White Exodus Attributed to Economic Slump

The striking white exodus that touched almost every part of Southern California in the 1990s was an aberration caused by the decade’s seesaw economy, not the first stitch of a pattern, demographers said Friday.

The five-county region’s white population dropped by more than 840,000, or 11.7%, in the last decade, according to 2000 census results released Thursday. It was part of a shift that made California the nation’s first large state without a racial or ethnic majority.

The scale and composition of the change caught some state population experts off guard: Even Ventura County and parts of Orange County--historically destinations for whites who fled other parts of Southern California--saw some decline in their white population.

San Bernardino County’s white population shrank almost 13%, even as the county overall gained almost 300,000 new residents.

The trend was most precipitous in Los Angeles County, which saw its white count plunge 18%.

Thousands vacated neighborhoods in Downey’s center and southern edge, for example, where five census tracts lost 40% to 73% of their white populations. Over the decade, the city’s white population dropped about 20,000, or 39%, even as its total head count rose more than 17%.

Most demographers say, however, that the deep recession of the early 1990s--and the collapse of the aerospace industry, in particular--caused the region to shed white population far beyond the slow natural decline they expect in the future.

“There was a trigger that pushed people out,” said Stephen Levy, director of the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy in Palo Alto. “I don’t see a trigger like that in the next decade.”

A smaller number of highly skilled whites came back into the state when the economy revived, but not nearly enough to reverse the earlier slide.

The 1990s population losses do not reflect migration alone.

They also indicate the widening gap in age and fertility between whites and other racial and ethnic groups, particularly Latinos. State records show that, after 1994, deaths edged past births among whites in Los Angeles County. By contrast, throughout the decade, Latinos experienced 10 times as many births as deaths.

Rate of Decline in White Births a Shock

In addition, while projecting the 2000 racial composition, state officials underestimated the rate of decline in white births, making the census figures more of a shock, said Mary Heim, assistant chief of the California Department of Finance’s Demographic Research Unit.

“I had been suspicious of the methods we were using for a long time,” she said.

Discounting births and deaths, state demographers say the white population of Los Angeles County declined by more than 480,000 during the 1990s. More than half of them left during the recession’s dog days, from 1993 and 1996.

Some clearly landed in Riverside County, which saw heavy gains in its white population throughout the 1990s, particularly at the beginning and end of the decade. Other relocated to spanking new suburbs in spacious Sierra foothill counties such as El Dorado and Calaveras, said William Fulton, president of the Solimar Research Group and a senior research fellow at USC’s Southern California Studies Center.

But more headed for the state border.

“The economic decline especially affected professionals,” said William Frey, a demographer at the Milken Institute. “The barrier is money. The barrier is not race.”

Orange County, which lost 6% of its white population, played out a somewhat different cycle.

The older northern reaches of the county, which came to life with the postwar boom of whites seeking the suburban California lifestyle, have experienced a new wave of immigration.

And the south county has come to life in this post-suburban era as young white families continue the sprawl begun, in many cases, by their parents.

The houses on the Rancho Santa Margarita side of the Mission Viejo border had just what P.J. Dye was looking for. They were new, built fresh from the ground up on previously undeveloped land. They were affordable, running about $160,000 back in November 1990.

And they weren’t where she used to live, in Westminster, home of Little Saigon and a growing Vietnamese-led immigrant community.

“We just needed to get out of the neighborhood,” said Dye, 46, a white mother of three who works in the office at Rancho Santa Margarita Intermediate School. “The old neighborhood was just really rundown, and there were a lot of problems with graffiti and gangs and the school district.”

High Cost of Living Will Force Many Out

The white slice of the total Southern California population pie is likely to keep shrinking relative to other groups because of several factors, but not at 1990s levels, demographers said.

The high cost of living will cause working-class people and more modestly paid professionals to leave the area, regardless of race.

“They just can’t afford the ‘50s- or ‘60s-era vision they had of life in the California suburbs,” Frey said. “They used to move further and further out, but then they’re stuck with two-hour commutes and high taxes. Now they head for Las Vegas or Arizona.”

Also, the census showed that the white portion of the under-18 population slipped in virtually every census tract in the region.

Even if whites’ 1990s trend line does not continue in California, demographers said the jolt has given the state and the nation a valuable dose of reality.

“We’re finally coming to terms with the estimates we’ve been seeing for 30 years,” Fulton said. “We can’t pretend we’re a white, middle-class state anymore. We haven’t been for 20 years, but we’ve pretended.”