courtesy of The New York Times July 16, 2000 NEVADA CITY                  [ jump to Sonoma County part]  Internet's Wealth Jolts Rural Towns By EVELYN NIEVES Photographs by Don Preisler for The New York Times In Nevada City, Calif., a Gold Rush-era town, house construction and prices have increased, but the downtown has kept its small-town flavor. EVADA CITY, Calif., July 11 -- The regulars at Moore's Café are holding court at the counter, nursing refills of coffee. Cars amble down Broad Street beside the horse-drawn carriages. Tourists browse the pottery and jewelry stores. Hunch-shouldered teenaged boys stand on random corners, looking a little bored.  These are the good old days, fading fast. Change is in the air in this Gold Rush-era town (population: 2,900) 150 miles northeast of San Francisco. Rush hour on Broad Street has become a bear. Housing prices have jumped higher in a year than almost anywhere else in California. McMansions are springing up near old hippie cabins in the woods.  Next door in Grass Valley, a Starbucks has opened in the historic district.  The old Gold Rush has met the new Gold Rush, and they are not exactly hitting it off. The high-tekkies have arrived here with a splash, jolting the pretty country towns along the Sierra Nevada foothills like ice-water in the face. "Some people just don't get it," said Mayor Kerry Arnett of Nevada City, who runs a video store. "They choose to come here because of the unique ambience, then they start asking for a 7-Eleven."  The Gold Rush towns, 200 miles away from San Jose and the center of the dot-com universe, are witnessing firsthand the infinite reach of the new technology. Companies and individuals are branching away from the congested, hyper-expensive burgs of Silicon Valley in recent years, inexorably altering life in towns that have worn the label "sleepy" with pride and joy. The Route 101 corridor of Sonoma County, wine and farm country two hours north of Silicon Valley, is now known as "Telecom Alley." Technology has surpassed grape growing as the No. 1 industry.  Salinas, an old working-class farm town an hour's drive south of Silicon Valley, is growing at twice the statewide pace, with 20 percent of new house buyers moving in from Silicon Valley. Near Salinas, Gilroy, the self-proclaimed "garlic capital of the world," has become a prime bedroom community for high-tech commuters from San Jose, 35 miles (but an hour in traffic) away.  Some change is welcome. Real estate brokers, of course, are giddy. And the tax bases are expanding faster than the towns can estimate. But along with the new wealth comes a new fear among longtime residents that their bucolic landscape and easy pace will be eaten alive by development and traffic.  "In one of our census tracts," said Mayor Anna Caballero of Salinas, "we have the density of Manhattan."  Limiting growth has become the No. 1 issue in towns through northern and central California experiencing an influx of Silicon Valley refugees. And as locals tell it, getting along with new people who usually have more money and bigger cars and more demands is a close second.  Longtime residents say it was probably inevitable that Nevada County would be discovered by dot-com escapees. Long a mecca for small electronics manufacturers, the county is now home to 66 high-tech companies, says its Economic Resource Council, and real estate brokers say at least 30 percent of new house buyers are high-tech employees or telecommuters.  As home not only to picturesque Nevada City but also the wild and scenic Yuba River, an eye feast of falls and swimming holes that evoke both Mark Twain and Club Med, this is a place where people aspire to live. A generation ago, the county began seeing a flood of artists and writers and hippies, who were eyed suspiciously by the loggers and working folks until the newcomers proved their mettle as good citizens.  Tom Bridwell, who restores antique cars, moved to the woods in the San Juan Ridge, just outside of Nevada City, and was one of those newcomers when he moved here 20 years ago. At the time, he said, he was looking around the state for a place where he and his wife could raise their 4-year-old daughter, Skye, and live in peace.  "We knew as soon as we saw it that this was the place," said Mr. Bridwell, now 60. He and his wife built a solar-heated cabin which is nearly halfway ensconced in earth. After the couple divorced, Mr. Bridwell, remained in the house. He likes to say he lives underground, though a wall of windows offers an up-close view of deer, owls, foxes and raccoons.  For him, the newcomers are a mixed blessing. "This lets the big fish play in a small pond and the small fish (Nevada County) play in a big pond," he said of the large companies, like the 3Com Corporation, the computer modem manufacturer, which have moved here. "But you get the traffic and the development and you wonder when will it end?"    Sonoma County is hoping it has that answer. The single most momentous change in the county in recent times occurred when Cisco Systems of San Jose plunked down $7.3 billion in 1999 to buy the Cerent Corporation in the Victorian town of Petaluma. The largest high-tech buyout of the year meant pay dirt for the employees of Cerent, then a struggling start-up with technology to speed up the Internet. Employees split a jackpot of $2.2 billion and began building huge houses and starting up companies in the county.  The wave of telecommunications companies attracted to the county by Cisco's investment (the company also bought Fibex Systems in Petaluma in 1999 for $320 million) has reached a critical mass -- at least two dozen companies have moved in over the last two years -- much to the dismay of many residents.  Much of Sonoma County still boasts the rolling hills and green landscape that attracts the city slickers and soothes the locals' souls. But corporate architecture and the oversized houses are springing up faster than the eye can process.  Last week, a coalition of conservation-minded groups won the right to place a measure limiting growth on the November ballot. The measure, called the rural growth initiative, would require that any changes for the next 30 years to the county's general plan on rural and agricultural lands be approved by a countywide vote.  "People are sick of standing by and watching greenbelts and open space paved over," said AnnaLis Dalrymple, a member of the Greenbelt Alliance, which helped draft the initiative, at a hearing where the county board of supervisors voted to place the initiative on the ballot.  For longtime residents, it's not just that newcomers chew up the landscape. Some also fight with their neighbors.  Carmenet Vineyards in Glen Ellen, which has been making wine in Sonoma County for a generation, is butting heads with an Internet entrepreneur who lives down the road from a property the winery bought. He objects to the company's plan, which received a permit, for a warehouse to store 125,000 cases of wine a year (on the grounds that it will create noise and pollution) and is circulating a petition to have the permit rescinded.   In Salinas, which for so long has been described as "struggling" that the word seems part of its name, big house developments, new malls and chain stores are replacing farms and open land at such a pace that it is beginning to look like a suburb.  For the Chamber of Commerce, the news is all good. But the low-wage workers, many of them immigrants, who have counted on one day buying a house here are frustrated by the prices and the seemingly easy money of their new neighbors.  Juan Gonzalez Jr., a 31-year-old father of four who works on a vegetable farm, said that he drives out of the way to avoid the shiny new white houses along the highway. That way, he said, his children do not ask why they cannot live there and "I avoid the envy for gaudy material things."  © 2000 New York Times