“The house is one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories, and dreams of mankind.”
—Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
Fifty miles south of Los Angeles, at the edge of the upscale town of Newport Beach, Crystal Cove materializes along Route 1 like a developer’s dream. Rental cottages, dating from the 1920s, line the craggy cliffs leading down to the Pacific Ocean. Grasslands give way to pristine sands. The Beachcomber Café offers seaside staples and gazebos frame sweeping vistas. It’s the type of beachfront scene that has long served as a selling point for California living.
On the other side of Route 1, tracing a subdivided spiral, luxury homes ascend in tiers. Carved out of the 2,400-acre Crystal Cove State Park, these Spanish Colonial-style constructions boast scenic views. The Irvine Company, a prime mover in Orange County real estate since its early days, broke ground on the 635-property gated and master-planned community in 2000. Since then, it’s become a destination for living with nature. Current properties are listed between 10 and 70 million dollars.
A couple of times a year, I brave traffic from Pasadena and visit Crystal Cove for a beach day. Every time I do, I puzzle over this juxtaposition of timeless nature and time-stamped luxury—waves and sand and seabirds, on one side; infinity pools, topiary, and stucco on the other. It’s an obvious division, but hardly accidental. These vistas, after all, depend on each other. The beach boosts property values, and the private development underwrites this extraordinary public resource. This is the neoliberal logic of development subsidies and public-private partnerships, where investments serve the public good. Even if the Orange County Coastkeeper organized to prevent the worst of the water pollution from the Irvine Company’s project, the plan passed unanimously at the California Coastal Commission. Irvine Company vice president Gary Hunt summed up this entire market-driven point of view in a comment to the L.A. Times: “A good environment is not just good for quality of life. It’s good for business.”
Such a tidy rationale conceals deeper deceptions. While the Coastkeeper is highly justified in its fight for clean water, the Irvine Company’s concessions, and its claims to environmental virtue, only stand to obscure upstream concerns, from the industrial production of building materials to the influence of developers’ lobbies on environmental policy to the gross imbalances of money and power that make such a project possible. The statement denies the heavy effects on the coastal ecology and the historical acts of indigenous erasure and labor exploitation that haunt the façade of modern luxury. Public spaces like Crystal Cove State Beach certainly improve quality of life and do more so for those who live nearby. This self-serving mentality contrasts with the ambitions of environmental justice, which emphasize environmental impacts at the margins, as well as broader webs of social and ecological harm.
When I stand at the corner of Route 1, waiting for the light to change, ocean ahead, mansions behind, I intuit this conspiracy of wealth, access, and environmental health. And while this intuition typically passes as I head down to the beach to read or watch the waves, here I’d like to pause and consider in greater depth the political and aesthetic knot that binds together luxury real estate and scenes of nature. My suggestion is simple—that real estate is a significant and under-addressed force in shaping the environmental imagination. Private property subdivides land while ecology implies a sense of earthly interconnection. Real estate ecologies produce a paradoxically privatized and expansive relationship to the land, forging the terms of natural beauty while effacing the human and more-than-human costs. Though the region varies greatly in its landscape and social makeup, coastal communities like Crystal Cove tell stories of nature on their highly cultivated surface.
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A few years after the Irvine Company plan passed, as construction crews remade the coastal bluffs, the primetime soap The OC debuted on Fox in 2003, transferring the locus of teen melodrama from Beverly Hills 90210 to Newport Beach. The action begins when Sandy Cohen, an idealistic lawyer, meets Ryan, a square-jawed troublemaker from the Inland Empire. Sandy sees something in Ryan, so he invites the wayward teen to live with him, his real estate heiress wife, Kirsten, and their son, Seth, in the pool house of their oceanside mansion. Romantic entanglements drive the plot, but Orange County is just as much the focus, a sun-kissed, conservative enclave where board shorts and boardrooms go hand in hand.
In the second episode, titled “The Model Home,” Ryan grows worried that the Cohens will send him to foster care. His love interest, Marissa, and brother-figure, Seth, help him hide out in an unfinished McMansion, part of a new development from Kirsten’s family firm, the Newport Group. There, the jock Luke confronts Ryan over his relationship with Marissa, leading to a fistfight, a felled candle, and a fire that burns the model home to the ground. Throughout the series, houses, housing, and real estate serve as a proxy for power; on The OC, belonging is drawn with property lines. Later, when Marissa’s affections stray, she begins an affair with a landscaper named DJ, who works at her family’s estate. DJ is fittingly modelesque, but he’s Latino and working-class, and the scandal turns on the fact that Marissa is involved with the so-called “yard guy.” All the main characters on The OC are white, and nearly all are rich. DJ’s arc underscores the show’s racist and classist premise, which determines who belongs in the yard, the pool house, or the mansion and illustrates what George Lipsitz has termed the possessive investment in whiteness.1
The real estate drama of The OC is always bound up in the physical place of Newport Beach, from its sculpted veneer to its coastal ecosystem. During one telling plot line, Sandy’s colleague, Rachel, presents him with a potentially career-making lawsuit against the Newport Group, which aims to develop an environmentally fragile stretch of local wetlands. Cautious to take on his wife’s firm, he nevertheless embraces this chance to put his ideals into action. The events unfold with soapy precision: Kirsten suspects Sandy of having an affair with Rachel. Sandy accuses Kirsten of threatening “one of the most biologically productive ecosystems in the world.” Kirsten claims that the Newport Group will protect “350 acres of wildlife refuge and a natural park.” Sandy rejects Rachel’s advances. Caleb, Newport Group CEO and father of Kirsten, balks at a buyout offer from a community land trust. The conflict continues until Sandy learns Caleb’s dirty secret: The land is unstable and was never buildable to begin with; the Newport Group was holding out to dump its assets on an unsuspecting bidder. Sandy, then, bests his wife’s father, buying the wetlands back for a dollar. The story bears more than a passing resemblance to the Irvine Company’s efforts at Crystal Cove. It highlights how much real estate and ecology both play into the cultural imaginary, the idea, of Newport Beach.
Soaps aren’t a direct window onto reality. The OC has little to say about investment patterns or environmental impact reports. But it offers a great deal of insight into viewer desires, which circulate around a few families of beautiful people who seduce and deceive one another while laying claim to this rarified land. The show’s reality-TV counterpart, Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County, debuted in 2004 and confirmed an OC moment in pop culture. While hardly free from fiction, Laguna Beach has a slower pace and verité style compared to today’s reality TV, following a group of privileged teens, including early influencers Kristin Cavallari and Lauren Conrad, or LC. If we think of the Irvine Company’s project as a fantasy meant to stoke real estate markets and consumer interest, while materially remaking the land, then the sequence of Crystal Cove into The OC into Laguna Beach marks a dissemination of capitalist desire from the land into the space of fiction into the more nebulous sphere of reality-TV and back again. In the pilot of Laguna Beach, LC takes her love interest, Stephen, up the hill to check out the construction site of her family’s new house—similar to the model home where Ryan squats on The OC. LC shows Stephen which room is going to be hers. The camera catches them in silhouette from behind, standing in the house and looking out at the ocean. Then they walk out onto the torn-up lot and discuss where the hot tub will go. Gone is the high-level drama of The OC; instead, the house, static and unfinished, frames the suggestion of romance.
The examples I’ve discussed so far, from the actual cliffside mansions to the TV shows that glamorize them, are cultural artifacts of a particular moment, when subprime mortgage lending turbocharged the deceptions of the American Dream. If these artifacts indulge this dream, they hardly disguise the desires that congeal in houses on land. Héctor Tobar’s 2011 novel, The Barbarian Nurseries, explodes the illusion of the luxury home as something that is both owned and integrated into the natural world. A grand, comic take on Southern California’s uneven geography, the novel centers on the Torres-Thompson household in the fictionalized gated community of Laguna Rancho Estates. Much of the story is told through the eyes of Araceli, an undocumented domestic worker who lives in a miniature version of the main house. Tobar draws on the same clinical matrix of insides and outsides as The OC, but does so to satirize the obsessive propriety and literal gatekeeping of Orange County’s nouveau riche.
The novel’s plot is sprawling, as is its depiction of Southern California, but the inciting action happens on Paseo Linda Bonita, in the type of subdivision Mike Davis describes as “eutopic (literally no-place)” and “masterplanned only for privatized family consumption.”2 Scott Torres and Maureen Thompson have experienced an economic downturn, and decide to scale back household staff, including the gardener, Pepe. In the first scene, Araceli watches from the kitchen window as Scott tries and fails to mow the overgrown lawn himself. Scott made his money in tech, and his frustration underscores how insulated he is from the material production of his lifestyle. For her part, Maureen recognizes her beloved, labor- and water-intensive garden, which she refers to as “la petite rain forest,” may not be sustainable. We learn through close-third person perspective that she planted the garden “to hide the adobe-colored wall behind it and create the illusion that these banana trees and tropical flowers were the beginning of a jungle plain where savage tribes lived and vines swallowed the metal shells of downed airplanes.”3 The reverie is pure colonial kitsch; it reveals Maureen’s bad taste as well as the bad politics of wanting simultaneously to possess nature and to get lost in it. Throughout, Tobar renders the Torres-Thompson property in crystalline detail, allowing its contradictions to calcify on the surface.
As Scott and Maureen struggle, Araceli holds the house together. She cooks, cleans, and, following the departure of their full-time caretaker, watches after the two Torres-Thompson boys. Maureen, in a stroke of inspiration, decides to completely redo her garden, replacing subtropical plants with low-maintenance native varieties. While she feels like she is “taking charge of her little domestic empire again,” when Scott receives the exorbitant landscaping bill, he explodes.4 Scott confronts Maureen, and their exchange becomes violent, with Araceli as horrified witness. Scott and Maureen storm off, and Araceli is unexpectedly stuck with the kids. She decides to take the boys to Los Angeles to find their grandfather, whom she thinks might be able to help. From there, it’s tragedy as well as farce: After returning to the house, Scott and Maureen conclude Araceli kidnapped the kids. The police get involved, and the media picks up the story, broadcasting headlines like “Close the Border! California Boys in Alien Kidnap Drama.” Araceli becomes the scapegoat for Scott and Maureen’s domestic dispute, and the novel performs a spatial and narrative magic trick, showing how the petty power dynamics of the home readily escalate to the scales of city, region, and nation.
The Barbarian Nurseries works so well because Tobar flips the usual story of luxury living, highlighting the insights of the laboring class. Araceli was once an art student in Mexico City, and the social satire doesn’t so much come from above as filter through her knowing oppositional gaze. In this way, the novel pairs well with the 2017 film Beatriz at Dinner, directed by Miguel Arteta and written by Mike White. Beatriz, played by Salma Hayek, is a massage therapist and healer who works at a cancer treatment clinic in LA. She makes house calls to a wealthy family in Orange County, after developing a bond with the daughter during her cancer recovery. One day, she makes the long drive to Newport Beach to work with the mother, Kathy, who is hosting a party that evening. During the massage, their rapport is obvious if also transactional, and afterward, when Beatriz’s car won’t start, Kathy invites her to stay for dinner. Beatriz reluctantly agrees.
The guests are all rich, white, and conservative. They repeatedly mistake Beatriz for the help. They’re there to celebrate the state approval of a luxury Orange County housing development on a bird sanctuary, and the big boss, Doug Strutt, played by John Lithgow, announces at dinner that they will break ground immediately, before environmental groups have the chance to sue. Beatriz and Doug, then, form a dyad—a spiritual healer with Mexican Indigenous roots and a ruthless entrepreneur. Over the course of the evening, Beatriz sheds the veil of bourgeois propriety. She suspects Doug is behind a hotel that wreaked environmental havoc on her hometown in Mexico, and she challenges his high-capitalist bravado with escalating intensity. Beatriz believes that “the earth needs old souls because, you know, it’s very sick”; Doug agrees the planet is dying but says that’s what gives him license to do what he wants. Gradually, an awkward dinner party becomes a civilizational allegory, a faceoff between the powerful and the dispossessed. By the end, it’s clear that Beatriz and Doug can’t both survive.
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I opened this essay with a line, Route 1, that apparently divides coastal Newport—separating a postcard-perfect beach from an extravagant aughts-era housing development. This split is in fact a mirage, a necessary aesthetic feature of the spatial capitalist process Neil Smith calls the production of nature.5 You see its material and discursive engine inscribed on hillsides and represented in shows like The OC. Contemporary series like The Real Housewives of Orange County and Selling the OC perpetuate this fantasy of real estate ecologies, of private property and landscape bound up through the libidinal ecology of consumer desire. Works like The Barbarian Nurseries and Beatriz at Dinner, however, suggest a different line, one that is not so easily breached. This is the line between haves and have-nots, labor and capital, colonizers and the colonized, and it’s the world-building fulcrum to transform these overdetermined spaces of nature into ecologies that can sustain us all.
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Endnotes
- George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Temple University Press, 2006).
- Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (Verso, 2018), 4.
- Héctor Tobar, The Barbarian Nurseries (Picador, 2011), 20.
- Ibid., 94.
- Neil Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capitalism, and the Production of Space (Verso, 2010).