Census Shows Decline in Population : Neighborhoods: Bel-Air, Brentwood, Pacific Palisades, West Los Angeles and Venice all lost numbers. But traditional racial barriers blur as immigrants flock to Hollywood, Koreatown and the Crenshaw District.

The campus of Paul Revere Junior High School in Brentwood echoes with the sound of childish laughter, but the student body is dwindling by 200 pupils a year. “We’re caught in a dance of death,” says Principal J.D. Gaydowski. “The fact is, the kids don’t exist.”

Indeed, the population of much of the Westside of Los Angeles is shrinking, according to recently released data from the 1990 U.S. Census.

Neighborhoods like Bel-Air, Brentwood, Pacific Palisades, West Los Angeles and Venice all lost numbers as the last of the Baby Boomers left home, death and divorce took their toll, and new residents put off having children.

At the same time, newcomers from Korea, Mexico and Central America crowded into the apartments of Hollywood, Koreatown and the Crenshaw District, changing the face of entire neighborhoods as the city’s traditional racial barriers began to blur.

The number of Latinos increased by 74% in Los Angeles’ Westside neighborhoods, and Asians showed a 47% increase since 1980, the Census found. Meanwhile, the black population decreased by 6% and the Anglo population by 9%.

Korean sign maker Steve Bang is one of the newcomers. Before he came from Seoul, “the United States was a dream country,” he said.

Business is slow now, rent is expensive and the shine is off the dream, but Bang and thousands of other immigrants are here to stay.

Bang is a onetime engineering student who hopes to enter a Christian seminary next year. Standing amid an array of computer-generated banners in his shop in a mini-mall near the Hollywood Freeway, he told a visitor that he did not feel at home during a recent visit to his native country.

“I feel Americanized even though I don’t have any money,” he said.

At a Korean-owned video shop next door, Mercedes Marin was renting a Super Mario Brothers Nintendo game to a grandmother and her eager grandson.

Born in Guatemala, Marin joined the wave of immigration with her parents, finding a home in the run-down apartments that line the side streets near Western Avenue.

“My family all lives around here and we just want to be together,” she said. “The first one came from Guatemala six years ago and the rest just kept coming.”

In Hollywood alone, the number of Latinos increased by 78%. Overall, Hollywood’s population rose 13%, to 213,846. If it were an independent city, Hollywood would rank above Stockton as California’s 12th-largest city.

Similarly, eight miles to the south in a predominantly black neighborhood at the foot of the Baldwin Hills, the Latino population of Census Tract 2362.01 increased more than ninefold. In 1980, Latinos accounted for less than 2% of the population the neighborhood; now, the census tract is 16.4% Latino.

Long a center of black life in Los Angeles, the neighborhood maintains its traditional character, including two Baptist churches on one block of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.

“I haven’t really seen the change. And then I did too, because you see it on the street, people going and coming and boarding buses,” said the Rev. Oscar Harvey, a minister on the staff of one of the churches, Bethany Baptist.

“It’s just the way the migration goes,” said Dorothy Bamgboye, director of the Jim Gilliam Recreation Center, where most of the regulars are black.

“People are looking for reasonably affordable housing, and this area is just saturated with apartment buildings that owners are trying to rent,” she said.

The disparate halves of the Westside--the mostly Anglo, generally affluent and increasingly childless areas to the west, and the more crowded, polyglot neighborhoods to the east--are linked every school day by the yellow buses of the Los Angeles Unified School District.

But even with 70% of its pupils bused in, the enrollment at Paul Revere Junior High has dropped from 2,500 at the height of the Baby Boom in the ‘60s to 1,081 this year. A look at the census data shows why: In the 1980s, the number of children in Brentwood and Pacific Palisades fell 22%. In the census tract encompassing Mandeville Canyon, the Baby Bust was even more extreme, with the population of children dropping by almost 40%.

The 27-acre junior high is tucked into a hairpin curve of Sunset Boulevard, where Brentwood and Pacific Palisades meet. Those high-priced neighborhoods lost children as well as adults. So did Bel Air-Beverly Crest and West Los Angeles.

The number of children in Westchester, Playa del Rey, Westwood, Palms, Mar Vista, Del Rey and the Venice area also dropped, although the total population of those areas stayed virtually even or increased with the construction of new condominiums and apartments.

“This is probably a long-term trend in the area, which does have some of the lowest household sizes already,” said George Malone, a planner for the county Department of Regional Planning. “It’s one of the most affluent areas in the county, and affluence means you can buy more housing for yourself. But most often it’s occupied by singles or couples,” he said.

An opposite trend was at work in the more crowded areas, where apartments in the $500-a-month range brought in a flood of immigrants, raising the crowding index--the ratio of persons per unit--to a high of 2.6 in the Crenshaw District.

Judith Jackson, resident manager of Gloria Homes, a large complex of garden apartments along Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, said, “Whether you can prove it or not, you know there’s more people in there than there should be, and we’re very cautious about trying to control it. Other owners don’t.”

In Hollywood, Guatemalan-born Luis Cabrera said that one-bedroom apartments are often home to immigrant families with five children or more. But he speculates that, given the choice, many of the immigrants will quickly adopt the U.S. norm of a smaller family.

“The younger people, when they come here and see the situation,” Cabrera said, “they have two or three kids at the most.”

POPULATION CHANGES

Nearly all of the population growth that took place in Westside neighborhoods of Los Angeles in the 1980s occurred in the area’s eastern sections--in places such as Hollywood, Koreatown and Crenshaw. Much of the growth was fueled by immigration from Latin America and Asia. The contrasting population decline in most coastal and hillside neighborhoods was due in large part to the aging of the population--and a resulting steep drop in the number of children.

Neighborhood: Wilshire-Koreatown-Fairfax-Hancock Park

Population: 271,620

% change from 1980: 21

Comment: Large Asian, Latino immigration

Neighborhood: Hollywood

Population: 213,846

% change from 1980: 13

Comment: Surge of Latino immigrants

Neighborhood: West Adams-Baldwin Hills-Crenshaw

Population: 169,397

% change from 1980: 12

Comment: Latino population up from 10% to 27%; black population down from 75% to 62%

Neighborhood: Westchester-Playa del Rey

Population: 47,948

% change from 1980: 10

Comment: New construction: 23% more housing units

Neighborhood: Westwood

Population: 42,658

% change from 1980: 9

Comment: Asian percentage more than doubled, to 13.7%

Neighborhood: Palms-Mar Vista-Del Rey

Population: 104,077

% change from 1980: 3

Comment: Increasingly integrated; Anglos barely a majority

Neighborhood: Venice

Population: 39,971

% change from 1980: -1

Comment: Baby Bust: population drops despite 11% rise in housing units

Neighborhood: Bel-Air-Beverly Crest

Population: 19,522

% change from 1980: -3

Comment: High cost of admission means little change; still 88% Anglo

Neighborhood: West Los Angeles-Century City-Rancho Park

Population: 67,817

% change from 1980: -5

Comment: Little change in ethnic makeup; aging population, fewer children

Neighborhood: Brentwood-Pac. Palisades

Population: 53,418

% change from 1980: -7

Comment: Sharp decrease in number of children

Total

Population: 1,030,274

% change from 1980: 11

Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census

ETHNIC AND RACIAL GROUPS

The 1980s brought considerable racial and ethnic mixing to some neighborhoods. The Baldwin Hills-Crenshaw area, long regarded as a black middle-class bastion, is now 27.4% Latino. The Mar

Vista-Palms-Del Rey area, once overwhelmingly Anglo, now has sizable Asian and Latino populations. High-price areas--Brentwood, Pacific Palisades and Bel-Air--were immune from trend.

ANGLO LATINO BLACK ASIAN Neighborhood 1990 1980 1990 1980 1990 1980 1990 1980 West Adams-Baldwin Hills- 5.2 7.5 27.4 10.5 61.9 74.7 4.8 6.0 Crenshaw Wilshire-Koreatown- 29.1 43.0 38.2 24.7 11.1 14.2 21.1 16.2 Fairfax-Hancock Park Hollywood 50.1 60.4 35.6 22.7 4.2 4.5 9.6 9.6 Westwood 76.3 87.4 7.1 3.9 2.5 1.5 13.7 5.6 West Los Angeles- 73.1 75.1 12.7 11.6 2.6 2.5 11.2 9.4 Century City-Rancho Park Palms-Mar Vista-Del Rey 54.2 62.7 25.4 21.6 5.8 3.9 14.0 9.9 Venice 64.4 63.8 23.9 22.8 7.9 8.6 3.2 3.4 Westchester-Playa del Rey 72.3 81.5 12.3 10.0 7.3 2.9 7.6 4.1 Brentwood-Pac. Palisades 89.3 91.6 4.7 3.4 0.8 0.9 5.1 3.1 Bel-Air-Beverly Crest 88.4 89.8 4.9 3.6 1.6 1.9 4.9 3.5

Notes: No other ethnic or racial group made up more than 1% of the population in any of these neighborhoods. 1990 Tracts have been converted to 1980 equivalents for comparison purposes.

Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census Compiled by Richard O’Reilly, director of computer analysis, and Maureen Lyons, statistical analyst.

CHILDREN: BOOM OR BUST

The census showed a surge of children, both native-born and immigrant, in the Westside neighborhoods closest to downtown Los Angeles--where schools are already packed. But classrooms in Brentwood, Pacific Palisades and Venice stand empty. Some schools in the neighborhoods where the number of children declined sharply might have closed altogether had it not been for the overflow of inner-city children bused in every day.

Ratio Number of % of change (adults to Neighborhood children from 1980 children) Wilshire-Koreatown- 56,703 40 3.8 Fairfax-Hancock Park Hollywood 39,409 27 4.1 West Adams-Baldwin Hills- 45,520 14 2.7 Crenshaw Westchester-Playa del Rey 7,305 -6 5.6 Westwood 2,967 -15 13.2 Palms-Mar Vista-Del Rey 17,997 -9 4.8 Venice 5,906 -19 5.8 Bel-Air-Beverly Crest 3,308 -17 4.9 West Los Angeles- 8,365 -16 7.1 Century City-Rancho Park Brentwood-Pac. Palisades 8,411 -22 5.4 Total 195,891 12