So....I decided to take a chance, be a good dorm resident, and brave out the DC tonight. It's been over a week since I went there for a dinner. But....when I saw what was being served (the normal slop) and the long lines to get the slop.....I just decided to leave.

Not worth it. Nope. They didn't even have any ice cream for me to take home. Waste my swipes. Humph.

I spent most of tonight wasting time. I couldn't help it that I stumbled across the on-line archives of the Los Altos Historical Association! (Yes...I know...I'm a dork.....bare with me here)

I just couldn't stop reading the scans of newspaper articles and flyers from the 50s when Los Altos and Mtn. View were in annexation "wars." Some of those Los Altans really hated Mountain View. They portrayed Mountain View in political cartoons as a vicious drooling dark wolf ready to attack Los Altos (portrayed as a fluffy white lamb).

Their whole thing was that Mountain View was going to take over the supposed "countryside" of Los Altos, and ruin their semi-rural country/suburban way of life. But....if you read between the lines of any of those old articles....you can see some pretty strong ulterior motives that stand behind the mantra of "keeping our semi-rural way of life."

MV was allowing residential lots to be subdivided to less than 1/4 of an acre.... making them affordable for people that were...well undesirable in certain communities in the 1950s because of their income and ethnicity.

So even though Los Altos pretty much got all the land it thought MV would take, they went ahead and developed all those orchards into neighborhoods that are now filled with homes selling for way over one million dollars. So much for preserving that countryside.

There was one swath of land however, that Los Altos couldn’t get….the area adjacent to my own neighborhood between El Camino and the train tracks. Los Altos wanted to cram all of its industry into that area, right up against Mountain View's oldest neighborhoods. That way, it wouldn’t have to put anything ugly in the orchards near its own existing residential neighborhoods. No big deal that it would replace the small orchards and farms that were next to Mountain View’s neighborhoods.

Regardless, Mountain View got the land instead….and developed it into a higher density neighborhood that is one of the most diverse areas of any place in the entire county. Los Altos was confined to the area south of El Camino Real. Things have come a long way since those years.... but the patterns of development set in the 1950s, and the resulting divisions in demographics that are rooted in those patterns still define the character of these two cities and the way they address certain issues.

So....it's no coincidence that Mountain View's population ended up being made up of about 45% minorities, and Los Altos', 15%. Mountain View has a median income of $40,000, Los Altos $80,000. These figures are from 1990.....the differences are problably more apparent now.

So now, in the same zip code you have the wealthiest of the wealthy on one side of El Camino Real, living in the semi-rural splendor of their nice homes lining streets without sidewalks on their quarter acre lots, and on the other side you have rows of apartment blocks where some of the poorest residents of entire county scratch out a living as the blue collar workers of the valley.

And along El Camino Real, the very street that splits this zip code in half, stand dozens of Hispanic immigrants, day workers, literally searching the street for jobs every day. Most letters to the editor regarding this issue in one city’s paper cry for the removal of these “illegals.” Letters in the other city’s paper speak of how to help them and immediately come to their defense when needed. Maybe we haven’t come quite as far from the 1950s as we’d like to think……..