Largest Cities Reflect Shift to West, 1990 Census Finds : Population: Los Angeles beats out Chicago as No. 2 in U.S. Irvine, Orange hit 100,000 in decade.

Six of the nation’s 10 largest cities are now west of the Mississippi River, and most of the 29 cities to reach a population of 100,000 in this decade--including two in Orange County--are California suburbs, according to final 1990 census data released Friday.

Orange County, despite a 25% surge during the decade that boosted the area’s population to 2.41 million people, fell into third place behind Los Angeles and San Diego counties among the state’s most populous.

With the news that the country’s westward shift has enlarged the suburbs and shuffled the roster of major cities, the Census Bureau also confirmed for the first time that Los Angeles--up half a million people since 1980, to nearly 3.5 million--is the nation’s second-largest city.

Chicago, which had been No. 2, was among several cities in the East and Midwest to slip in population. Chicago dropped below 3 million people for the first time since the 1930 census, and in the past 40 years it has lost 837,000 people--23% of its populace.

New York, meanwhile, remained No. 1 and grew by a quarter-million people to 7.3 million, reversing a decline that began in the 1970s.

The trend toward population loss plagued many older cities in the East and Midwest in the 1980s, but not in California and the rest of the Sun Belt West.

Houston edged past Philadelphia to become the fourth-largest city. San Diego jumped to sixth place in this census, ahead of Detroit, Dallas, Phoenix and San Antonio. Baltimore, which had been in 10th place, slipped off the list.

Friday’s figures are the last in a series of three initial reports on the 1990 census. Details on ethnic minorities, education and other facets of the population will come later. The populations of the states were announced earlier and they showed that California would gain seven seats in Congress, which would make it the first state to have more than 50 elected representatives.

The figures released this week normally would have been considered final, but this year’s results await a ruling on lawsuits filed by a number of large cities, including Los Angeles, Chicago and New York. The suits allege that the Census Bureau fails to count many individuals, especially the poor and members of minority groups who may be wary of participating in government surveys.

Critics have urged the Department of Commerce, which oversees the census, to make statistical adjustments to compensate for errors in the count. Yet some demographers doubt that such adjustments would make the census more accurate.

In Friday’s numbers, the fastest-growing American city of 100,000 or more is Mesa, Ariz., a suburb of Phoenix that swelled by 89% in the 1980s. In California, 42 smaller towns and cities saw faster growth in the decade, and 18 places here crossed the 100,000 threshold to rank as medium-sized American cities.

Orange County added two cities to the 100,000 club. Irvine surged 77.6%, to 110,330, and Orange increased 20.6%, to 110,658.

But they were far from the fastest-growing in the county. Two South County cities that incorporated during the late 1980s to ease growth pangs recorded the biggest percentage gains. Laguna Niguel’s population jumped more than 262%, to 44,400. Dana Point jumped 200%, to 31,896.

The biggest population gain, however, did not come in fast-growing South County but in the urbanized north. There were 90,000 more residents counted in Santa Ana during the 1990 census, boosting the city’s population to 293,742 and pushing it past Anaheim as the biggest in Orange County. Anaheim is now in second with 266,406.

Santa Ana had contended after the 1980 census that the city’s population was undercounted by 50,000 because the count failed to reach the large undocumented population. City officials started an intensive effort to get out the count before the 1990 census, and it paid off.

The new population figures should mean $4 million more a year when the city’s share of everything from state vehicle license fees to federal grants are tallied, a substantial increase that will help provide better services for the population it has had all along.

“I’m stunned,” said Councilman Miguel A Pulido Jr., who led the get-out-the-count effort. “This is beyond our initial expectations. I think 30,000 of those people could be accounted for because of new construction, but the biggest difference is we finally got a census that counted everyone.”

At the end of the decade, 195 U.S. cities were home to more than 100,000 people, a list that now includes suburbs such as Thousand Oaks, Simi Valley and Santa Rosa, which may not be familiar names outside California.

Most of the new cities do not resemble the traditional cities of the past. There is usually no Main Street but almost invariably a freeway at the heart of the city. Sometimes there are no department stores or shopping malls, and often no ethnic-minority neighborhoods.

Some of the cities are so new that they were not incorporated before the 1980 census.

Santa Clarita, one of the new 100,000-person cities, was a collection of unconnected subdivisions in the canyons north of Los Angeles in the last census. Moreno Valley, another example, was a mostly empty piece of desert east of Riverside.

These suburbs had the most spectacular population rise, but the census figures show that growth in California in the 1980s was a widespread phenomenon, altering the inland deserts and Sierra foothills along with the San Joaquin Valley and the older cities.

Every county in the state gained population in the 1980s. Riverside County, which grew by 76%, was the fastest-growing, followed by its Inland Empire neighbor, San Bernardino County, which grew by 58%.

The next 15 counties in growth ranking were north of the Tehachapi Mountains that commonly divide Southern California from the rest of the state. Amador County, in the Sierra Nevada east of Sacramento, was the fastest-growing Northern California county.

Although Orange County ranked as the 32nd-fastest-growing of California’s 58 counties, experts said the 1990 census numbers reveal an interesting phenomenon. Instead of displaying the traditional demographic pattern of residents fleeing urban areas for suburbia, the county has two distinct types of growth.

While South County booms with new houses and people, the older core cities in the north also continue to gain substantial numbers of residents, many of them minorities and newcomers from Latin America and Indochina.

“In a traditional sense, areas like Anaheim and Santa Ana would not have continued to grow, but they have gained population phenomenally,” said Mark Baldassare, a UC Irvine professor of social ecology.

“When the rest of the census figures come out, I think they will show that the county has emerged as a more cosmopolitan and urban region than it was a decade ago,” he said.

The state has eight counties with a population of more than 1 million; it had five such counties in the last census. Southern California has five: Los Angeles, San Diego, Orange, San Bernardino and Riverside.

Also, nearly all of the 456 cities in California grew in some measure during the 1980s. Three dozen of them more than doubled in size, led by Temecula and Palmdale.

The new data also confirms that San Jose, once a farming outpost, has surpassed San Francisco to become the largest city in Northern California and the third most populous in the state, behind Los Angeles and San Diego.

Just 38 cities in California lost population, and most were either small and isolated communities--such as Point Arena and Trinidad on the north coast--or pockets of affluence where the population is older and fewer children are being born. Villa Park in Orange County, Beverly Hills, Palos Verdes Estates and San Marino are examples of affluent cities in which the population dropped. Berkeley and Santa Monica were the largest cities with drops in population.

The pattern of suburban sprawl and of small towns and nondescript suburbs exploding into full-fledged cities--which have come to characterize California--is also evident in other parts of the country.

Four of the new mid-size cities are in Texas. Laredo, on the Mexico border, reflects the huge influx of Latino immigrants into the United States during the last decade. Two others, Mesquite and Plano, are suburbs of Dallas. The fourth is Abilene.

Two of the new mid-size cities--Scottsdale and Glendale--are suburbs of Phoenix. Two other new members of the 100,000-plus club are state capitals: Salem, Ore., and Tallahassee, Fla. Overland Park, Kan., is a suburb of Kansas City.

Lowell, Mass., which until World War II was a thriving industrial metropolis with a population well above 100,000, had slowly declined over the decades. But it has had a recent resurgence, thanks to a thriving new high-tech computer industry and has gone over 100,000 again.

Prosperity brought about by computer business has had similar effects on other parts of the country. For instance, Durham, N.C., where there is a growing computer-research industry, has grown by more than 35% in the past decade, and neighboring Raleigh has grown by nearly 39%.

Most cities and towns that grew rapidly this decade are in thriving industrial areas, or are near large cities, or have liberal annexation laws that allow them to expand their boundaries as their populations grow, said Richard Forstall, chief of the Census Bureau’s population distribution branch.

“These have been characteristics of California and the West. They have certainly not been characteristic of the Northeast,” Forstall said.

Since 1980, five cities fell from the 100,000-population list. Roanoke, Va., and Columbia, S.C., both had declining populations, but only within the city limits, not in adjoining suburbs. Youngstown, Ohio, and Pueblo, Colo., have been plagued by dying steel industries. “And Davenport (Iowa) has had a little mixture of everything,” Forstall said.

Even in cities that experienced tremendous growth, there was sharp criticism of this week’s figures.

“We still believe many residents were not counted,” Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradly said in a statement. “This undercount could mean the loss of millions of state and federal dollars needed to adequately provide services to those most in need. Ironically, these are some of the same people most likely to have been missed in the census count.”

New York officials were pleased that the city’s count did not fall as short as they feared. New York’s gain of 3.5% was higher than in early projections, and reversed a loss of more than 800,000 in the previous decade.

Detroit also got relatively good news from the census this week. The city has lost 14.6% of its population, less than first believed, and thus will not drop below 1 million and lose various forms of federal assistance.

Nonetheless, officials from these cities, along with many others around the country, continued this week to criticize the 1990 census for missing too many of the country’s residents. Overall, the bureau found that there were 248.7 million living in the United States at the end of 1990. Last October it had projected it would find 253 million, a gap of 4.7 million.

Times staff writer Eric Bailey and director of computer analysis Richard O’Reilly contributed to this story.

THE CENSUS: Counting Orange County

The U.S. Census Bureau released population figures for cities and counties across the country. The final tally for Orange County reveals several trends. The South County grew at an astonishing rate, but some sections of the urbanized north continued to swell with people.

Yorba Linda (85.5%) 1980: 28,253 1990: 52,422 Irvine (77.6%) 1980: 62,134 1990: 110,330 Dana Point (200.8%) 1980: 10,602 1990: 31,896 Tustin (56.8%) 1980: 32,317 1990: 50,689 Laguna Niguel (262.8%) 1980: 12,237 1990: 44,400 AMERICA’S 10 LARGEST CITIES

1990 Percentage 1980 Rank City 1980 1990 Change Rank 1 New York 7,071,639 7,322,564 3.5 1 2 Los Angeles 2,968,528 3,485,398 17.4 3 3 Chicago 3,005,072 2,783,726 -7.4 2 4 Houston 1,595,138 1,639,553 2.2 5 5 Philadelphia 1,688,210 1,585,577 -6.1 4 6 San Diego 875,538 1,110,549 26.8 8 7 Detroit 1,203,368 1,027,974 -14.6 6 8 Dallas 904,599 1,006,877 11.3 7 9 Phoenix 789,704 983,403 24.5 9 10 San Antonio 783,940 935,933 19.1 11

1990 CENSUS RESULTS

1980 1990 City Population Population % Change Anaheim 219,312 266,406 +21.5 Brea 27,913 32,873 +17.8 Buena Park 64,165 68,784 +7.2 Costa Mesa 82,562 96,357 +16.7 Cypress 40,391 42,655 +5.6 Dana Point * 10,602 31,896 +200.8 Fountain Valley 55,080 53,691 -2.5 Fullerton 102,034 114,144 +11.9 Garden Grove 123,305 143,050 +16.0 Huntington Beach 170,505 181,519 +6.5 Irvine 62,134 110,330 +77.6 Laguna Beach 17,901 23,170 +29.4 Laguna Niguel * 12,237 44,400 +262.8 La Habra 45,232 51,266 +13.3 La Palma 15,400 15,392 -0.1 Los Alamitos 11,529 11,676 +1.3 Mission Viejo * 48,503 72,820 +50.1 Newport Beach 62,556 66,643 +6.5 Orange 91,787 110,658 +20.6 Placentia 35,041 41,259 +17.7 San Clemente 27,325 41,100 +50.4 San Juan Capistrano 18,959 26,183 +38.1 Santa Ana 203,713 293,742 +44.2 Seal Beach 25,975 25,098 -3.4 Stanton 23,724 30,491 +28.5 Tustin 32,317 50,689 +56.8 Villa Park 7,137 6,299 -11.7 Westminster 71,133 78,118 +9.8 Yorba Linda 28,253 52,422 +85.5 Unincorporated areas 196,196 227,425 +15.9 COUNTY TOTAL 1,932,921 2,410,556 +24.7

* Unincorporated areas in 1980

Source: U.S. Census Bureau Researched by: KATHIE BOZANICH / Los Angeles Times