A wild ride on cycles of boom and bust

As it happened, the first Sunday that Chiordi attended Palm Canyon was the final one for the founding pastor. Before he moved on to a new assignment, Tom De Vries handed out racing batons and read a passage from First Corinthians: "Know ye not that they which run in a race run all, but one receiveth the prize? So run, that ye may obtain."

Moreno Valley and Chiordi both stayed in the race. And quietly, the cycle turned. A new medical center opened. An indoor shopping mall was built. Department stores and chain restaurants began to pop up. City Hall opened, and council members no longer had to hold office hours in a strip mall food court.

The bedroom community of the 1980s was beginning to feel more like a real city: "The first time I really realized it," recalled Sally Baden, a Palm Canyon member, "was when the Burger King was going in. I said, 'Wow, we are getting big!' "

In time Moreno Valley would add 50,000 more residents and many, many jobs. The city dedicated new parks and other amenities, financed in part through a utility tax passed amid the panic of the first bust. By 2002 the Riverside Press-Enterprise was editorializing about the "Moreno Valley Comeback."

Chiordi rode this tide up. He sold his business, went to work as a branch manager at an auto dealership, bought a new house and, as real estate values soared, refinanced it twice, taking out money to pay down old debts and for a family vacation. He had purchased the house for $160,000. It was now worth $420,000, at least on paper.

"I had the feeling that it was a good economic time again," he said, "and that it was going to last for a while."

It didn't.

The mortgage crisis has swept through all California, of course, but the effect seems worse, again, out here on the edge. In the second quarter of 2008 alone, 1,182 foreclosures were reported in Moreno Valley, according to DataQuick Information Services, a clearinghouse of real estate data.

By comparison, in the same period, Pasadena and Monrovia, with a combined population equal to that of this city, reported 101 foreclosures. Long Beach, with a population of about half a million, reported 263. Compton, roughly 100,000 in population, 239.

The numbers don't do justice to what can be seen at street level. Rare is the block in Moreno Valley that does not have at least one vacant house. Many have four or five. They are easy to spot. The lawns have turned brown and blinds have been removed, revealing a forlorn emptiness within.