Riverside voters backing Measure A to limit roosters
09:01 AM PST on Wednesday, February 6, 2008
By DOUG HABERMANThe Press-Enterprise

This article is a study of transition. From reading the article I can see a Riverside of another era, probably one that looked much like the Ramona I knew in my childhood, mostly filled with farm and a sparse amount of housing for people who wanted to get away from the city.
As the years went by more and more people moved to Riverside to escape the city, but eventually the county reached a certain size and started to attract another sort of people. These people weren’t so much looking for a place to retreat but a place to where housing was cheap. Maybe these people were hoping that the growth in the area would continue so they could sell for a profit and move on to another growing area. Maybe they just wanted a place that was inexpensive, but not ghetto with its dirty streets, crime, and other signs of humanity.
It would seem a bit ludicrous for one to move into an area with farms and have a problem with roosters, but if I look at it in this light it makes a little more sense. Some of these residents with problems with country life, with their speculative buys, will eventually move on when riverside reaches its next growth phase. Maybe there will be some farms left but most farms would have been replaced with condos or apartment buildings as it becomes more and more difficult to run an Ag business whilst the area becomes more urbanized.
Maybe the area will become more like Escondido, with it’s farms in the hills where it is too costly to build residences in the because of all the rocks. Maybe Riverside will become like Cerritos, Farms are replaced by communities that resemble walled city on the hill tops, and for all the houses one is hard pressed to find a gas station save his/her life. Whichever form the cities of Riverside County take the one undeniable fact remains, the farm life is dead in Riverside.
Yes, some farm may be isolated enough to be spared the quiet death. For the most part anyone of meager means, read without enough money to own horses, will have to find another place to escape the city noise while man does what he does best. He expands to fill any given space, much like a gas but sprouting buildings, fast food joints, and shopping malls, much like spores from a fungus colony. With roads acting as arteries bringing nutrients to this newly established colony.