Valley's Next Century Seen as Bloom or Rust

By NANCY HILL-HOLTZMAN

Sept. 4, 1997 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Just as it has for decades since the first For Sale sign went up on a tiny front lawn, the San Fernando Valley in the 21st century will continue to be a way station for the middle class.

But it may be a dwindling middle class that lacks sufficient skills and education for high paying jobs, and a middle class dominated by recent immigrants as upwardly mobile families of all races move out.

Although newcomers most likely will find a better life in the Valley than the one they left behind, they will no longer be able to count on finding the American Dream.

Experts say the Valley of the future could just as easily be a rotting urban core as a blooming suburban oasis.

“There are huge disparate scenarios for the Valley,” said Shirley Svorny, who heads the Center for the Study of the San Fernando Valley at Cal State Northridge. “I can see the Valley deteriorating . . . or it all comes together.”

Svorny and others say the area’s fate depends on the same basics that drew people in its heyday--good schools, safe streets, open roads, plentiful jobs, well-kept bungalows, a sense of community--and the political will of the people to settle for nothing less.

But it may be a lot to expect, considering where the Valley stands today. Given the current state of public schools, complaints about local government and the lack of public transportation, Valley attorney and civic leader David Fleming declared bluntly, “We’re not prepared for the 21st century.”

The one area in which Valley leaders seem organized and taking action is economic development.

Responding to the loss of 100,000 jobs in the early ‘90s recession and the Northridge earthquake, chambers of commerce and other business groups formed the Economic Alliance of the San Fernando Valley, a public-private partnership, to map the Valley’s economic future.

Although the area is still suffering from the loss of aerospace and other manufacturing jobs, the outlook for the next century looks bright, experts say.

Moreover, the steps being taken by the group, including a job skills survey in progress that will spawn targeted training programs, is what academicians say is needed to match the work force with the work.

If current trends hold, “things look pretty good for the Valley,” said CSUN economics professor Daniel R. Blake.

The explosive growth of the entertainment industry, including ancillary multimedia, high-tech companies, which grew 44% in the past 10 years, is the No. 1 reason for optimism, Blake said.

Other high spots of Valley commerce include biotech firms and medical supply manufacturing companies, as well as technology-based manufacturing and information services, said John Rooney, president of the Valley Economic Development Center.

But the future of the Valley economy lies in small businesses, which will account for 95% of job growth in the Valley, Rooney said.

By that he means chiefly “economic engine” businesses with the potential to export goods and services outside of the area, but to a lesser extent, small retail concerns too.

“The Valley is going to be the small-business capital of the United States,” Rooney said. “It is a new economy.”

Rooney concedes that a key stumbling block that must be addressed is the problem of workers who lack skills.

In some cases, that is a failing of the public school system, but it also applies to immigrants with varying educational backgrounds and fluency in English.

Of the adult population, 345,000 or about a quarter of Valley residents were born in another country, according to a 1993 UCLA master’s thesis, “Beyond Suburbia: The Changing Face of the San Fernando Valley.”

In the 1950s, unskilled workers would have been able to move from minimum-wage jobs into relatively high-paying blue-collar jobs at, say, the General Motors plant.

But most of those jobs are gone and there appears to be little on the horizon to replace them, UCLA professor Goetz Wolff and other experts said.

That worries Wolff, who is leery of rosy predictions that a significant number will become successful entrepreneurs contributing to the predicted bevy of small companies.

The lack of high paying blue-collar jobs is a problem that reverberates through the housing market, depressing prices because workers can’t afford them and contributing to the spread of blight as unoccupied properties are allowed to deteriorate.

UCLA Law School professor Gary Blasi, chairman of a city Blue Ribbon Housing Commission, estimates a quarter to a third of the slum housing in Los Angeles is in the Valley. While that’s not disproportionate to its size, the numbers are alarming because they represent a huge increase over the past 20 years.

“I see a couple of scenarios,” Wolff said. “One is a ‘Blade Runner’ scenario in which we really screw up. We continue to do the wrong thing and we spiral down to a low end where we can’t support education and infrastructure.

“Or we recognize we have to have ‘patient’ capital and invest in people and defer quarterly profits for something that takes a little longer,” he said.

That would mean putting money into things such as training and higher wages, investing in education and caring for the infrastructure.

In the past, California made the right decision by investing in education and infrastructure, said UCLA professor Roger Waldinger, author of “Ethnic Los Angeles.” But in a post-Proposition 13 world, Waldinger said, it’s become just the opposite.

If those projections sound harsh, Waldinger, Wolff and others maintain that taking a clear-eyed look at the Valley’s future requires shucking its myths, including the myths of its past.

Sure, families by the thousands spilled over the Sepulveda Pass from the other side of the hill and all points east to grab the cheap, new housing that sprouted amid the orange groves and farms.

But “Leave It to Beaver” be damned, the country’s biggest suburb was never just a bedroom community.

Indeed, its buildup, starting in the postwar 1940s, was very much linked to jobs, as Greg Hise, an urban planning professor at USC, demonstrates in his book, “Magnetic Los Angeles.”

The slogan for the post-World War II development of Panorama City by Kaiser Community Homes was, “Building a city where a city belongs,” that is to say, relatively close to four major employers in the Valley--General Motors, Lockheed, Rocketdyne and Anheuser-Busch.

In addition to jobs, the planners envisioned a self-contained community with its own shopping, recreation spots, houses of worship and airports. And they succeeded.

“You could almost tow [the Valley] off to the ocean and it could go on on its own,” said Peter Morrison, a demographer at the Rand Corp.

Population turnover was also in accordance with planners’ vision, despite the Valley’s image as a place where little changes.

“The way to think of the Valley is not just a community or a region but a place through which people cycle on their upwardly mobile climb,” Morrison said.

In the half-century since the housing boom started, the Valley has developed into a vibrant multiethnic, economically complex city within a city that is home to all strata of society.

“If California is an entry port of immigration to the United States, the Valley is certainly one of the front doorsteps,” Morrison said.

Still, the lack of progress in a number of areas that define a livable city are at the crux of concern about the Valley’s future: Schools, accessible local government and transportation.

Even some of the Valley’s biggest boosters offer a glum prognosis unless major changes are made, first and foremost in the quality of the public schools.

“Schools are the cornerstone,” said Scott Wilk, executive director of FREE, a group organized to break up the Los Angeles Unified School District. “If we don’t address the school issue, the Valley will be like a Third World area--very rich and very poor and nothing in between.”

Academics who study urban migration share the concern about the dwindling middle class.

One possible scenario for the next century is that the Valley floor will be a doughnut hole populated by poor minorities, more than half of them Latino, while the hilly rim will be home to the affluent of any race, with no middle class in between, a pattern already apparent throughout Los Angeles.

Many Valley political watchers are convinced that the fate of the school breakup movement is the best bellwether of the Valley’s future.

If the school breakup campaign gains momentum, a campaign to secede from Los Angeles could follow. The plan had been to concentrate on the school breakup campaign first, but this week, the group of activists spearheading the secession movement, Valley VOTE, began talking at a meeting about combining the two independence efforts and placing them together on the same ballot in the year 2000.

But whether either movement succeeds depends, of course, on voters. Assemblyman Tom McClintock (R-Northridge), an advocate of breaking up the school district and author of the Valley’s secession bill, maintains that the political will is there to be harnessed.

The 21st century, McClintock said, will be marked by people rising up to reclaim control of political power lost with the centralization of government in the 20th century.

“We’ve designed a system,” he said, “that thwarts the best intentions of individuals to improve their community.”

And one obvious improvement that remains as elusive as it is crucial is public transportation.

Working with the Economic Alliance, mayoral advisor Fleming, a recent appointee to the state Transportation Commission, has helped organize a transit summit set for Sept. 12. There, he and others plan to challenge Valley leaders to quit fighting over where a rail line should be located and commit to a plan.

“If we’re going to do anything in this Valley,” Fleming said, “we have to have a transportation system.”

On Friday, a look at the weekend’s events marking the San Fernando Mission’s bicentennial and some of the controversy involved in the preparations.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Current Valley Employment

Information based services: 7%

Locally-based employment: 44%

Entertainment: 15%

Technology-based manufacturing: 15%

Information-based services: 10%

General manufacturing: 9%

Future Job Growth

Theme parks/ tourism