Milestones of Growth and a New Ethnic Order

Southern California’s long-predicted new ethnic order became reality in the 1990s, as Latinos ascended to dominance in Los Angeles and nonwhites came to outnumber whites regionwide by more than 3 million, census data released Thursday showed.

As the millennium dawned, the combined population of Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and Riverside counties hit 16,373,645--surpassing the statewide total in 1960 and topping all other states in 2000 except Texas and New York.

The Southland gained more than 1.8 million residents in the last decade, swelling the bounds of older suburbs even as new ones blossomed to the east, north and south.

Immigration cooled a few degrees from the furious pace of the 1970s and 1980s, but clearly remained Southern California’s driving engine of growth.

Rimmed by shrinking white pockets on its edges, the region’s giant central bowl became more racially and ethnically complex than ever, adding 31% more Latinos and 35% more Asian Americans.

“It ain’t coming,” Azusa City Manager Rick Cole said. “It’s here.”

Even in a place jaded by the constant lurch of change, the last decade brought a host of significant milestones:

* For the first time, the census reflected that Latinos have replaced whites as the largest ethnic group in both the city and county of Los Angeles. Inglewood and Compton, which in 1990 were the area’s only cities with black majorities, are now majority Latino.

* Asians emerged definitively as the region’s third-largest racial or ethnic group, increasing their margin over African Americans to more than 500,000. The Asian population spiked in the San Gabriel Valley and along the border between Los Angeles and Orange counties; Cerritos and Walnut joined Monterey Park as cities with Asian majorities.

* Growth continued its gallop across the Inland Empire. Riverside and San Bernardino counties gained more than 660,000 residents and were home to 14 of the region’s 20 fastest-growing cities or unincorporated spots.

* The under-18 population grew by more than 20% across Southern California, with Latinos accounting for most of the increase. At the same time, the number of white youth in the region declined by more than 11%.

It was a two-sided decade for Southern California, half grimace, half grin.

The first five years brought the riots, the O.J. Simpson trial, the Northridge earthquake. Jobs declined by the hundred thousand as defense cutbacks shriveled the high-tech sector and construction dropped to a trickle.

The downturn triggered white and black flight from Southern California’s coastal counties, driven mostly by economic considerations.

“We had a large exodus of whites and a smaller exodus of blacks, moving mostly to Riverside, San Bernardino and Las Vegas,” said Herman De Bose, a sociology professor at Cal State Northridge.

In the decade’s back half, the economy’s two-tiered recovery brought high-paying jobs into swiftly expanding suburban metropolises such as Thousand Oaks and Irvine, sending their populations skyward.

The Southern California depicted in the census’ April 2000 snapshot shows growth in virtually every corner of the map, radiating outward from Los Angeles in bands of warm, warmer and warmest.

Older, built-out suburbs in northern Orange County and the San Gabriel Valley charted some of the biggest numerical gains, suggesting that more and more of Southern California has become too densely packed to match its image for rangy, Western sprawl.

“We are a far more urban area than we like to think,” said William Fulton, president of Solimar Research Group and a senior research fellow at the Southern California Studies Center at USC. “Los Angeles, in particular, is now an older urban area.”

Immigrants more than replaced those who deserted Los Angeles’ urban core, outweighing a 15.4% drop in the city’s white population and a 11.5% decrease in the number of African Americans.

The ethnic dispersion that marked the 1980s intensified in the 1990s as Latinos and Asians also flowed persistently, if unevenly, into the suburbs, often bypassing traditional ports of entry.

In fact, Latinos increased faster in the counties bordering Los Angeles County than in the central county itself.

Orange County’s Latino population grew 46.1% and now numbers as many as 875,579, exceeding that of San Antonio, a renowned Mexican American hub.

The Latino population also surged 71.8% in Riverside County and 66.2% in San Bernardino County, beating state demographers’ estimates by 400,000.

“We expected lots of growth out there, but not that composition,” said Leo Estrada, a professor of urban planning at UCLA. “It’s been amazing.”

While Latino growth in Los Angeles remained brisk--Latino population in the county grew 20.7%--the rate of increase was actually below the statewide Latino growth rate of 35%.

The slower-than-expected rates of growth in Los Angeles meant that a Latino majority did not emerge in either the city or the county, as many Latino leaders had hoped for.

Immigration Key Factor in Growth

The census data released Thursday showed only ethnic and racial identification, not place of birth. That made it impossible to trace with precision how much of the Latino growth is related to immigration and how much to high birth rates. However, immigration remains the overriding factor: Even many Latinos born here are the offspring of immigrants.

Experts offered several reasons Latinos were increasingly branching off from Los Angeles, including a possible saturation of the low-end job market here that typically draws immigrants.

“I don’t think virtually any communities are ready to absorb the magnitude of the foreign-born population, especially Latinos,” Azusa’s Cole said. “This is hitting Southern California like a tidal wave.”

In some cities, Latinos’ rate of increase was slower than in 1980s, but may have carried the group over what Cole called “the tipping point.” Latinos became a supermajority, able to overcome the higher voting rates among whites, or opened up a sizable population gap over other minorities.

The region’s most spectacular growth--accompanied by the some of its most intense growing pains--centered on Orange County’s southern third and throughout the Inland Empire.

Coto de Caza and Aliso Viejo, which were barely smudges on Orange County’s map in 1990, quadrupled and quintupled their populations, respectively.

Temecula--flush with high-paying jobs, winery tourism and a popular film festival--saw its population jump 113% from 27,099 to 57,716, second most among Riverside County cities. But with the flood of white, affluent refugees came traffic nightmares and skyrocketing housing costs.

City Councilman Sam Pratt, elected in 1999 at age 80, recently proposed a moratorium on residential development. It failed, but not before polarizing the city and mobilizing anti-growth factions.

“I don’t want to stop the world,” Pratt said. “But this place is a zoo.”

Los Angeles County’s top three fastest-growing cities were all in the Antelope Valley, as the march of red-tiled, buff-colored homes pushed into more of Santa Clarita’s canyons and the vast desert floor spanning Palmdale and Lancaster. Palmdale led the pack, adding 69.5%.

Technical writer Juniko Moody, 42, said she moved to Santa Clarita despite her concerns that it is overwhelmingly white and that she is part African American, part Asian and part Native American. The chance to own a home won out, but even as she helped make her neighborhood more mixed, she acknowledged that the region’s racial walls remain.

“Los Angeles is diverse, but it’s not exactly a melting pot,” she said. “Everyone is segregated according to money.”

That characterization of Southern California--as both diverse and insular--resurfaced again and again as the region and its residents digested the 2000 census results.

By some measures, the Los Angeles-Long Beach area remains the most segregated of California’s 25 largest metropolitan areas, said Paul Ong, a demographer at UCLA.

“Look at Carson,” said Angela James, an associate sociology professor at USC. “The percentages of Latinos, whites, blacks and Filipinos are very even, but where do people live? It’s very mixed on a macro level, but very segregated on the neighborhood level.”

Orange County is dividing in half, with whites moving out of older northern enclaves like Fullerton, where they have been replaced by Latinos and Asians. Similarly, the number of Latinos shot up by 42% in the San Fernando Valley, but the newcomers deepened, rather than mitigated, the ethnic splits between mostly white and mostly Latinos communities.

Agoura Hills, Calabasas, Westlake Village and Hidden Hills--all clustered in the affluent hills of the west Valley remain more than 80% white.

By contrast, at the eastern end of the Valley, the community of San Fernando is now 84% to 89% Latino, up 7.6% from a decade ago.

The pattern also holds true in Ventura, where the 1990s only deepened the ethnic divide between the seven predominantly white, upscale enclaves in the county’s eastern two-thirds and the three increasingly, Latino cities to the west.

One of the 2000 census’ most heralded elements--allowing respondents to identify themselves as more than one race--produced a surprisingly minimal effect on the regional results.

Some 770,142 Southern Californians checked more than one race, but their 4.7% response rate lagged that of the state. Demographers theorized that in Los Angeles County, rising intermarriage and multiracial rates might have been canceled out by immigration.

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Times staff writers Patrick McDonnell, Scott Gold, Daryl Kelley and Annette Kondo contributed to this story.

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Southern California in the Year 2000

Since 1990, census tracts with Asian or Latino majorities have increased in much of the region. The number of white majority areas dwindled in Los Angeles and Orange Counties.

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Source: Census 2000

Data analysis by RICHARD O’REILLY / Los Angeles Times

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Inland Empire Growth

Fastest growing:

Chino Hills -- 141.9%

Temecula -- 113.0%

Adelando -- 112.9%

Lake Elsinore -- 111.3%

Perris -- 68.6%

Slowest growing:

Needles -- -7.0%

Barstow -- -1.6%

Big Bear Lake -- 1.6%

Norco -- 3.7%

Redlands -- 5.3

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San Bernardino County cities

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City 2000 % Change pop. from 1990 Adelanto 18,130 112.9 Apple Valley 54,239 17.7 Barstow 21,119 -1.6 Big Bear Lake 5,438 1.6 Chino 67,168 12.5 Chino Hills 66,787 141.9 Colton 47,662 18.5 Fontana 128,929 47.3 Grand Terrace 11,626 6.2 Hesperia 62,582 24.1 Highland 44,605 29.5 Loma Linda 18,681 7.4 Montclair 33,049 16.2 Needles 4,830 -7.0 Ontario 158,007 18.6 Rancho Cucamonga 127,743 26.0 Redlands 63,591 5.3 Rialto 91,873 26.9 San Bernardino 185,401 12.9 Twentynine Palms 14,764 24.9 Upland 68,393 7.9 Victorville 64,029 57.4 Yucaipa 41,207 25.5 Yucca Valley 16,865 23.1

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Riverside County cities

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City 2000 % Change pop. from 1990 Banning 23,562 14.5 Beaumont 11,384 17.5 Blythe 12,155 44.2 Calimesa 7,139 53.6 Canyon Lake 9,952 25.4 Cathedral City 42,647 41.8 Coachella 22,724 34.5 Corona 124,966 64.2 Desert Hot Springs 16,582 42.1 Hemet 58,812 62.9 Indian Wells 3,816 44.2 Indio 49,116 33.5 La Quinta 28,928 58.2 Lake Elsinore 23,694 111.3 Moreno Valley 142,381 19.9 Murrieta 44,282 na Norco 24,157 3.7 Palm Desert 41,155 77.0 Palm Springs 42,807 6.5 Perris 36,189 68.6 Rancho Mirage 13,249 35.5 Riverside 255,166 12.7 San Jacinto 23,779 46.7 Temecula 57,716 113.0

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