Close-Up: Two Boom Towns Moreno Valley Home of the Y-Chop

By GUS LEE Gus Lee is the author of China Boy.

What is the California Dream? And whatever it is, where can it be found? In the past seven years, 118,000 modern-day pathfinders have located a form of it in Moreno Valley, a new city 70 miles southeast of Los Angeles and 42 miles from Disneyland.

Stand in the Lake Perris foothills and look north to the hard browns and purples of the Badland hills and the San Gorgonios Mountains: between the lake and the peaks, Moreno Valley sprawls across the desert floor. While dust devils dance on the shimmering sand, summer heat relentlessly fills all spaces. This is pioneer and pathfinder country, a desert that developers turned into the mother of all real estate opportunities by diverting water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and the Oroville reservoir, far to the north. This is a place for hardworking parents, with wagon-train hearts, seeking picket-fenced yards, swing sets and quiet streets, for people who can endure temperatures in the 100s and can drive three hours a day to work and back.

I call these people Y-CHOPs -- Young Commuting Home-Owning Parents -- a new version of an old ideal of the American nuclear family. They have come to Moreno Valley because a home in more established California cities can cost as much as a space shuttle. In "MoVal" a typical four-bedroom house on a 7,500- sq.-ft. lot costs $140,000. The affordable homes and quality of life have made Moreno Valley the fastest growing city in America.

Today three out of four working "MoVallers" merge with thousands of other competitive freeway high achievers driving on gas, caffeine, ambition, ozone depletion and sleep deprivation for the two hours of freewaying to Los Angeles or the 1 1/2-hour drive to Orange County. This mass evacuation leaves MoVal half empty during the day. But the American urge for home ownership and its coveted symbols -- a swing in the yard, idyllic neighborhoods and progressive public schools -- is so powerful that the commute is accepted as part of the natural price of the Dream, a bearable surcharge on happiness, part of being a Y-CHOP.

Most Y-CHOPs are white. The evolving MoVal family has one parent commuting to work and one staying home with two children in a single-family dwelling, in a safe neighborhood with church and grandparents nearby. You can almost see Ward, June, Wally and Beaver Cleaver in the house across the street and hear the rush of a tail-finned T-Bird cruising by, with Elvis and Buddy Holly blasting from the radio through tinny pre-Dolby speakers. Many of the streets are laid out in that cookie-cutter pattern of curves and cul-de-sacs familiar from Steven Spielberg movies. You know the scene: a tract-house version of the Norman Rockwell family seated at the breakfast table, dog in the corner waiting breathlessly for some scraps. In the congestion of all these American icons, say hello to Moreno Valley in the 1990s.

Kristin and Bo Knutson are Y-CHOPs who came to Moreno Valley in 1988. They were looking for a place for Kristin's parents to retire, but it was so beguilingly peaceful and appealingly inexpensive that they decided to stay. Now Kristin's parents provide a presence for Zak, 17, and help raise Alana, 1. Kristin believes that the combination of town and school is better for her children than that in their former home. She commutes three hours a day to her neonatal intensive-care nursing job at Childrens Hospital of Orange County. For the first time, the Knutsons have enough living space; at night they hear crickets. Kristin is articulate, insightful, responsible -- though Y-CHOPs is an anagram for psycho, Y-CHOPs are anything but. "This is a new community," Kristin says. "We have an opportunity to influence the future, to shape it. Older cities are set and hard to change." The order of their home, the front- yard bougainvillea, the serenity of the neighborhood -- all say, as emphatically as her words, that moving to MoVal was the right thing for her and her family.

One reason is that MoVal is also a place for PY-CHOPs -- the Parents of Young Commuting Home-Owning Parents. Ivy Crawford, a retired county senior- citizen outreach worker, moved from Los Angeles to MoVal in 1984 for "peace and quietness" and the pleasure of being near her two * granddaughters. How would she feel if she were unable to spend as much time with a second generation of children? She smiles and says, "I'd go crazy if I couldn't see them every day."

For MoVal's mayor, Judy Nieburger, and her staff of professional managers and energetic volunteers, the big challenge is protecting the quality of life while the population expands. Two-thirds of MoVal workers have some college education, and the percentage of residents with bachelor's degrees is increasing. Three out of four workers are between the ages of 25 and 44. They are neatly distributed among blue collar, technical, professional and management, with the vast majority full-time workers. The city has attracted a business from Asia -- Borneo International Furniture -- but is still seeking major American companies that will help MoVal dedicate its human energy to work and home, rather than to work, home and the freeways. Having a big employer in the neighborhood would help eliminate the Y-CHOP dilemma: families need safety and community, but to attain them, one or both parents must spend a major portion of life on the road.

It is self-evident that children need time with parents, that sons need the time of their fathers. The failure to universally fulfill these needs represents the high price Y-CHOPs pay to live like Ward, June, Wally and the Beave. So far the trade seems worth it, but they would much rather not have to make the choice. Until they can drop the c from their acronym, the Y-CHOPs' version of the California Dream will not be complete.