REGIONAL REPORT : ‘80s Failed to End Economic Disparity, Census Shows : Southland: Asian-Americans, Anglos stay on top. Blacks, despite gains, were at the bottom with Latinos.

Prosperity blessed Southern California during the 1980s, but it was not colorblind, leaving Latinos and blacks at the bottom of the region’s economic ladder and keeping whites and Asians at the top, a Times analysis of U. S. Census data shows.

Although far from conclusive, the figures provide the first detailed county-by-county comparison of the economic shifts wrought among the region’s disparate racial and ethnic groups over the past decade. Among the more intriguing findings: African-Americans made slight gains in household income compared to whites, while Latinos and Asian-Americans saw their comparative financial health worsen.

The figures bear out national trends that have shown African-Americans faring better in the West than in any other region of the United States. But they also buttress longstanding claims that the rising tide of the 1980s failed to lift all boats equally, underscoring concerns that race, ethnicity and wealth in America are tightly bound.

The disparities arise from “a combination of different access to education, differences in employment and promotional opportunities,” said Paul Ong, a UCLA labor economist and author of a landmark study on the income gap. Income levels for many groups, Ong said, were almost certainly skewed by the massive wave of immigration that hit Southern California during the 1980s.

But some of the differences, he added, “may be overt discrimination.”

In most areas of Southern California--as in the country overall--blacks managed over the past decade to narrow slightly the longstanding disparity between their household incomes and those of whites.

Los Angeles County figures typify the trend: In 1989, median household income was $26,027 for African-Americans, $27,803 for Latinos, $39,106 for Anglos and $39,552 for Asians-Americans. For every dollar that members of an Anglo household took in, their African-American neighbors earned 66.5 cents, their Latino neighbors made 71 cents, and their Asian-American neighbors made $1.01.

James Johnson, a UCLA geographer and an expert on “black flight,” said the slight gains made by African-Americans in narrowing the income gap appear to be because of the movement of middle-class blacks to outlying neighborhoods.

As a result, he said, Los Angeles County--where the black-white gap was narrowed by a scant 1.5 cents--is fast being left with only two income classes of blacks, the extremely wealthy and the hard-core poor.

“I don’t think it reflects a large increase in the social and economic status of black folks per se,” Johnson said. “Rather, it reflects the out-migration of people who could not get a house or a good job in Los Angeles, who are fleeing the schools for the sake of their kids. And what’s left is a polarization of wealth (among those who are left behind).”

Black progress was most apparent in the Inland Empire, where middle- and lower middle-class African-Americans fed up with urban life have flocked to affordable desert tract homes at the region’s metropolitan fringe.

In fast-growing Riverside County, middle-class flight to the suburbs lofted African-American median household income up 47% to an inflation-adjusted $29,105, almost double the growth rate for Anglos.

By 1989, African-Americans in Riverside County were closer to economic parity with whites than blacks anywhere else in Southern California, with the typical African-American household earning about 85 cents for every dollar brought in by a typical white household. Just 10 years prior, that figure was only about 72 cents--on the lower end of the regional parity spectrum.

The gains paralleled a trend in the western United States, where median household income for blacks rose from about 68 cents on a white dollar in 1979 to more than 75 cents in 1990 for every dollar of white median household income.

But among Latinos, the income gap widened in every Southern California county to the point where--comparing among individuals--a typical Latino in Los Angeles County now brings in 39 cents in per capita income for every dollar a typical Anglo earns.

Even the relative affluence enjoyed by Asian-Americans overall was eroded during the 1980s in Los Angeles and Orange counties--possibly, say Johnson and other demographers, because of movement by wealthier Asian-Americans into outlying counties. That outward migration was coupled, the experts say, with an influx of poorer immigrants--some of whom may have had difficulty translating education in their homelands into financial success here.

Best off were Asian-Americans in Ventura County. Their median household income, adjusted for inflation, shot up 45% during the decade to $55,410. Worst off were African-Americans in San Diego County. Despite a 23% increase, their median household income was reported at $25,150.

Ventura County officials pointed to Oxnard’s rapid growth in explaining the remarkable gains in income by Asian-Americans. The county’s largest city has drawn a substantial number of affluent Asian-Americans to its northwest corner, where houses costing as much as half a million dollars have been built along the River Ridge Golf Course.

Such luxury developments have lured upwardly mobile Asian-Americans who may have earlier made their fortunes in Los Angeles, experts said. “The better off move out,” said Viviane Doche-Boulos, a demographer for the Southern California Assn. of Governments. “We noticed it before with whites, and now it is permeating other groups.”

San Diego economists blame the poor showing among African-Americans on the county’s heavy reliance on tourism and the service sector, which accounted for most of the new jobs during the 1980s and which tended to depress wages overall.

Marney Cox, regional economist for the San Diego Assn. of Governments, said the African-Americans and Latinos in the county appeared to be concentrated in those low-paying jobs rather than in the region’s more lucrative defense industry.

San Diego was the only county where African-Americans failed to outpace whites in income growth.

Different measures tell different stories, demographers caution. Median household income uses the same statistical unit--regardless of the number of people living under one roof. Thus, an engineer living alone, a single mother supporting three children, or a house full of day laborers who have pooled their paychecks all qualify as a household.

Per capita income--the aggregate income of a group divided by the number of people in it--corrects for this range in household size, but it can be skewed by extremes in income or population. A small cluster of rich Asian-Americans can bring up the average per capita income of all in the group; a large group of Latino children too young to work can make Latino per capita income appear artificially low.

And income comparisons involving Anglos sometimes are blurred because many Latinos categorize themselves as both white and Hispanic on census forms.

Moreover, the racial categories themselves--particularly in Southern California--cover a wildly diverse range of people. An “Asian” might be anyone from a struggling Cambodian refugee to a Chinese-American stockbroker to a surfer whose great-grandmother was Japanese. A “Hispanic” for census purposes could be an illegal immigrant from Zacatecas or a lawyer born and raised in Los Angeles.

But the figures give a rough portrait of the distribution of income in the region, and offer an outline of the ways economics and ethnicity are entwined.

“If you look at the overall census figures, you see a clear correlation between race and income,” said Lorn S. Foster, a Pomona College political scientist specializing in urban and ethnic politics.

Even well-educated African-Americans “get less bang for their education buck” than well-educated whites, Foster said. In a study he did based on census data and other information, Foster found that a dollar spent on education by an African-American “did not necessarily transfer into that much more economic well-being.”

Such persistent disparities, he said, underscore claims that race remains a partial determinant of success.

The 1990 Census asked Americans how much they had made the previous year. For the United States overall, the median 1989 household income was $30,056. For the West, it was $32,270. And for California, it was $35,798.

From a national perspective, all races and ethnic groups did relatively well in California, earning more than the national medians for their groups.

But locally, only Orange County was so well off that every ethnic and racial group placed above the state median--although Ventura County’s prosperity placed every group except Latinos above the curve.

Even in the wealthier counties, though, there were vast racial disparities. Median household income in Orange County ranged from a comfortable $47,353 for whites to a much less generous $35,905 for Latinos.

And a closer look at Latino income implied that, for many households, any gains were achieved by having two or more wage earners in a family. In Orange County, Latino household income rose 14% during the past decade, but per capita income edged up by only 2%. Although from a household perspective, Latinos were taking in about 76 cents for every dollar that Orange County’s typical Anglo household earned, the average Latino was taking in only about 42 cents for every dollar earned by an Anglo.

Those figures, experts say, imply not only a pooling of resources in Latino households, but a stagnation of growth for them in a county where per-capita income for every other group grew by 20% or more.

“What this means,” said RAND demographer Peter Morrison, “is that people living in Hispanic households in Orange County are essentially no better off than they were (as a group) in 1980.”

The picture is equally complex for Asian-Americans, whose apparent affluence in some counties is mitigated by the number of mouths each household must feed.

In Los Angeles County, the typical Asian-American household appears better off than the typical white household. But divided into per-capita income, that wealth works out to just 71 cents for every dollar in the pocket of the average white.

In fact, in two counties, Asian-Americans lost ground against whites over the past decade. In Los Angeles County in 1979, Asian-American median household income was about $1.08 for every dollar of white median household income; by 1989, it had dropped to $1.01. And in Orange County, where the typical Asian-American household was bringing in $1.02 for every dollar earned by an Anglo in 1979, median household income slipped to just 97 cents to every dollar earned by an Anglo by 1989.

African-Americans and Latinos remain the poorest racial groups. Despite the overall gains in Southern California, they figure disproportionately among the poor in every one of the region’s six counties.

San Bernardino County’s population is only about 8% black, but African-Americans make up nearly 13% of the county’s poor. Only about 10.5% of Los Angeles County residents are African-American, but blacks represent 15.5% of the poverty rolls.

Latinos made up about 23% of Orange County’s population in 1990, but they made up half of the people living below the federal poverty line--$12,674 for a family of four. Latinos made up only about a quarter of Ventura County’s population, but when it came to the county’s poor, they made up nearly 56%.

The influx of immigrants, many of them unskilled and poorly educated, may be partly to blame for the hardships faced by Latinos as a group, experts say. Asian immigrants tend to be better educated, UCLA’s Ong said, although many “may have the job skills but not the English language ability. And without that, it’s difficult to translate training into the mainstream economy.”

Statistics for this story were compiled by Richard O’Reilly, Times director of computer analysis, and by statistical analyst Maureen Lyons.

Profile of Poverty

Despite the overall gains in Southern California, non-Anglos still figure disproportionately among the region’s poor. Here is the breakdown for Los Angeles County: LOS ANGELES COUNTY

ANGLOS REPRESENT: 41% of the county’s population but 17.7% of the people in poverty

ASIANS REPRESENT: 10.2% of the county’s population but 9.5% of the people in poverty

BLACKS REPRESENT: 10.5% of the county’s population but 15.5% of the people in poverty

LATINOS REPRESENT: 37.8% of the county’s population but 56.8% of the people in poverty

SOURCE: 1990 Census

Household Income

The ‘80s--an era of relative prosperity in Southern California--were more lucrative for some groups than for others. In the category of median household income, whites and Asians generally were better off than blacks and Latinos, but blacks made progress in narrowing the income gap with whites in every county except San Diego. Orange County had the broadest prosperity--every group earned more than the overall state median income of $35,798. Median income means half of the households made more than that, half made less.

NATIONWIDE

ADJUSTED PERCENTAGE GROUP 1980 1990 CHANGE White $34,919 $31,435 -10% Asian* $33,607 $36,784 9% Black $21,114 $19,758 -6% Am. Indian $20,541 $20,025 -3% Latino** $22,629 $24,156 7%

CALIFORNIA

ADJUSTED PERCENTAGE GROUP 1980 1990 CHANGE White $32,129 $37,724 17% Asian* $34,733 $39,769 14% Black $20,989 $26,079 24% Am. Indian $24,847 $27,818 12% Latino** $25,427 $28,209 11%

LOS ANGELES

ADJUSTED PERCENTAGE GROUP 1980 1990 CHANGE White $31,929 $39,106 22% Asian* $34,492 $39,552 15% Black $20,821 $26,027 25% Am. Indian $25,767 $30,880 20% Latino** $24,545 $27,803 13%

ORANGE

ADJUSTED PERCENTAGE GROUP 1980 1990 CHANGE White $38,409 $47,353 23% Asian* $39,376 $46,139 17% Black $30,309 $39,176 29% Am. Indian $32,848 $42,876 31% Latino** $31,529 $35,905 14%

RIVERSIDE

ADJUSTED PERCENTAGE GROUP 1980 1990 CHANGE White $27,595 $34,336 24% Asian* $28,554 $38,043 33% Black $19,820 $29,105 47% Am. Indian $23,925 $29,080 22% Latino** $24,607 $28,417 15%

SAN BERNARDINO

ADJUSTED PERCENTAGE GROUP 1980 1990 CHANGE White $29,910 $34,617 16% Asian* $32,370 $39,302 21% Black $23,481 $28,624 22% Am. Indian $21,516 $28,358 32% Latino** $27,585 $30,666 11%

SAN DIEGO

ADJUSTED PERCENTAGE GROUP 1980 1990 CHANGE White $29,650 $37,151 25% Asian* $28,938 $36,385 26% Black $20,521 $25,150 23% Am. Indian $22,889 $27,226 19% Latino** $23,558 $26,730 13%

VENTURA

ADJUSTED PERCENTAGE GROUP 1980 1990 CHANGE White $36,748 $47,233 29% Asian* $38,151 $55,410 45% Black $29,744 $39,983 34% Am. Indian $27,926 $37,740 35% Latino** $27,307 $34,203 25%

* Includes Pacific Islanders

** Latinos are also included in other race categories

NOTE: 1980 figures adjusted for inflation

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