To Work, Town Needs Jobs
MOUNTAIN HOUSE, Calif. — Isabela Putzlacher doesn't think of herself as a pioneer. She's too busy building a dental practice from scratch, in a town that itself is being pulled from thin air, to waste much time on her place in local history.
When Mountain House Dental opened its doors in January -- with one dentist, one assistant and an office manager -- it brought the first private-sector jobs to this new town, where the San Francisco Bay Area meets the Central Valley.
Three jobs down, 21,997 to go.
Named for a settlement that served Gold Rush wanderers, Mountain House is being built today only because its developers promised to create a potent mix that would elude much of California: housing and jobs.
Planned as a self-sustaining community, Mountain House hopes to become an antidote to the state's far-flung subdivisions, where weary commuters shuttle between the houses they desperately want and the work they desperately need.
Nine hundred homes have been built so far. But someday, it will have more than 16,000 residences -- apartments, townhouses and single-family homes with in-law units for affluent multigenerational families.
Someday, if all goes as planned, it will have 11 schools, a community college, a town center and those 22,000 jobs. It would be the kind of sought-after employment that pays workers enough to actually live here, beside the windmills and cows of Altamont Pass.
Someday. Today, Mountain House residents still put thousands of miles on their cars each year and wonder when a grocery store will come to town. Putzlacher dreams of getting a new neighbor.
And San Joaquin County supervisors ask tough questions of Mountain House's developers as they vote to allow the new town to continue moving forward.
"This project was brought to us as a self-sustaining community, with enough jobs to sustain the community," Supervisor Dario L. Marenco said as the board voted last month to approve the project's second phase. "So how do we enforce that?
The Legislature has begun addressing one half of an intractable California problem: how to build more houses in cities where the jobs are. Mountain House is struggling with the other half of the equation: how to bring jobs out to the houses cropping up in California's fast-growing exurbs.
