‘90s a Rude Awakening From Suburban Dream

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

While 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 are 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 assistance. 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 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.

In thousands of Valley households, the smallest unexpected expense--a car repair, medical bill or lost day of work--is a budget buster that can bring financial crisis, say social service workers and community leaders.

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

Berkley, 64, used to make $16 an hour at the Lockheed 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.”

At Our Lady of the Holy Rosary Church in Sun Valley, which distributes food to needy families twice a week, “the line just seems to get bigger and bigger,” said Father Pat Murphy.

“People can’t stretch the dollar as much as they used to,” he said. “The idea of saving for a rainy day is gone, because every day is a rainy day.”

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. Even in the Valley’s more depressed areas, poverty is not as visible or pervasive as in the South Bronx or South-Central Los Angeles. It is more likely to hide behind prim bungalows or in garages housing crowds of immigrants.

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,’ ” remarked Ellen Michiel, executive director of the West Valley Community Development Corp.

She added: “There tends to be a great deal of skepticism that this community [of low-income people] exists here--and that it is large and it is growing.”

The Valley’s economic slide reflects a sweeping transformation that began more than a decade 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 neighboring 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 like 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.

Driven north by severe economic conditions at home, Latino immigrants are willing to start at the bottom of the U.S. job market “in the hope that there will be opportunities to advance in the future,” said professor Manuel Pastor, director of the international and public affairs center at Occidental.

History suggests that their fortunes will indeed improve with time, although because of economic circumstances the road to a better life may take longer than it has in the past.

Census data show that immigrants living in the Valley who arrived in the 1970s are better off than immigrants of the ‘80s. Moreover, immigrants who arrived before 1970 are better off than immigrants of the ‘70s--and, in fact, have a slightly lower rate of poverty than the native born.

For now, however, being poor in the Valley means a struggle for the basic necessities. And it often means living two and three families to one sardine-can apartment just to make ends meet.

Even in depressed neighborhoods, apartments larger than a single bedroom usually rent for at least $600. For a worker struggling at minimum wage, that’s more than three-fourths of his monthly pay.

To put a roof over their heads, poor families often pool their funds to rent a single apartment. Landlords, eager to preserve high rents to pay off loans and other costs, are content to look the other way. The result of overcrowding is accelerated wear and tear on the limited stock of housing available to the poor.

Scores more impoverished families have found a way to beat the crowds. They pay $300 and more to rent garages that afford more privacy but often lack plumbing and heat.

No one knows for sure how many poor people in the Valley live in garages, but the number is surely in the thousands. Last December, when MEND (Meet Each Need with Dignity), the Pacoima-based social service organization, distributed Christmas baskets to 1,200 needy families, about 100 of those families were living in garages, said Marianne Haver Hill, MEND’s executive director.

Contributing to poverty are the growing numbers of immigrants who are dependent on day labor and low-wage jobs. In addition, the spectacular collapse of the aerospace and defense industries stripped the Valley of thousands of its best-paying jobs. For good measure, the Northridge earthquake tossed thousands of people out of their homes or out of work.

“The earthquake, along with the deteriorating job situation in the Valley, was like a one-two punch,” said Father Tom Rush, pastor of Mary Immaculate Catholic Church in Pacoima.

In the Valley, as in the United States as a whole, 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. In Los Angeles County, only 8% of white, two-parent families, 9% of black, two-parent families and 17% of Latino, two-parent families live in poverty, according to an analysis of 1990 census figures by Julie DaVanzo, a Rand Corp. economist.

By contrast, 28% of white, 41% of black and 46% of Latino female-headed families were poor.

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.”

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 as 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.

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.

Children in low-income families may not know much about the current debate surrounding welfare reform, but they know about not having, and doing without.

“My mom gets $490 from welfare and she has to pay $400 for rent,” said Nora Vera, 17, of Pacoima. “She’s not really able to give us any money, not that much, and we’re four kids, so it’s really hard.”

For Nora, it meant wearing the same few clothes to school every day and sometimes not going out with friends.

“I have friends that would treat me, but I wouldn’t feel comfortable going with no money, because then you want to buy something, but you can’t,” she said.

Last summer, Nora got a summer job through a program run by the Los Angeles Archdiocese of the Catholic Church. With her money she bought clothes, school supplies and other essentials for herself, leaving her mother with one less child to worry about. She also helped out by buying things for the household. But the job ended, and now she is looking for work again.

It is certain that life will get tougher for recipients of public relief. County supervisors voted in February to slash general relief payments by more than one-quarter to $212 per month. The county bears the full cost of general relief, and the move would save an estimated $78 million per year.

Moreover, under welfare reform proposals pending in Congress, monthly AFDC grants will shrink and recipients will face the prospect of being cut off entirely after collecting benefits for five years.

“The philosophy behind it is it’s going to put more pressure on the family to get jobs,” said Bill Macfadden, a division chief with the county Department of Public Social Services. But Macfadden questions how quickly the 260,000 adults on county AFDC payrolls can be moved into the work force, given their limited job skills and economic conditions.

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 local 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 final indignity, 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.”

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, observes 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.”

Monday: For throngs of immigrants arriving in the Valley, progress up the economic ladder may come more slowly than in the past.

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The Spread of Poverty

A Times computer analysis of census data and a 1995 poverty projection shows that the number of poor areas in the San Fernando Valley has more than tripled in five years. The 1990 census counted 20 Valley poverty areas, defined by the U.S. Census Bureau as census tracts in which more than 20% of persons live below the federal poverty level. The 1995 projection, derived by the Los Angeles County demographers from a variety of income indicators, shows 43 new poverty areas, raising the total to 63.

Source: Los Angeles County strategic planning and urban research division and U.S. Bureau of the Census; Computer analysis by DOUG SMITH / Los Angeles Times

Poverty Rates: The Valley and L.A. County

The percentage of Valley residents living in poverty remains lower than for all Los Angeles County, but steady increases in poverty countywide has narrowed the gap over the past 15 years.

1980

San Fernando Valley: 9.1%

Los Angeles County: 13.2%

1990

San Fernando Valley: 10.8%

Los Angeles County: 14.8%

1995

San Fernando Valley: 16.3%

Los Angeles County: 21.4%

Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Los Angeles County division of strategic planning and urban research; Researched by DOUG SMITH / Los Angeles Times

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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