the subject, the valley I call home has undergone major changes since I graduated from high school in 1987. Twenty-three years ago, this area was largely rural, at least out here on the southern end of the valley, where I grew up. Muddy water still flowed in open ditches along the edges of the roads; there were no sidewalks in some places; and many of the streetlamps were the same low-wattage bulbs topped with crenelated tin reflectors that had hung there when my grandmother was a teenager. I often grumbled about how boring the place was, how I wanted to live in a city, but I remember secretly adoring the broad horizons, the open sky, and I especially loved the sensations I experienced when driving my Galaxie past freshly irrigated fields at night with the top down. The temperature would abruptly drop ten degrees and the air would become downright humid, a shocking change from the usual Utah aridity. Sometimes the sweet, honey-like odor of blooming alfalfa would ride in on the moist breeze. And then just as suddenly it was hot and dry again as I passed the field’s boundary, like a desert mirage vanishing as you overtake it.

And then, in what seems like the blink of an eye, even though it’s actually taken two decades, that familiar, broken-in and broken-down landscape vanished. The fields are just about all gone, and most of the valley is now a crowded, gridlocked, subdivided, strip-malled, chain-stored, beige-stucco’d hellhole, and it’s getting worse with each passing year. Our air quality along the Wasatch Front consistently ranks among the worst in the entire nation, you can’t go 1,000 feet without a red light stopping you or some idiot in a minivan cutting you off, and the vistas have gotten considerably more claustrophobic. And yes, we folks who are old enough to remember the way things used to be are pretty damn frustrated about it. That old Joni Mitchell song about not knowing what you’ve got until it’s gone? Let’s just say that for someone like me, there’s a lot more poignancy than cliche in that one. The worst part is how bloody impotent you feel in the face of implacable Progress. There’s just nothing anybody can do to stop or even slow it. So we watch helplessly, year after year, and sometimes only week after week, as the place that once defined us and nurtured us transforms into something alien and uncomfortable.

When old-timers are feeling glum and powerless, they tend to look around for a scapegoat. And in the case of this unloved boom of local development, the unfortunate target of our ire became the Californians who started moving here in the ’90s. Stories abound of Californians who sold their overvalued shacks for sums that were relative fortunes and came here to build the first McMansions. They supposedly were fleeing a failed lifestyle down there, but ironically they seemed to immediately start trying to recreate everything they’d left behind here. Predictably, this generated a lot of friction… and the legend of the Californicator was born.

Everything Utahns hated about the seemingly unplanned and out-of-control development chewing up our open spaces was laid at the feet of the latte-swilling outsiders from the west. The crowded roads? Just like the ones in LA. The gargantuan houses? Californians with more money than brains, courtesy of the disparity in the cost of living between there and here. The more recent skirmishes in the never-ending culture war between Mormon and gentile? Obviously fueled by the Californicators coming in here and wanting their wine and titty bars. It goes on and on like that, example after example.

And the sad thing is that it’s really bullshit. Yes, a lot of Californians have moved up here, and yes, they have worked to alter Utah’s culture so it more closely resembles what they left behind. But the real culprit behind the proliferating tract houses is the enemy within, our own children. Utahns tend to have large families, and few of those children are inclined to leave when they reach adulthood. Simultaneously, all those farmers of my youth are old now, and their kids don’t want to work the land. Those old guys have to do something with their land, and to fund their retirements. So they sell their fields to developers, and another suburb springs up to house the next generation.

We’ve done it to ourselves.

But of course no one wants to admit that. It’s much easier to blame someone else. Especially when you have a chart to back you up…

Addendum: I didn’t really consider the red lines, the ones representing people leaving this state, and that’s because I don’t have a lot of thoughts about the outward flow. It would be interesting to find out how many of those people leaving Utah are natives, and how many are outsiders who stayed here a few years and then decided to move on. My gut tells me that native-born Mormons, especially, just don’t leave, but I could be wrong.

it doesn’t really matter how many people leave the state, though. My alfalfa fields and open ditches are gone, and they’re never coming back. And even though I’ve grown more resigned to that over the years — I was virtually bleeding about it only a few years ago — I still hate it with a passion. Joni’s right: we really didn’t know what we had until it was gone. Damn hindsight…