‘90s Bring More Hardship and Decline to Valley

As one of the country’s best-known suburbs, the San Fernando Valley has always been a shrine to upward mobility, a place where life was good and could only get better.

But a series of convulsions--the aerospace industry collapse, the Northridge earthquake, a real estate depression, white flight and a swelling population of poor immigrants--has battered its image and psyche.

Although it may linger in memory as the land of Ozzie and Harriet, the Valley of the ‘90s is now home to an increasingly anxious middle class and a surging poverty rate exceeding that of the rest of the country.

At the time of the 1980 census, one in 11 residents of the Valley (including the cities of Burbank and Glendale) lived below the federal poverty line, a figure not adjusted for the high cost of living in Southern California.

By 1990, the proportion of the impoverished had grown to 1 in 9.

By 1995, 16.3%--or 1 in 6--Valley residents fell below the poverty line, according to estimates by Los Angeles County’s division of strategic planning and urban research.

Based on these figures, the Valley now holds the dubious--and once unimaginable--distinction of having a higher rate of poverty than the United States as a whole. The national rate was 14.5% in 1994, the last year for which estimates were available.

The numbers reflect a pattern of escalating hardship. Consider:

* The number of people on welfare in the Valley (including Glendale and Burbank) rose from 64,642 in 1990 to 115,230 in 1995--an increase of 78%.

* In 1990, one of every 14 Valley residents was receiving welfare, food stamps or Medi-Cal. By 1995, more than 1 in 7 was on the dole.

* Unemployment claims in the Valley jumped from 78,706 in 1989 to 111,051 in 1995--an increase of 41%.

* For those with jobs, average salaries in the Valley in 1992 were about 4% lower than in 1987, when adjusted for the rise in cost of living, according to an analysis of private sector wages.

As the data suggest, at the same time that poverty rates are soaring, a growing number of Valley residents are living on the edge--not just the chronically poor, but many lifelong members of the middle class who have become unemployed or underemployed and are at risk of skidding into poverty.

No clear divide separates the poor from those hanging on by a thread, but the Rev. Braxton Berkley of Pacoima fits somewhere within that gray realm.

Berkley, 64, a minister and former Lockheed employee, used to make $16 an hour at the plant in Burbank before the aerospace giant eliminated thousands of jobs. Now the money dribbles in from several directions--Social Security, a pension, a part-time job--yet his income is much lower than before.

Said Berkley: “I’m not exaggerating when I say I’m one step away from pushing a shopping cart if any of the pieces fall through the cracks.”

In a not-so-gray area is an unemployed Van Nuys woman who said: “I sell my blood for money--I make $120 a month doing that--and with my food stamps, that’s how I live.”

To be sure, not everyone feels the pain. The average Valley household remains middle or upper middle class, and by most yardsticks, the area is better off than the county as a whole. As time goes by, however, the Valley is less a bastion of comfort and security and more a low-rise version of urban America.

Even so, the Valley’s image as a middle-class cocoon has proved an obstacle in raising funds to help the disadvantaged, say social service providers and advocates for the poor.

“People in the city . . . say, ‘Why are you doing anything there [in the Valley]? There are no poor people there,’ ” said Ellen Michiel, executive director of the West Valley Community Development Corp.

The Valley’s economic slide reflects a sweeping transformation that began decades ago.

In 1960, the Valley’s population was 92% white, but by 1990, the white majority had shrunk to 56.5%, and it is believed to have continued to fall. Many former residents have opted for a lower-cost life in other states or for better schools and less crime in the Valley’s own suburbs: Simi Valley, Thousand Oaks and Santa Clarita.

Simultaneously, immigration has soared. In 1980, about one-fifth of Valley and Glendale residents were foreign born, but during the next 10 years the immigrant population more than doubled. By the 1990 census, more than 500,000 immigrants lived in the Valley and Glendale--and foreign-born residents accounted for one-third of the population.

In many ways, the newcomers resemble the young families who came to the Valley in the late 1940s and early ‘50s, dreaming of affordable housing and a chance to climb the economic ladder. Although drawn from a melange of lands and cultures, the new crowd of dreamers is dominated by poor Latinos who, while possessing a formidable work ethic, lack education, English and job skills--and thus are poor in dramatic disproportion to their numbers.

More Mexicans now live in the East Valley than in East Los Angeles and Boyle Heights. And as immigrant families have moved south and west in search of work and affordable rents, poverty also has dispersed from its stronghold in the northeast Valley to traditionally wealthier precincts such as Northridge and Canoga Park.

A pair of statistics speaks volumes about this demographic change: Immigrants who arrived during the 1980s make up about 17% of the Valley’s population, but a whopping 41% of its poor, according to an analysis of census figures by researchers at Occidental College.

In the Valley, as in the United States, poverty’s grip is tightest on the young. At the time of the 1990 census, the rate of poverty among children in the Valley was almost 50% higher than the rate for the population as a whole.

The reasons are not complicated. High rates of divorce and out-of-wedlock birth have created legions of single-parent families--usually headed by women, and typically by young women with limited education and earning power.

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Moreover, in the Valley as in the rest of the country, the erosion of the minimum wage has driven countless families into poverty. In 1980, the earnings from a minimum wage job were enough to lift a family of three above the poverty line. Today, the purchasing power of a minimum wage job is 25% below the poverty threshold.

There simply are thousands “who can’t achieve a minimally decent standard of living . . . by any amount of hard labor,” said urban historian Mike Davis. “They’re trapped in a structural ghetto of low-wage jobs that don’t go anywhere.”

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By a wide majority, most poor households in the Valley have at least one member who works but earns too little to lift the family out of poverty.

Still, more than 100,000 children and adults in the Valley derive part or all of their income from welfare. As welfare rolls have grown, so too have its costs. Yet for welfare recipients, times have never been leaner.

California’s welfare benefits remain among the most generous in the country. But the maximum grant for the typical mother and two children under the Aid to Families With Dependent Children program--$594 per month--is considerably less than the $694 that was paid in 1989. Factoring in the rise in the cost of living, welfare payments to a family of three provide one-third less purchasing power than they did six years ago.

“Taking into consideration the cost of living, the welfare recipients have been losing ground,” said Bryce Yokomizo, East Valley district welfare director for the Los Angeles County Department of Public Social Services.

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A typical family of three on welfare also is eligible for up to $242 per month in food stamps. Its combined annual income from welfare and food stamps would be $9,960--less than the poverty threshold of $12,156 for a family of three.

Even among the middle class, anxieties are particularly evident in the Valley, said Ed Blakely, a professor of urban planning at USC. It is “a classic example of the step-down in wages and lifestyle,” he said.

As Julie Kunce and her husband have learned, the fall from middle-class comforts can be sudden and steep.

In the span of a few months last year, the North Hills woman lost her job in the loan department of a bank, and her husband lost his job as a printer. With an infant son to support and car and house loans to pay, Kunce said the couple quickly ran through their savings, then sold jewelry and other possessions to buy food and pay utility bills.

Kunce also volunteers at the food pantry of a church that has helped the family. If there was a silver lining, she said, it’s that “we’re . . . being more understanding of people who are in this kind of situation.”

After months of searching, Kunce finally found work selling bus bench ads.

“Instead of $14 [an hour], I’m making $8.25,” she said. “My husband still hasn’t found work.”

But accepting the job meant new costs for the couple. “I didn’t have the gas money to get back and forth to work,” she said. So she had to ask her mother to drive her to work each day.

For the Kunces, the last straw came the night of May 17. The couple was mugged in Northridge. The robbers took their rent money and a set of car keys.

The incident, Kunce said, might have been God’s way of telling the family something.

“We’re leaving,” she said. “We’re just not prospering here. I think God’s telling me it’s time to move on.”

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Maybe to someplace like Rialto in San Bernardino County, where there’s development and growth and a need for loan processors.

Fortunately, relatively few members of the Valley’s middle class have seen their financial lives fall apart. But thousands of Valley families have faced the double whammy of stagnant or shrinking earnings accompanied by the erosion of their only significant asset: their homes.

Over the years, as real estate prices shot upward, many Valley homeowners who had saved little for the future nonetheless believed they held the one investment that could only go up. But since 1990, single-family homes in the Valley have lost about 25% of their value, laying waste to homeowners’ morale along with their net worth.

Pessimism and shrinking expectations have trickled down even to the ranks of students, said William Bowen, a geography professor at Cal State Northridge.

As a newcomer to the college in 1970, Bowen asked his students how many expected to buy a home, and every hand went up. Recently, when he asked the same question to a class of 50 students, “three put up their hands,” Bowen said.

“That,” said Bowen, “says something about . . . the morale factor in the body politic.”

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This story was reported by Times staff writers Myron Levin, Lucille Renwick, Doug Smith and Jocelyn Y. Stewart. It was written by Levin.

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1993 Poverty Threshholds

The U.S. government uses a combination of family size and income to determine who is poor.

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Size of Family Unit Poverty Threshold 1 person $7,761 2 9,935 3 12,156 4 15,570 5 18,407 6 20,808 7 23,573 8 28,148 9 or more 31,159

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