Quintessential Suburb Is No More : Population: Immigration, mostly from Latin America, has made the Valley a place of contrasts and barriers. The gap between rich and poor is wider than it was a decade ago.

Immigration in the San Fernando Valley has in 10 years dramatically changed the faces and fortunes of the residents of what was once one of America’s quintessential suburbs.

And as more immigrants arrive to pursue a new life, barriers both invisible and marked are dividing once shared neighborhoods--separating rich and poor, educated and uneducated, native-born and foreigner, English-speaking and bilingual, according to 1990 U.S. census results released this spring and analyzed by The Times.

“We all talk about ‘the Valley’ as if it was a homogeneous entity and we apply that name based on what it was 20 years ago,” said Peter Morrison, a RAND demographer who has studied the 1990 census results. “That is probably one of the biggest stereotypes to shatter. The Valley is now an incredible melting pot.”

Data from the long-form of the census that was distributed to one out of every six people was analyzed by The Times to allow comparisons to be drawn among the 14 Los Angeles city planning areas included in the Valley.

Reflecting a national trend, the gap between the richest and the poorest families in the San Fernando Valley has grown since the 1980 census.

Sharp growth in the percentage of minority residents in the Valley--some Asian, mostly Latino--also mirrors a decade of increasing immigration nationwide.

The two trends combined powerfully in affluent areas such as Sherman Oaks, Encino, Tarzana and Woodland Hills, where the population remained as much as 86% Anglo and median family incomes rose faster than the countywide average of 19%. In general, the census data shows, Anglo residents of the Valley are more likely to be well-educated and to have higher incomes than their minority or immigrant neighbors.

In much of the east and northeast portions of the Valley, where immigration was the greatest, the growth in incomes lagged far behind the average.

The decade’s demographic changes can be seen in the largely Latino faces of those waiting at bus stops, working in fast-food restaurants and trimming the lawns of Valley residents. The pace of immigration can also be seen where day laborers in growing numbers--at the intersection of Parthenia and Reseda boulevards, on Roscoe Boulevard east of Balboa Boulevard, and at the city-sanctioned “hiring hall” in North Hollywood--gather to look for work.

The decade of change can be heard in morning roll calls in Valley schools and in classes where Valley-based Los Angeles police officers are learning to speak Spanish to facilitate a transition to “community-based” policing. And, among other places, it can be experienced in so-called “beer bars” in the northeast Valley that cater to lonely single men far from their homes and families in Mexico and Central America.

Other demographic changes in the Valley have occurred gradually and subtly. But, when quantified in recently released income, ethnicity, citizenship and educational data gathered in the 1990 census, the changes are profound.

“The polarization was not that surprising,” said Gene Turner, one of two Cal State Northridge geography professors who plotted demographic changes in Los Angeles over the past decade. “Everybody has been talking about the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.”

Turner’s colleague, CSUN geography professor James Allen, said the extremes of wealth and poverty are probably even greater than it appears from comparing the Valley’s 14 planning areas, which divide residents into groups of 65,000 to 150,000. Within those areas, sometimes in adjacent census tracts, are extremes of rich and poor, where several families live in a garage within minutes of where another family owns a house worth $200,000 or more.

“The results are consistent with an increasing socioeconomic gap among Americans,” Allen said.

Some residents have responded to the Valley’s transformation with a flurry of name changes intended to distinguish their increasingly isolated middle-class neighborhoods.

Since the last census, the communities of West Hills and Valley Village were born and the community formerly known as Sepulveda, which began to be associated with an increasing crime rate, changed its name to North Hills. The name changes as well as a successful move to push the borders of Sherman Oaks north into what had been Van Nuys were at least partly in response to homeowners’ fears that their real estate values were threatened.

The median income of families in Encino and Tarzana--$64,652--grew 15% in the decade, adjusted for inflation, and is now double that of families in North Hollywood. The median income of North Hollywood families, meanwhile, grew only 3% during the decade.

That gap is likely to grow, experts say, because of job and educational trends that can be seen nationally as well as locally. For example, the percentage of Valley residents who are high school dropouts has climbed side-by-side with the percentage of residents who are college graduates.

The percentage of residents of Sherman Oaks, Studio City and Toluca Lake over age 25 who are high school dropouts has dropped from 13% to 9% over the past decade. At the same time, the proportion of residents who attended at least four years of college grew from 33% to 42%.

In Encino and Tarzana, the percentage of adult dropouts fell from 14% to 11%, while the percentage of residents who completed at least four years of college increased from 33% to 41%.

But in Arleta and Pacoima, about 57% of the adults over 25 reported that they had not finished high school, up from 49% during the 1980 census. Among Latino residents there, the proportion of high school dropouts grew from 72% to 75% since 1980.

The percentage of residents who had attended at least four years of college in those same communities fell from 9% to 7%. Among Latinos, the percentage dropped from 2.5% to 2.3%.

In East Valley communities including North Hollywood, Mission Hills, Panorama City, North Hills, Sylmar and Sun Valley, a third or more of the adults are high school dropouts, an increase from the last census.

Those numbers mean that the proportion of residents “who don’t have the minimum credential to hold something other than a dead-end job” is on the rise, said Morrison of RAND, the Santa Monica think tank.

At the same time, national census results show that the proportion of jobs that are low-paying is on the rise, said Eugene Ericksen, a sociology professor at Temple University in Philadelphia who has studied census results.

With fewer and fewer blue-collar jobs paying middle-class wages, Ericksen and others warn of increases in the ranks of the working poor--households scraping by on poverty wages.

Between 14% and 17% of the residents of Arleta, Pacoima, North Hollywood, Mission Hills, Panorama City, Sun Valley and Van Nuys have incomes below the poverty line, which is $12,674 for a family of four. The biggest increase in the number of residents getting by on poverty incomes occurred in the Mission Hills-Panorama City area, where the poor now account for 16% of the residents.

By contrast, between 5% and 6% of those living in Granada Hills, Sherman Oaks, Studio City, Toluca Lake, Encino, Tarzana, Chatsworth and Porter Ranch reported earnings below the poverty line in 1989, the last full year before the 1990 census.

Despite their economic troubles, only about 3% of residents of the Valley’s poorest neighborhoods said they receive government income such as welfare. That percentage is slightly less than reported statewide.

“I would expect a lot of the working poor to be immigrants,” said David Heer, sociology professor and director of the Population Research Lab at USC. “If you are undocumented, you are not legally entitled to welfare payments.”

With limited job prospects, immigrant families are forced to put more of their members to work to afford essentials, Temple University’s Ericksen said.

“They put everybody to work and are having to run much faster to get to the same place, with three or four workers in a household instead of one or two,” Ericksen said.

The percentage of Latino residents doubled in four of the 14 city planning areas in the Valley. They constitute an overwhelming majority in Arleta and Pacoima, and slim majorities for the first time in Sun Valley and Sylmar as well.

Reflecting those changes, more than a quarter of Valley residents say they speak Spanish at home. Ten years ago, Spanish was the language of choice in 14% of the homes. About 12% of Valley residents say they speak little or no English.

Of the 1.2 million or so Valley residents, about one-third, 411,125, are foreign-born, according to the census. Of those, about half--214,467--report they came to the Valley since the last census.

As a result, about 23% of Valley residents are not citizens. Non-citizens are concentrated in seven of the 14 city planning areas that divide the Valley. In some of those areas, most of which are in the East Valley, as many as a third of the residents are non-citizens.

The census results do not indicate whether residents are legal immigrants.

Nationally, about 44% of the foreign-born now in the U.S. arrived in the past 10 years, said Jeff Passel, of the Urban Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based group that tracks immigration trends nationally. He said it is probably the largest such influx in the nation’s history.

“California by far got the biggest piece of the immigrants,” Passel said. “It had the biggest share to start with and got the biggest inflow, with most going to Los Angeles.”

Some of the middle- and upper-middle-class neighborhoods that characterized the Valley of the past remain virtually untouched by those changes, although in some cases they have been reduced in size to mere pockets.

Anglos are in the minority in most neighborhoods east of the San Diego Freeway but remain a majority in most neighborhoods west of the freeway.

Overall, the percentage of the Valley’s population that is Anglo fell from 75% to 58%.

But minorities still represent only a small proportion of the residents of the pricey communities that straddle Ventura Boulevard from Studio City to Woodland Hills. The Anglo population in those communities is still about 85%. Much the same is true in communities along the Valley’s northwest edge.

Countywide, the Anglo population dropped from 53% to 41% and statewide fell from 67% to 57%.

The percentage of black residents in the Valley increased slightly during the 1980s from 2.6% to 3.4%, while the Asian population doubled from 4% to 8%.

The Valley has changed in other ways, too, according to the newly released census data. As has occurred nationally, fewer Valley households fit the traditional family model of a mother, father and children under age 18.

Despite a 22% increase in the Valley’s population during the 1980s, the number of traditional families grew in only four of the 14 planning areas, mostly in the East Valley. Valleywide, about a quarter of residents fit that profile, with about 27% reporting they are married but have no children under 18.

A new category of the 1990 census shows the proportion of employed mothers, which among all Valley communities regardless of income or ethnicity is between 50% and 60% for women with children under age 6. The proportion of employed mothers with older children is higher, between about 65% and 70%.

Also common in nearly every Valley neighborhood is a slight increase in the proportion of single fathers with children, and a slight decrease in the percentage of single mothers. Valleywide, about 5% of the households consist of single mothers with children, and about 2% are single fathers with kids.

Dick Woods, president of the Iowa-based Fathers for Equal Rights, said the change is probably related to the change in California child custody laws of the early 1980s, which provided more joint custody of children between divorced parents.

“We’re seeing this trend in all of the Western states,” Woods said. “Iowa had the first joint custody law, and California the second one.”

Census Highlights: 1980-1990

Changes in population, family income and percentage of homes where Spanish predominates

Pop. Income Spanish 1980 1990 Sherman Oaks-Studio City-Toluca Lake +8% +25% 5% 6% North Hollywood +30% +3% 19% 36% Arleta-Pacoima +35% +6% 46% 63% Van Nuys-North Sherman Oaks +25% +2% 15% 31% Mission Hills-Panorama City-Sepulveda +39% -9% 16% 38% Sun Valley +25% +2% 27% 46% Sylmar +62% +8% 26% 41% Granada Hills-Knollwood +5% +18% 6% 9% Canoga Park-Winnetka-Woodland Hills +11% +12% 8% 15% Chatsworth-Porter Ranch +22% +14% 5% 11% Northridge +10% +7% 8% 15% Reseda-West Van Nuys +16% +7% 9% 22% Encino-Tarzana +2% +15% 6% 8% Sunland-Tujunga +22% +22% 10% 20%

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

Income Rankings 1990 Rank by Median Family Income Encino-Tarzana: $64,652 Chatsworth-Porter Ranch: 61,930 Sherman Oaks-Studio City-Toluca Lake: 61,543 Northridge: 60,352 Granada Hills-Knollwood: 56,594 Canoga Park-Winnetka-Woodland Hills: 55,328 Sunland-Tujunga: 48,006 Sylmar: 42,903 Reseda-West Van Nuys: 41,563 Sun Valley: 38,487 Van Nuys-North Sherman Oaks: 36,271 Arleta-Pacoima: 35,475 Mission Hills-Panorama City-Sepulveda: 35,679 North Hollywood: 32,514 Foreign Population 1990 Rank by Percentage of Population That Are Not U.S. Citizens Arleta-Pacoima: 34.5 Sun Valley: 33.6 Mission Hills-Panorama City-Sepulveda: 30.7 North Hollywood: 29.6 Van Nuys-No. Sherman Oaks: 28.3 Reseda-West Van Nuys: 23.5 Sylmar: 20.6 Northridge: 17.4 Canoga Park-Winnetka-Woodland Hills: 17 Encino-Tarzana: 15.4 Sunland-Tujunga: 15 Chatsworth-Porter Ranch: 14 Granada Hills-Knollwood: 13 Sherman Oaks-Studio City-Toluca Lake: 9.6