California Grows to 33.9 Million, Reflecting Increased Diversity

For the first time ever, no racial or ethnic group forms a majority in California, according to census data released Thursday, which also showed that the state’s population shifted inland during the 1990s and away from pricier coastal cities.

The state is now home to 33.9 million people. As California grew increasingly multicultural at century’s end, the white population dropped by nearly half a million over the past decade, surprising many demographers.

Less startling was the growth in the Latino population, whose political and economic muscle has increasingly appeared in storefronts and election results statewide, particularly in the five-county Los Angeles metropolitan region.

A third of the nation’s Latinos now live in California, largely because of rising birthrates rather than new immigration. Statewide, the Latino population grew at a brisk 35%. Latinos became dominant in Los Angeles city and county in the 1990s and had even more dramatic growth in the Inland Empire and Orange County.

While still massive, immigration to the state slowed compared with the 1980s, as economic opportunity lured newcomers to a band of states stretching from the Northwest, across the nation’s breadbasket and into the South. California’s share of immigrants shrank from 1 in 3 to 1 in 4.

“California’s filled up,” said Jeffrey Passel, a demographer with the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan policy research group. “It makes some sense for immigrants to think, ‘If I go there, I’m going to be in competition in all the same job niches, but they’re begging in Arkansas if I’m willing to work in a chicken plant.’ ”

If the state is full, Los Angeles County may be overflowing. In the 1990s, it added 656,174 residents and maintained its title as America’s most populous county. Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura counties together saw growth of nearly 13% over the decade.

While the demographic changes affect life in classrooms and restaurants, on freeways and in subdivisions, they also alter California’s political landscape. The once-in-a-decade process of counting people in the U.S. will give California an additional congressional district; now lawmakers must redraw crucial political boundaries.

Among other major changes:

* Californians increasingly migrated inland to the vast agricultural Central Valley, largely because of housing affordability. The median price for a home in the Central Valley is $151,580, compared with San Francisco’s $550,000.

* Tiny San Benito County, tucked just south of the Silicon Valley, grew at the fastest rate in the state, a jump of 45.1%. Los Angeles County, in comparison, grew only 7.4%. But the devil is in the details. San Benito added 16,537 people--equivalent to just 2.5% of the new Los Angeles County residents.

* In addition to Latinos, the population of Asians/Pacific Islanders surged--38.5% statewide. The change was particularly apparent in the Silicon Valley and the Bay Area, where four counties now have Asian populations of more than 20%. Immigration was key.

* As the population of Asians and Latinos grew, the population of blacks in California held steady.

The data released Thursday were the first detailed information on California from the 2000 census. Other information, including details on how much money Californians make and what their families look like, will follow throughout the year and into 2002.

The California census information--which pegs the state as the country’s biggest, with Texas No. 2--mirrored trends seen nationwide, as the federal government released data about all 50 states before an April 1 deadline. Earlier this month, the Census Bureau reported that 30% of all Americans belong to minority groups because of the fast rise in Latino and Asian populations.

The 2000 census was the first in which people in the U.S. could define themselves as more than one race or ethnicity; as a result, the data show a range for each population group. California’s white population was between 46.7% and 48.8% in 2000, down from 57.2% in 1990.

Refuting those who thought the state would have an astronomical number of multiracial people, California had the third-largest proportion of multiple-race responses in the nation, after Alaska and Hawaii.

Driving the 4.7% of Californians checking more than one racial designation, say demographers, were tens of thousands of Latinos who marked white and some other race. Nearly all who chose white and other were Latinos, said Hans Johnson, a demographer with the Public Policy Institute of California.

The U.S. Census Bureau considers Latino heritage to be an ethnic, rather than racial, category and designed a separate question on the 2000 census form. If Latinos were considered as a separate race, California’s multiracial data would fall in line with the national rate of 2.4%, Johnson said.

The highest percentage of multiracial responses was in San Francisco--which is both a city and a county--where 7% of respondents marked two boxes. In Sacramento County, 5.8% checked two or more races. Los Angeles County had a multiracial response rate of 4.9%, and the city of Los Angeles’ was 5.2%.

One of the greatest changes in the state was the population shift inland from California’s increasingly expensive coastal regions. In fact, eight of the 15 fastest-growing counties are in the arid, agricultural Central Valley, which stretches from Redding in the far north to Bakersfield in the south.

Placer County, in the Sierra Nevada foothills, drew escapees from Sacramento, workers in an emerging high-tech corridor, seekers of a more rural lifestyle and a burgeoning retiree community. Its 43.8% growth rate placed it at No. 2 in the list of California fast-growers.

Stanislaus, San Joaquin, Yolo and Sacramento counties--where new subdivisions grow faster these days than row crops--attracted hordes of Bay Area workers fleeing home prices like San Francisco’s.

“What we see constantly is a change from green fields to urban places,” says Carol Whiteside, formerly the mayor of Modesto and currently the president of the Great Central Valley public policy think tank. “Orchards become shopping and retail centers, and alfalfa fields become subdivisions.”

According to one 1999 Central Valley survey, 1 in 8 employed residents of the sprawling state core said they commuted to jobs in the Bay Area or Los Angeles region; 20% of those who live in the north San Joaquin Valley area drive west to jobs in San Francisco or the state’s technological heartland.

The headlights along Interstate 205 these days are a sparkling testament, as commuters from towns like Manteca and Tracy crest the Altamont Pass in the early morning, heading for places like Sunnyvale, Oakland and San Francisco.

Urban encroachment on farmland, traffic congestion and air pollution are all side effects of a boom in population over the last decade. “We’re not in danger of paving the whole valley,” Whiteside says, “but the change is unrelenting. And what we know is over time there’s a significant change in the character of the place.”

In the Silicon Valley, the new demographics have turned old working-class towns into affluent immigrant suburbs, filled with the children of Asian-born tech executives. Milpitas, once known for its dump, is now known as the site of the largest Chinese-owned mall in Northern California.

Fremont, which once had to scrap a plan for a city-run human relations commission because of a lack of nonwhites, now has a 40% Asian public school enrollment and a shopping district known colloquially as Little Taipei.

Outside the Champion Teppanyaki restaurant, a 25-year-old cook named James Hong stubs out his cigarette. He says he moved to Fremont two years ago from Taiwan.

“Why Fremont?” he says, incredulous. “Why Fremont? In Taiwan, everybody knows Fremont! This is a high-tech country!”

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Times staff writers Solomon Moore, Patrick McDonnell and Robin Fields contributed to this story.