For Many Who Left in Hard Times, L.A.’s the Place Again

Ten years ago, Leslie and Steven St. Martin left Los Angeles for the usual reasons: smog, traffic and crime. They headed for Hawaii, attracted by the natural beauty and the chance for a fresh start.

But the pull of family ties back in Southern California grew stronger as the St. Martins had children. Hawaii’s high cost of housing, the condition of its public schools and the restricted job opportunities--she is an English professor, he is a plastics distributor--also began to bother them.

So in June, they moved back to the Los Angeles area and bought a house in Topanga, which they share with their 4-year-old daughter and 3-month-old son.

The St. Martins’ return exemplifies part of a trend that is helping to increase population in post-recessionary Southern California.

“There’s a lot more opportunity here as I build up a business,” explained Steve St. Martin, 40, who is a senior salesman for the family-owned Northern Polymer Corp. He noted that there are about 3,000 plastic molding businesses in the Los Angeles region, compared to about a dozen potential customers on Oahu.

Leslie St. Martin, 37, who earned a doctorate at the University of Hawaii and is teaching part-time at the University of Judaism in the Sepulveda Pass, said part of what pulled her back was the large number of colleges in Southern California.

Their children benefit by being closer now to grandparents, who help baby-sit, and by the cultural and educational opportunities here, the St. Martins said.

Of course, traffic and mortgage costs can make life more stressful in Los Angeles than when they were renting on an Oahu beachfront.

“Sometimes I miss what I had there, but I don’t regret moving back,” said Leslie St. Martin. “For us, this was definitely the move to make.”

For both highly skilled professionals and for low-income immigrants, an improved Southern California economy helps fade images of riots and earthquake, according to Allen Scott, a UCLA professor of policy studies and geography. “Attitudes are only symptoms, not a cause. The underlying cause is more fundamental: economics and the job situation,” he said.

Dowell Myers, USC professor of urban planning and demography, agreed but cautioned against exuberance, since even slight growth in such gigantic counties as Los Angeles and Orange generate large raw numbers. The 62,000 people that Los Angeles County gained last year, according to federal census figures released Tuesday, amounted to two-thirds of a percentage point, although state numbers based on a different method were twice as high.

Because of births and continuing immigration from Latin American and Asia, Southern California counties never lost population in the early ‘90s. However, state Department of Finance figures show that the exodus of residents from Los Angeles County was powerful, reaching a peak of 227,578 in 1992 before dropping to 73,199 last year. The flow of people to nearby suburban counties and out-of-state slowed and was offset by foreign immigrants and by more U.S. citizens moving into the county, analysts explained.

Officials say they do not keep statistics on how many people such as the St. Martins are returning to Southern California. But that trend-within-a-trend also includes Rex Wiratunga, a 53-year-old aerospace engineer from Northridge, who lost his job six years ago and could find another one only in Seattle. The big problem: Since he could not sell his house, he wound up commuting back to his family in the San Fernando Valley every other weekend.

Boeing Co.’s acquisition of McDonnell Douglas last year allowed him to transfer back to a post in Long Beach in November. Besides being delighted at living again full-time with his family, he has another reason to be pleased. “I like California better than Seattle climate wise,” he said.

Another U-turn was maneuvered by Melvin D. Sandvig of Oak Park in Ventura County. After running in the Goodwill Games Marathon in Seattle, the lawyer and retired Los Angeles police officer decided he liked that area enough to move his family to a planned community near Tacoma, Wash., in 1991.

“We bought a 3,000-square-foot house on a golf course for about $200,000. You couldn’t get anything like that in Los Angeles,” he recalled.

Sandvig would work five days at his law practice in Encino and then spend nine days with his family in Washington. But then he discovered that Washington schools were overcrowded. About to enroll his third child in private school, he realized it would cost him $25,000 a year to educate all three.

So the family moved back in 1995 to take advantage of the public schools in Oak Park. “It’s as close as you can get to being a private school,” Sandvig said.

Beyond the returnees, Southern California boosters say they discern a trend of young, mobile people around the country finally seeing the region as a desirable place again.

For example, after nine years working at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Andrea Feldman moved to Los Angeles in June both for her career and to taste the West Coast. Feldman, 32, is working as assistant curator at the Santa Monica-based Eli Broad Family Foundation, a private lending library of contemporary art.

“In the art world if you don’t want to move to Europe and you don’t want to be in Manhattan . . . L.A. is the place to be,” Feldman said. “I wanted to experience something new and figured if I wasn’t doing it now, I wasn’t going to.”

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Times staff writer Karima A. Haynes contributed to this story.