Megacounties: The Boom Towns

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Still, many people flocking into the megacounties consider them a close-to- ideal blend of city and suburb. "There are few things you can't do here within an hour," says Orange County Teacher Greg Hickman. "You can head to the mountains, the desert, the water or a shopping center." Agrees Gemma Turi, a public relations consultant who switched from commuting into Los Angeles to a new job in Irvine, near her home in Newport: "It's like being on vacation except you get to live here."

But other aspects of suburban life are not in the least like being on vacation, and some burgeoning problems could even put a stop to the phenomenal growth. Among the worst:

CONGESTION. Traffic snarls are the No. 1 gripe everywhere. Offices and beaches may be close by, but getting to them can be as time consuming and nerve jangling as making the haul between suburb and city. During a stifling spring heat wave two weeks ago, one couple in Long Island's fast-growing Suffolk County took 1 hr. 15 min. to sweat through 15 miles of bumper-to-bumper traffic between their home and the ocean beachfront of Robert Moses State Park. Du Page County's Morton Arboretum, a popular spot for local outings, is becoming a walled fortress. Managers are erecting a series of 40-ft.-high earth berms to protect the trees and shrubs from the lethal effect of de-icing salt splashed up by heavy traffic on the neighboring tollway. Mark Baldassare, a sociologist at the University of California at Irvine, predicts that by the 21st century Orange County traffic will become so hopelessly jammed that "the people in Irvine, for example, will rarely decide to go to another village. They will stay in their own small areas."

LABOR SHORTAGES. Unemployment rates in the megacounties are phenomenally low: less than 3% in Fairfield County, Conn., for instance. Middle managers and computer programmers can be enticed by high salaries, but where to find the laborers to build the new offices, the clerks to staff the stores, the pump jockeys to keep the cars running? Not from the local working class; in many communities there is none. Manual and low-paid clerical workers cannot afford the housing prices (Orange County median price for a new home: $125,000); indeed, many of the children who grow up in those houses must move elsewhere when they start their own families. And residents fearing still greater congestion fight bitterly and usually successfully against construction of low-cost, high-density apartments.

Labor shortages are so acute in Fairfax County that the new hotels are recruiting at local senior citizen centers. The American Automobile Association has announced that it will move its national headquarters from Fairfax County to Orlando in 1989. The reasons, said the AAA, were the difficulty of finding enough clerical workers in Fairfax and, of all things, traffic congestion.