Tallying New Family Ties : The 1990 Census recognizes non-traditional ‘families,’ from single-parent households to unmarried couples.

Michele Allan, a Santa Monica-based real estate agent, and her daughter, Briana, 8, are a Los Angeles household.

So are Carol Anderson, 42, a Century City lawyer and her lesbian lover, Patty Dailey, 40, a restaurant owner.

And so are lawyer Grant Barnes, 41, and the aerospace entrepreneur-pianist, the writer from Taos and the USC piano doctoral student who share his eight-bedroom, three-piano, circa 1910 California Craftsman home near Hancock Park.

These households are representative of a rapidly growing contemporary phenomenon known as the non-traditional “family.”

It is a group that the U.S. Bureau of the Census hopes to pinpoint more accurately through revised census forms that will be arriving at the nation’s 92.8 million households within the next few days.

The Bureau of the Census, which will have spent $2.6 billion over a 10-year period in planning and executing this census, hopes for a 75% response rate. What it learns from respondents will help identify societal trends that may indicate needed changes in policy-making by both government and business and industry.

That the nuclear family--breadwinner father, homemaker mother and children--is something of an American anachronism has been well documented.

In a report in May, 1988, the city’s Task Force on Family Diversity found that only 22% of the city’s households were married couples with children. Another 22% were married couples without children.

And a report to be released March 29 by the city’s Consumer Task Force on Marital Status Discrimination contains a key demographic statistic: 55% of all households in the city of Los Angeles are made up of unmarried people.

This category includes singles living alone; blood relatives living together, such as brother and sister; roommates; domestic partners, both heterosexual and homosexual; widowed and divorced individuals; and single-parent families. Of the latter, the vast majority are headed by women.

Only 30 years ago--that’s only three censuses--Michele Allan and Briana would have been considered something of a demographic rarity.

Consider these statistics from Donald Hernandez, chief of the Census Bureau’s marriage and family statistics branch:

* In 1960, 9.1% of children under 18 were living with one parent.

* By 1970, that had increased to 11.9%.

* By 1980 it was 19.7% and by 1988 it was 25%.

This “enormous increase,” Hernandez points out, reflects factors such as the increase in the divorce rate--stabilized at about 50%--and in childbearing outside of marriage.

When parents divorce, Hernandez says, “the mother gets the children. That has stayed stable.” About 90% of single-parent households are headed by women.

For the first time, the census form this year includes a category for “unmarried partners”--defined by the agency as two unrelated adults in a “close, personal relationship”--a move being hailed by many, both in heterosexual and homosexual relationships, as a step toward recognizing that domestic partners in long-term committed relationships are entitled to the same legal rights accorded married couples.

Heretofore, the census form had provided for specific categories, such as single, roommate or boarder--but not unmarried partner.

The major objective, Hernandez says, is “to identify unmarried partners of the opposite sex. Today, living together before marriage has become a common first step for couples who marry. About half of couples who marry were living together. If you go back 30 years, it was a very small percentage.”

As another kind of 1990s family unit, Michele Allan and Briana, who live in Brentwood, represent one in four of all Los Angeles households that include a child under age 18.

And they are representative of an extraordinary societal upheaval. But, even as society has come to hardly blink an eye at single-parent families, it has yet to provide support systems for them.

For single working mothers, life is something of a juggling act.

Allan, whose college degree is in speech pathology, was a fashion model (often working on location abroad) before turning to real estate three years ago, partially because of the flexibility it offered in hours and some freedom to take her daughter with her on the job.

Another motivation, Allan says, is that “I got fired from two 9-to-5 jobs, my first two jobs after my divorce.” She acknowledges that tardiness was always a problem--usually stemming from some morning domestic crisis involving the child.

Briana is a frequent visitor to Fred Sands’ Santa Monica office, where Allan keeps a cache of art supplies in her desk. Briana’s artwork competes for desktop space with trophies Allan has won as a top saleswoman.

She often accompanies her mother to house showings, open houses and to present offers, much of this on weekends. Allan says, “I try to use discretion. The clients have never said, ‘We don’t want kids here.’ ”

A single parent since Briana was age 3, Allan is fortunate in that the child’s father shares child care, four days every 10 days; she also has household help.

When Briana is with her, Allan says, 6:30-8:30 nightly is mother-daughter time--”I try to get home, drop everything, eat dinner with her, play a game, read with her” before she goes to bed. Sometimes Allan then has business appointments.

Scheduling can be complicated, she says, and a single mother always feels that “Oh, my God, I’m not getting my work done, nor am I raising my child properly.”

But, she adds, “You always kind of remind yourself that you’re completely blessed if you have this child.”

Christopher McCauley, co-president of the city’s Task Force on Family Diversity and a member of the city’s human relations commission, speaks of the “new majority” that is being defined in surveys, such as the census and the report to be released soon by the city’s Consumer Task Force on Marital Status Discrimination.

Changes in the 1990 census form are significant, he says, because for the first time “the census will count both step-family relationships and unmarried or domestic partners.”

While adding the “unmarried partner” category, the census has eliminated some of what McCauley calls “negative language,” such as “nonfamily.”

In other words, the new designation is a recognition of the growing acceptance of the notion that what defines a family is its function, not some rigid structure.

According to Census Bureau surveys, there were 2.6 million households in 1988 with unmarried partners of the opposite sex and 1.6 million with unmarried partners of the same sex. The largest concentration was in the 25-to-34 age group. Only a decade earlier, in 1980, their surveys indicated 1.5 and 1.2 million such households, respectively.

Hernandez points out, “About half of couples who marry today were living together as couples before their marriage. If you go back 30 years, it was a very small percentage.”

(Another growing category, Hernandez says, is the number of young adults living in their parents’ homes, a reflection of both postponement of marriage for education and the economic and job markets.)

As a result of being counted as unmarried partners, McCauley says, “couples by the millions will be able to say, ‘We are here and we would like the same rights and responsibilities that other people enjoy.’ I think it will provide a data base for that movement.”

Further, he says, “It will probably undergird more support for some changes in employee benefit programs. It’s going to cause a lot of institutions to evaluate the way they define family.”

Ultimately, census figures could affect the way society deals with issues ranging from child care to insurance rates to frequent-flyer programs to rights of inheritance to family memberships in discount stores.

Jehan Agrama, co-president of the Los Angeles chapter of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), says her group is “trying to alert our community” to benefits that may accrue if there is a more accurate federal count of homosexual couples, whose numbers have been debated since the Kinsey report of 40 years ago.

(The 1980 census estimates of the gay and lesbian population in the city of Los Angeles ranged from a low of 152,000 to a high of 233,792.)

Benefits being fought for by proponents of “domestic partnership” ordinances include hospital visitation rights and bereavement leaves.

Agrama, 30, a free-lance consultant to the television industry, is in an 8-year relationship with a woman with whom she shares a home in the Melrose area.

Although some homosexuals fear that such information could be used against them, Agrama has been telling gays and lesbians who have not publicly declared their sexual orientation that it is doubtful they will be harassed or discriminated against as a result of census information, which the government says is strictly confidential.

The long-term benefits, she adds, could be significant: “People against gays and lesbians, and bigoted people, are saying it’s just a handful of us on the West Coast (who are homosexual). They don’t realize there are gays and lesbians in all walks of life and in all parts of the United States. It isn’t just West Hollywood.”

Carol Anderson, a lawyer who has lived for two years with Patty Dailey, points out that under her firm’s health care insurance, for example, “I can cover my children (two teen-agers, from a 13-year marriage) but I can’t cover my lover.”

When it comes to things like second-car insurance discounts for families, she says, “they always hit us with the same line--’If you want the privileges of marriage, get married.’ But no, you can’t. It’s always a Catch-22. It specifically and logically disenfranchises us.”

The 1990 Census, she says, will show definitively that “the so-called traditional family is anything but the majority anymore.”

Heretofore, she adds, society has been “trying to impose morals and models of the past on present circumstances. It has nothing to do with the lives of most people. It’s not just gays.”

Her own daughter, she points out, is aware that, if she marries and has children, chances are very good “that she will raise and support those kids alone. Trying to force her into the model of mom and pop together for 50 years with 2.3 children is absurd.”

Whereas gays and lesbians are largely accepted in Los Angeles, Anderson says, she gets correspondence from other states where homosexuals are in “desperate straits.”

She mentions a current attempt by the Traditional Values Coalition to deny equal housing rights to heterosexual couples who are unmarried. Then she laughs and says, “Of course, we’re exempt because as far as they’re concerned, we don’t exist.”

Grant Barnes’ household isn’t exactly a family, but neither is it simply landlord and boarders. Rather, he and the one man and two women who share his home fit into the Census Bureau’s “unrelated adults” category of households.

Barnes bought the house in 1987 and began looking for people to share it. A veteran of community living, first as an undergraduate at a co-op dorm at the University of Texas, he explains, “I enjoy the diversity of people. It’s a very sociable, convivial, congenial atmosphere.”

His current householders range in age from 26 to 41 and make up what he calls “a living community” of equal partners who meet regularly to discuss any problems and to divide up the household chores “according to whether a person is more comfortable sweeping floors or feeding the dog.”

Rental is based on size and amenities of an individual’s bedroom.

If there is a drawback, Barnes says, it is “a lack of complete privacy.” Prospective housemates are screened on criteria that include, he says, “how interesting they are, whether they’ve had any background in community or shared housing” and willingness to contribute. He would like to see a child in the house.

One of his motivations in sharing was economic; by sharing, he was able to buy a large house and to make needed renovations. On average, a housemate stays between nine months and a year. “Most people have brought very little with them,” he says. “They enjoy a transient lifestyle.”

Barnes is something of a rarity in Los Angeles. Not only does he not “cocoon” within his own private four walls, he doesn’t even own a car and commutes by public transit to his job with the downtown law firm of McKenna, Conner & Cuneo.

He acknowledges that shared housing hasn’t yet caught on in a big way in Los Angeles but he believes it has the potential to be as big here as it is in Europe or the Northeast.

After all, he says, “shared housing appeals very strongly to people who are in between things, in between cities or residences or relationships.”