Cities at the Center of Change

When Ed Kelly moved his family from North Long Beach to a brand-new cul-de-sac off Edinger Avenue 29 years ago, he felt like a pioneer.

His neighborhood was fast filling up with young, mostly white families, many of them seeking new lives away from the economic decline and social upheaval rocking urban Los Angeles in the late 1960s.

Today, Kelly said, he feels increasingly like an outsider in the suburban community he helped settle.

His once-homogeneous neighborhood has turned into a melting pot where, by his count, four or five languages are spoken. Security bars now cover the windows of his ranch house. Most of his original neighbors have moved away, and Kelly is thinking of joining them.

“I don’t think it’s a racial thing, because I have nothing against any of my neighbors,” the 58-year-old computer salesman said. “But it’s not the same place. The stores are different. . . . The whole character is different.”

The demographic shift on Kelly’s block and many others is slowly transforming Orange County--and prompting a second wave of flight.

Ethnic minorities already make up the majority in many of Orange County’s central cities, including Santa Ana, Westminster, Garden Grove and Stanton. By 2020, county demographers predict, Latinos will surpass whites as Orange County’s largest ethnic group.

While the changes appear inevitable, there is much debate over what the demographic changes mean.

Some economists and urban planners say that parts of central Orange County--like older suburbs across the country--risk the same economic decline and social divisions that beset older cities a generation ago.

“What’s happening in central Orange County, and in a lot of aging suburbs, is that homeowners who were part of the original inner-city exodus are getting old,” said Peter Dreier, a professor of public policy at Occidental College.

“In the next 10 to 20 years, they are going to move away or pass on,” he said. “The big question is: What happens next?”

Joel Kotkin, a well-known author and economist, tried to answer that question earlier this month with a study that highlighted the growing gap in everything from high school SAT scores to real estate values and business growth between upscale communities along the coast and in South County and the older communities to the north.

Longtime residents in Santa Ana and elsewhere say they are all too aware of the problems surrounding them--from struggling schools and gang activity to pockets of poverty. But while some are leaving, many others are holding their ground and rejecting the notion that their communities are in decline.

“The languages and the colors change, but we are still neighbors,” said Alberta Christy, who moved to southern Santa Ana from the Los Angeles Coliseum area a few years after the Watts riots. “This was a working-class neighborhood when mostly whites lived here. It’s still a working-class neighborhood. It transcends color lines.”

Christy lives about a mile from Kelly. But the shifting ground in her neighborhood has only strengthened her resolve to stay.

Christy, who is black, was one of only a few nonwhites when she and her children moved into the Valley High School neighborhood 28 years ago. But she had something in common, she said, with the other parents: a desire to have her children grow up in a safe, friendly environment.

For more than a decade, her block remained largely white and middle class. But by the early 1980s, some of the couples whose children had left home began moving out. Many rented their houses to newly arrived immigrants from Mexico.

“This is when things began to change,” said Christy, who works in banking. “We saw an influx of immigrants, and family members would bring other family members in.”

Around the same period, crime began to rise. “It was a scary time,” she said. “We had a lot of residential burglaries. We had trouble getting police to come to the neighborhood. Some of my neighbors wanted to become vigilantes.”

In her view, the situation has improved dramatically over the last five years. Many of the rental houses were sold to families, and these new homeowners maintain them better and have a bigger stake in the community. New community-policing tactics have brought about a reduction in crime and all but eliminated the weekend cruising on nearby Bristol Street that resulted in a string of shootings.

Ethnically, Christy’s block has never been more diverse, with Mexicans, Salvadorans, Chinese, Hmong, Koreans and Native Americans, as well as whites. Despite their differences, Christy said, they are united in neighborhood pride.

“We realized we had to come together,” she said.

Christy’s optimism about Orange County is shared by experts who nonetheless see the potential for social divisions in the future.

The neat rows of tract houses and shopping centers that sprouted like mushrooms around large cities after World War II are now entering middle age--and in some cases, the wrinkles are showing.

In bedroom communities on the outskirts of Cleveland, Philadelphia and Chicago, decay advanced rapidly as middle-class families moved beyond the so-called inner-ring suburbs to even newer and more distant housing tracts. In their wake, shopping centers sit vacant and crime is up.

By contrast, Orange County’s economy is thriving with jobs and new development. While most of the construction is taking place in South County, economists and residents agree that even central Orange County is recovering from the recession of the early 1990s.

In his report, Kotkin praises minorities who run small businesses--such as Korean Americans along Garden Grove Boulevard and Latinos with their bustling shopping district in downtown Santa Ana--for helping drive the county’s economic boom.

But he said the seeds for division exist in Scholastic Assessment Test scores, which are significantly lower for students in Santa Ana, Anaheim and Garden Grove than for those in more affluent South County and coastal cities. Last year, the Santa Ana Unified School District’s average score was 867, compared with 1,156 in Irvine Unified School District.

Orange County’s unemployment rate--3.5% in September--is one of the lowest in the state. But the rate is nearly double that in Santa Ana and Stanton. The office vacancy rate is running 20% in the central zone, compared with 6% around John Wayne Airport and in South County and 10.5% countywide.

Battered by defense cutbacks and a decline in manufacturing, older communities in North and Central County are gradually losing their share of the total countywide payroll, while South County is rapidly gaining, according to a study by Cal State Fullerton’s Center of Economic Studies.

“In the past, the ‘Orange Curtain’ has referred to the county’s border with Los Angeles,” Kotkin states in the study. “But now, it may be better understood as a psychological, political and sociological barrier that separates the prosperous parts of the county from the economically challenged core.”

Kotkin and others talk about the need for Orange County’s better established business community to embrace ethnic businesses and for government to improve schools in disadvantaged areas.

Anil Puri, director of Cal State Fullerton’s economic studies center, said older suburbs face a major challenge in retrofitting their aging office towers, industrial parks and retail districts to compete more effectively with newer developments.

Downtown Santa Ana, for example, has successfully revived its 4th Street shopping district with a festive mix of Latino-oriented restaurants, music shops, clothing stores and other businesses. But many of the office towers that once housed banks and law firms sit vacant.

Overall, Puri said, central Orange County remains a good location for manufacturing, with a large pool of blue-collar workers and proximity to the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles.

Beyond economics, other experts stress the need for continued community policing activities to prevent decline. Garden Grove, for example, spent millions improving the tough Buena-Clinton district by beefing up patrols, rehabilitating apartments and relocating a manufacturing business there that provides jobs for residents. The moves cut crime dramatically.

Pat Garcia-Velasquez, a Santa Ana real estate agent with Advanced Properties, said success stories such as Buena-Clinton are often lost on outsiders.

“There is clearly a perception problem,” she said. “Some people see people who look different from them and dress differently. It can make them uncomfortable.”

Garcia-Velasquez said many of the sellers she works with are older whites who are moving on to retirement communities, both in Orange County and elsewhere. Many of the buyers are younger Latinos just starting out.

“You are seeing a lot of neighborhoods that for years had a lot of elderly people become family neighborhoods again with lots of kids playing on the streets,” she said. “Buying that home is so important to these families.”

Garcia-Velasquez agrees that improving public schools is key to sustaining the quality of Central County cities. She said some of her new buyers aren’t as involved as they could be in their children’s education, because they hold several jobs and feel slightly intimidated about getting involved.

“There is a language barrier, and some of these parents don’t feel comfortable about going to the PTA,” she said. “It would be great if they had a few extra hours to spend with their children and dealing with school. It would help a lot.”

Lupe Ruiz, a sales clerk who lives with her extended family in Santa Ana’s Heniger Park district, said she might consider moving south when it’s time to buy her own home.

“Santa Ana is where my family is, [but] I think my [own kids] could have better opportunities in Irvine or somewhere around there,” she said. “I hope that will be the next step.”

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Leading Indicators?

Some economists express concern about the gap in school test scores, employment rates and business activity between older communities in central Orange County and newer ones to the south. They say the numbers could presage future social divisions. A look at some measures:

Unemployment (September 1997)

Countywide: 3.5%

Santa Ana: 6.2

Stanton: 6.1

Garden Grove: 4.5

Westminster: 4.1

Buena Park: 4.1

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Office Vacancy (summer 1997)

Countywide: 10.5%

Central County: 20.3

North County: 11.3

West County: 13.6

John Wayne Airport: 6.1

South County: 5.7

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Average SAT Scores (1997)

Irvine: 1,156

Newport-Mesa: 1,077

Huntington Beach: 1,064

Garden Grove: 990

Santa Ana: 867

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Projected Ethnicity Changes (countywide)

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1995 2020 White 59% 40% Latino 27 41 Asian 12 16 Black 2 3

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Sources: State Department of Employment, Center for Demographic Research at Cal State Fullerton, Times reports; Researched by SHELBY GRAD / Los Angeles Times