City’s East and West Are ‘2 Different Worlds’ : Neighborhoods: Residents east of Redondo Avenue are primarily affluent and Anglo. The west side consists mostly of poor minorities.

The fires and looting that leaped across western Long Beach nearly two months ago ran into an invisible wall--Redondo Avenue, a line beyond which the city remained peaceful.

As a police sergeant said not long after the riots, “Central Long Beach was burning to the ground and Belmont Shore was like any other day. It was like two different worlds.”

The shattered shop windows and charred buildings underscored the deep economic and ethnic divisions that separate the two sides of Long Beach. In the western half are the poor and minorities. In the eastern half are prosperous Anglos.

It is a divide reflected in myriad ways, from the number of supermarkets and parks to crime. At one edge of town, large, well-stocked grocery stores are an endangered species, youngsters jostle for space on cramped soccer fields, and sleeping toddlers are struck by random bullets ripping through the bedroom wall in the middle of the night.

At the other end, the rich dock their boats in front of their million-dollar homes on the Naples canals, tanned shoppers stroll past a bounty of shops in Belmont Shore, and families have their choice of expansive, tree-shaded parks.

Census Bureau figures analyzed by The Times vividly document the enormous contrasts in how people live on the two sides of Redondo Avenue and who they are.

* Most of the city’s growth during the past decade occurred on the western side, which expanded by 64,000 people, compared to only about 4,000 new arrivals in the eastern half. And most of the city lives in the more densely developed western portion--302,486 of the 429,433 Long Beach residents counted in the 1990 census.

* Nearly 22% of those residing west of Redondo Avenue live below the federal poverty line, compared to 6% to the east. Citywide, almost 17% of Long Beach residents live in poverty, an increase of 3% since 1980.

* The median household income was nearly $44,000 east of Redondo Avenue, significantly greater than both the state and Los Angeles County medians, which hover around $35,000. But west of Redondo, the median household income was just slightly more than $26,000.

* Less than 2% of those living east of Redondo were on welfare, compared to 7% to the west.

* The city’s foreign-born population doubled in the past decade, and most of those immigrants poured into the western side, where foreign-born residents made up 30% of the residents in 1990, compared to 10% on the eastern side. Of the 91,000 foreign-born people west of Redondo, nearly 19,000 entered the country between 1987 and 1990.

* Whereas Anglos make up 82% of the population in the eastern side of the city, that figure drops to 36% on the western side. In the past decade, the Anglo population west of Redondo fell 20%. For Long Beach as a whole, it declined 13%.

* In contrast, the Hispanic population surged 110% on the western side, representing most of the growth in the city’s overall Hispanic population, which doubled. Latinos constitute 30% of those living west of Redondo, blacks 18%, and Asians 16%.

The divisions are by no means ironclad. Pockets of affluence remain on the western side, such as Bixby Knolls, the Virginia Country Club and much of the coastal area. And redevelopment has spawned luxury residential high-rises downtown and middle-class condominiums in the West Village.

But for many, the divide is rarely crossed. Long Beach remains two cities for them, one serene and suburban, one gritty and urban. And they would prefer not to set foot in the scruffy part.

“They don’t really care that much what happens on the other side of the town,” lamented Planning Commissioner Anthony D. Tortorice, who lives in the transition zone between Cherry and Redondo avenues. “There’s no connection. It’s not their responsibility, and they don’t feel they should have anything to do with it.”

The riots highlighted that feeling for some. “The expression I heard was, ‘Let them swim in their own filth,’ ” Tortorice said, recounting the comments of an eastside resident.

“This city is tremendously polarized, both in race and class,” agreed Elisa Trujillo, who lives in Drake Park on the western side and teaches sociology at Cal State Dominguez Hills. “And it’s only gotten more so in the last decade.”

As drug dealing and gang violence have exploded in the poorer sections, and Spanish and Khmer have replaced English in many neighborhoods, the chasm has widened.

Despite City Hall’s efforts to revitalize downtown with upscale restaurants, new office towers and an entertainment center, it remains off-limits for many eastside residents who consider it dull and dangerous. They would rather go to Orange County, Lakewood and Cerritos for their shopping and entertainment.

“I don’t know anybody who goes downtown,” said Andy Andrews, who heads the neighborhood association in Alamitos Heights. “I don’t know what they’d go downtown for.”

City politics, meanwhile, remains in many ways dominated by an old guard more attuned to the east side then the west. Mayor Ernie Kell comes from the 5th District east of the airport, a sprawl of tract homes called “Leave-it-to-Beaver Land” by one local wag.

While Kell has named some minorities to the city’s boards and commissions, his appointments still tend to be successful business people and political donors more representative of the old Long Beach than the new.

“It’s always the same people,” complained Karen Pilcher, a nurse who lives in the Rose Park area between Cherry and Redondo avenues.

For all its demographic changes, Long Beach continues to reward “tradition and inappropriate conservatism,” argued Bill Barnes, dean of the Pacific Coast campus of Long Beach City College. In powerbroker circles, he said, it still matters which local high school you went to, making entree tough for the rafts of newcomers.

Barnes traces such attitudes to the Midwestern transplants who settled in Long Beach in droves earlier in the century, earning the city a memorable nickname.

“What has endured is ‘Iowa-by-the-sea,’ whatever people thought that was,” Barnes said.

Yet change is rattling at the door. “(The old guard is) still in control, but there’s hope,” said Vora Huy Kanthoul, associate executive director of United Cambodian Community Inc.

In last year’s council reapportionment, a new Latino-dominated district was carved out that is likely to elect the council’s first Latino member within the next few years. Recently elected council members Doris Topsy-Elvord and Alan Lowenthal--who will represent two western districts--both campaigned with promises to turn more attention to Long Beach’s inner-city problems and diverse ethnicity.

“The question is whether we can develop a vision that reflects who we are,” Lowenthal said. “A lot of people long to return to the way Long Beach used to be.” While he said that nostalgia embraces many desirable things--such as a safe community--it’s also “very exclusive,” shutting out the minorities who now make up half of the city.

The power structure has been slow to reflect Long Beach’s transformation because the change occurred so rapidly, suggested Rod Givens, president of the Black Business and Professional Assn.

“The system will not respond to ethnic folks and those less advantaged without those people making demands,” Givens said.

Certainly when it comes to neighborhood clout, the affluent parts of town have the upper hand. Its homeowner groups pack the City Council chambers over zoning and traffic issues, but only a few residents trickle in from the most crime- and drug-infested blocks to complain about the daily miseries they endure.

Still, Chuck Greenberg, a local attorney, says it’s not so much a matter of who has clout and who doesn’t, but rather the thorny nature of inner-city woes. “Traditional city government--not only in Long Beach but everywhere--deals much better with traditional middle-class problems. . . . There is an onslaught of new problems we don’t know how to deal with.”

While the city tries to figure out what to do, something of a backlash has developed against the poor residents and immigrants blamed by some for the eastward creep of crime and blight.

“They keep expanding and forcing the others out,” grumbled a businessman, a Belmont Shore resident who asked not to be identified. “They bring the crime and the related problems with them. . . . I think Long Beach would be much better if you cut it at Redondo and the east side seceded.”

If Long Beach doesn’t do something soon, he warned, “it will be another Compton.”

During his failed reelection campaign this spring, Councilman Wallace Edgerton frequently insisted that the city needed to change its “demographics,” build developments that would attract prosperous people, and cut back its distribution of federal housing subsidies.

At planning commission hearings, some members also have complained that Long Beach attracted the poor and urban ills by building an oversupply of cheap apartments in the 1980s that have since been filled with people from Compton, Watts and East Los Angeles. The remarks were criticized--by Topsy-Elvord and Tortorice among others--as poor-bashing and implicitly racist. But those who made them were unrepentant.

Low-rent apartments lured the poor to a city that had no jobs for them, Planning Commissioner Elbert W. Segelhorst said recently. “You concentrated a lot of poor people who are dependent (on subsidies). The crime rates have gone up.

“We have so many now. You’re not helping the poor by bringing in more poor,” Segelhorst said.

The spread of crime and graffiti, concerns about declining test scores, busing and crowded classes in the school system--and more recently the riots-- have prompted some residents to flee and more to think about it.

“A lot of people want to get out. It’s something that’s been building,” Segelhorst said.

In many ways, Long Beach is at a crossroads. No longer Iowa-by-the-sea, it is struggling for a new identity, beset with big-city woes.

Said Greenberg, “The civil unrest accentuated the problems to the point where Long Beach may well be a coin that’s balancing as to where it’s going to fall. Either the whole city must realize it must address the basic difficulties of the westside, or like a cancer, they will metastasize and destroy the fabric of this city.”

A Tale of Two Cities

Long Beach has become a city divided, with deep economic and ethnic differences between the eastern and western portions of town. The division begins in Redondo Avenue and continues to its northern border.

1980

By percent of population

East Long Beach West Long Beach Anglo 88.1% 57.2% Hispanic 6.6% 17.9% Black 1.5% 16% Other* 3.8% 8.9%

1990

By percent of population

East Long Beach West Long Beach Anglo 81.9% 35.9% Hispanic 9.2% 29.7% Black 3.0% 17.5% Other* 5.9% 16.8%

City Profile

Long Beach Eastern Long Beach Western Long Beach Population 429,433 126,947 302,486 Increase Since 1980 18.8% 3.6% 26.7% Foreign Born 24.3% 9.9% 30.5% Below Poverty Level 16.8% 5.9% 21.6% Median Income $31,938 $43,947 $26,198

Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census

Federal definition of poverty level is an income of $12,674 for a family of four.

CHART COMPILED BY MAUREEN LYONS AND RICHARD O’REILLY / Los Angeles Times