Figures Show Ventura County Poverty Rate Dropped in ‘80s : Census: The decline contradicts state trends despite the influx of immigrants during the decade.

Defying statewide trends, Ventura County’s poverty rate fell even as tens of thousands of poor immigrant laborers settled in the county during the boom of the 1980s, new census figures show.

Boosted by the rapid growth of new white-collar neighborhoods in the east county, Ventura County’s median household income surged by 28% during the decade, compared to 17% for California as a whole.

The county’s income per person, which was slightly below the statewide median in 1980, now exceeds it by 8%.

During the same decade, the county’s poverty rate fell from 8% to 7.3%, while the statewide rate increased from 11.4% to 12.5%. The rate represents the percentage of people whose income is below the federal poverty line of $12,674 for a family of four.

The county’s relative affluence--a median household income of $45,612, nearly $10,000 higher than the statewide figure--spanned all racial and ethnic groups.

The average household income for Asians in Ventura County was $61,992 in 1990, while blacks averaged $47,760 and Latinos $40,693 a year. Whites--a category for which the U.S. Census Bureau also included Latinos--averaged $55,717 per household.

The new income figures reinforce home ownership data released last year. Nearly 66% of Ventura County’s dwellings were owned by the people who lived in them, a rate much higher than the 57.6% statewide average. And ownership was relatively high regardless of race.

Communities with large numbers of owner-occupied houses are more stable and tend to have less crime, analysts say. Ventura County has the lowest crime rate of any urban county in the West.

Reported incomes were highest in Moorpark, Thousand Oaks and Simi Valley, enclaves for predominantly white refugees who fled the urban ills of the Los Angeles Basin. Four of 10 workers in those cities still commute to Los Angeles County, data shows.

Household incomes increased faster than the state average in nine of the county’s 10 cities, including three with Latino majorities--Oxnard, Santa Paula and Fillmore.

Only in Ojai, where many residents are retired and their incomes fixed, did income growth fall below the California norm.

“The biggest surprise to me was to see the median income level so high in Moorpark,” said Steve Wood, Ventura County’s analyst of 1990 census data. “That’s almost a totally new population that didn’t exist in 1980.”

Growing fivefold in a decade, 25,000-resident Moorpark literally created itself during the 1980s, building pricey new planned communities from peach and apricot orchards and surrounding hillsides. Houses sold for up to $500,000.

Moorpark households had a median income of $60,368 in 1990, almost 99% higher than 10 years ago and surpassing even Thousand Oaks as the richest city in the county.

Thousand Oaks still has the county’s highest income per person, because its families are generally older and children have left home.

Ventura also has a high per-capita income, but the city’s household income was $5,000 less than the county median because so many of its residents live alone.

Analyst Wood said he was struck by income figures for Oxnard, where about half of the 64,000 Latinos who came to the county in the last decade settled.

Oxnard’s household income of $37,174 was higher than four other local cities, including Ojai and Port Hueneme. It was $1,400 higher than the statewide median.

“There’s been quite a bit of upper-income housing built in Oxnard,” Wood said, “and almost no low-cost housing built there in the last 10 years.”

But Carl Lawson, census specialist for the city of Oxnard, cautioned against the perception that Oxnard is becoming a mostly middle-class community. A large share of Oxnard’s residents still live hand-to-mouth, he said.

About 25% of the city’s dwellings are overcrowded, double the state average and a rate exceeded only by Santa Ana for cities of more than 100,000 residents. That means that two or three workers often live in the same apartment, Lawson said.

“You take one person who moved into a house in Thousand Oaks and he’s making $100,000 by himself, and in Oxnard you have three people who all make $20,000 in the same house,” Lawson said. “The key factor in household income is the number of wage earners in the household.”

In fact, Oxnard’s income per person was only $12,096 in 1990, $4,400 below the state median.

And Lawson said the high cost of housing in Ventura County, which is among the state’s most expensive places to live, makes the local poverty rate appear more benign than it really is.

“A Latino family in Oxnard has a much harder time making ends meet than a family in Fresno, because of the high housing costs,” he said. “So while a family may not officially rank as impoverished, for all practical purposes someone who lives from paycheck to paycheck while accumulating debt considers themselves to be in poverty.”

Indeed, the gap between this county’s richest and poorest communities is also sketched in the new census figures.

Oxnard, Santa Paula and Fillmore have the county’s lowest per capita income and the highest percentage of children who live in poverty.

Statistics on education and employment show that those three cities have one-half the percentage of managers and professional workers as Thousand Oaks, Camarillo and Moorpark.

In Moorpark and Camarillo, about one-third of all households earn more than $75,000 a year. That compares to a countywide average of 20.4%.

The truly rich households--those with incomes exceeding $150,000 a year--are distributed similarly. Countywide, 2.7% of households, or 5,947, make at least $150,000 and about one-third are in Thousand Oaks. Only 10 families, 0.3%, earn that much in Fillmore compared to 5.3% in Thousand Oaks. Despite such disparities, census figures reveal trends that show county residents overall make better livings and are better educated than ever before.

Nearly 80% of county residents who are at least 25 years old have high school diplomas, compared to 75.9% a decade ago. And about 23% have college degrees, compared to 18.2% in 1980.

Thousand Oaks residents are most educated, with 90% holding high school diplomas and 35% college degrees.

Indeed, compared with the state as a whole, Ventura County has been hit less by the increase in poverty that many analysts attribute to an influx of 3.2 million immigrants during the past decade.

While 32% of Los Angeles County’s residents are foreign-born, and the figure is 22% statewide, in Ventura County just 17% of residents were born in other countries.

In Los Angeles County, more than half the people speak a language other than English in their homes. The figure is 32% statewide and 26% in Ventura County.

Overall, Ventura County is 66% white, 26.5% Latino, 4.9% Asian and 2.2% black.