Diversity Comes With Division

This is the Orange County paradox: The more diverse we get, the farther apart we seem to drift.

Over the last decade the statistical center points of Orange County’s growing Latino and Asian populations have changed little, hovering just east of the Santa Ana River at about 17th Street, according to a fresh analysis of data from the recent 2000 census.

But the center point for the county’s white population has shifted southeast about two miles, from a Latino-heavy Santa Ana neighborhood near Broadway and Edinger Avenue to an office park overlooking the Costa Mesa Freeway.

That change, experts say, underscores the region’s growing physical division along racial lines, with whites slipping away like a continent adrift.

Symbolically, the new white population center point rests near the former site of the Crazy Horse Saloon in Santa Ana, a country-western nightclub that last year followed the southward flow of whites and moved to the Irvine Spectrum.

Yet the growing gap between the white and minority population center points--called “centroids” by the U.S. Census Bureau--is more than a statistical curiosity. It offers hints to the future physical makeup of the region as developers and retail chains use such data to help determine where to lay out new housing tracts, build new stores and buy billboard space.

The shifting centroids will even help determine what junk mail you receive as marketers target specific neighborhoods by ethnicity and income levels.

“It’s very useful data,” said Connie Pechmann, a marketing professor at UC Irvine. “Heavy users of the census data are chain stores such as Starbucks. They’re going to move to where the people are and replace the mom-and-pops. So they’re going to be moving southeast.”

In some ways, the data confirm trends that marketers have already identified by analyzing such statistics as building permits, she said. But the new census data can help businesses determine whether they might have missed a market--and help them anticipate where their future growth will be.

“If you are thinking about where to locate a store, obviously you want to know where the population is located,” said Dave Stewart, a deputy dean and professor of marketing at the University of Southern California. “The same is true in government planning. . . . The individual point itself is just a point. That point is not the critical issue; it is where it is moving and where it will go.”

Centroids themselves are statistical creations. They represent the point at which Orange County would be balanced if each person in a group--defined by such criteria as ethnicity or income range--is treated as an equal weight. It maps the heart of the dispersal of people, which is why, for instance, the Asian centroid can lie in a Latino neighborhood.

As interesting as the centroid information might be, the most critical data has yet to come. Next year the Census Bureau will release detailed population snapshots, including income, occupation and education levels--the kinds of details that help identify consumer markets down to areas as small as a few residential blocks.

Later this year, the bureau will release ancestry information, which will enable marketers to differentiate, for example, between Mexican and Guatemalan neighborhoods and enclaves of Chinese from Korean.

As it is now, though, the early 2000 data illustrate a decade of change in Orange County. The ‘90s were marked by the departure of tens of thousands of middle-class whites after manufacturing jobs--particularly in the aerospace industry--dried up in the older, more developed and industrialized northern part of the county.

As a smaller wave of upper-middle-class whites moved into South County, lower-income immigrants moved into the north, drawn by less-expensive housing and areas where fellow Latinos and Asians already were rooted, UCI sociology professor Frank D. Bean said.

“The big issue in the future in these areas that are fairly congested is, you start to outstrip the infrastructure,” Bean said. “Then it requires a new approach to service delivery.”

Rey Ngum and her husband, Neang Thuy, didn’t need a sophisticated marketing analysis to develop their strategy for finding a business niche midway between the Asian and Latino centroids.

The Cambodian immigrants own a Chinese restaurant in the heart of the largely Latino neighborhood at West 17th and English streets in Santa Ana.

“Everybody loves Chinese food,” explained Ngum, 34, as she stirred a vat of beef and broccoli at her restaurant, Hong Kong Chef Express.

Clear, bold letters on the front door advertise “Comida China,” or “Chinese food” in Spanish. So it is understandable that customers assume Ngum understands Spanish, which she does--”a little.”

“I took some Spanish in high school,” said Ngum, who moved to the United States at 13. “I just say ‘OK.’ ”

Ngum and her husband bought the small restaurant four years ago from a Chinese family. They live in a predominantly Asian neighborhood in Westminster.

By a statistical quirk, the axis of Orange County’s Asian population lies just south of Ngum’s restaurant at King and West 14th streets, a neighborhood populated mostly by Latinos.

The center of Orange County’s Latino population lies a few blocks northeast, near Candis Avenue and West 21st Street, where Theodore Sawyer has lived for 15 years.

The 47-year-old New York native and Army veteran said he has witnessed the exodus of white neighbors and an influx of Latinos.

Sawyer, who is white, said he moved to Santa Ana from Riverside to cut commuting costs. His wife is a Santa Ana high school teacher and, at the time, he worked for an Anaheim trucking company.

“God doesn’t look down and say he’s Latino, he’s Chinese or whatever,” Sawyer said, standing in the driveway of his modest single-story house. “He looks down and sees a spirit.”

Staff writers Ray F. Herndon and Jennifer Mena contributed to this report.