New Identity, New Challenges

Defenders of the San Fernando Valley have seized on the 2000 census as confirmation that the Valley is not the stereotypical white-flight suburb its detractors say it is.

Sure, between 1950 and 1970, the Valley was 95% white. But today, of the 1.4 million people who call the Valley home, 42% are white, 39% Latino, 9% Asian and 4% are black.

Check out Valley Produce in Reseda, ground zero for culinary multiculturalism. Women in chadors and saris, men in turbans and yarmulkes ply the grocery store’s narrow aisles, drawn by well-stocked bins of lavash bread, plantains, taro root and infinite varieties of rice.

And El Camino Real High School’s Academic Decathlon team, which heads to Anchorage this month for the national competition, has a roster right out of the United Nations: Samantha Henry, Elan Bar, Walter Ching, Grace Giles, Aria Haghighi, Dennis Kuo, Scott Lulovics, Ryan Ruby, Alan Wittenberg.

But if the Valley is no longer one homogenous enclave, as the census numbers confirm, it is, like the rest of Los Angeles, still a collection of enclaves. The northeast Valley communities of Arleta and Pacoima have the highest concentration of Latinos, between 78% and 83%. Tarzana, Encino, Sherman Oaks, Studio City and Toluca Lake, hilly neighborhoods along the Valley’s southern edge, have the largest concentration of whites, at least 78%.

And the Valley as a whole is experiencing what demographers call fairly significant white flight to newer, farther-out suburbs such as Santa Clarita and the Antelope Valley.

Does white flight matter? A city depends on a middle class for stability, but middle-class blacks, Latinos and Asian Americans and middle-class immigrants can play that role as well as whites.

But if the Valley’s newfound identity as a multicultural suburb is worth celebrating, it follows that another round of white flight, this time out of the Valley, is not. If the census numbers tell us how far we’ve come, they also tell us how far we need to go to knit the Valley’s diverse communities together.