A Tale of 2 Census Tracts Charts Latino Movement

Latinos, now the largest group in Los Angeles County, have imprinted neighborhoods in different ways with their rapid ascension.

Two census tracts, both neighborhoods in transition, offer a glimpse.

In Tract 9107.06 in Palmdale, Dick Gray is optimistic as he watches his neighborhood reclaim itself like a rose in the desert.

Fifty miles south in Tract 5703.01, on a North Long Beach street packed with apartment buildings and small bungalows, Ernesto Martin is worried about racial tension and crime.

Both census tracts are among the 10 in the county that showed the largest growth of Latinos in the 1990s, according to Census 2000 data.

Eight of these neighborhoods, including Gray’s, are in the Antelope and Santa Clarita valleys. One is in northwest Pasadena, the 10th is Martin’s.

All of them are home to a spectrum--working class, middle class, different generations--all under the “Latino” label.

George Sanchez, a USC professor of history and American studies, cautions that factors of economics and class will play as strong a role as race and ethnicity in how these neighborhoods adapt to demographic shifts.

Adds Harry Pachon, director of the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute at Claremont Graduate University: “It’s not only a matter of ethnic relations, it’s also a matter of single homeownership and urban space. . . . In some low-income neighborhoods, those with crowding and density of apartments and dwellings, you may have more anonymity and distrust of others than you do in [areas of] single-family tract homes.”

Palmdale Development Opened in 1989

Gray’s Palmdale tract is part of the California Dawn development, which opened in 1989. The first buyers, many of them middle-class Latinos, paid $100,000 to $150,000 for their homes. After the early 1990s recession, a second wave of buyers snapped up properties as the early homeowners moved out, sometimes at half the original price.

Elsewhere in the tract, developers built hundreds of homes during the ‘90s. As a result, Latinos in this tract more than quintupled. They surpassed whites as the largest group in the tract, making up 1,543 of the 3,501 residents. The black population rose ninefold, until there were only about 100 fewer blacks than whites.

Gray, 58, who is white and an original homeowner, isn’t fazed that most of his new neighbors are Latino and black. Life here reflects the suburban sameness of any middle class tract: tidy yards, occupants rarely seen except to zip in or out of a garage, the whir of an occasional lawn mower. Race is not an issue, Gray said, only the small number of renters who let yards and houses decline, lowering property values.

He remembers the worst of the recession when neighbors, U-Haul trucks in tow, abandoned houses and mortgages in the dead of night. For years after, empty houses were vandalized and tarnished by graffiti. The area’s median house price, while inching up, is still below the $150,000 he paid for his home 12 years ago.

An elementary school opened behind his house. Nearby a Wal-Mart is under construction.

“The last two to three years it’s coming back,” said Gray, who intends to stay put.

Another resident, Teresa Gonzalez, 34, said that when she moved here from Alhambra five years ago, many houses were vacant. She says that most new neighbors are Latino and black and that her children play with youngsters of all races. Adults are too busy commuting to Los Angeles to socialize much, she said.

Said another resident, Nick Ruggiero, 35, who moved here from the San Fernando Valley: “If you keep up your yard, and act like normal people, that’s what matters.”

Race relations experts say simple quality-of-life matters that have nothing to do with skin color or religion--a stereo that’s too loud, noisy kids in the street, a weed-covered frontyard--are often what spark ethnic tension.

“We can have an incident flare up, it may not be about race,” said Margaux Kohut, executive director of the Long Beach branch of the National Conference for Community and Justice. “But then a racial insult will come up.”

Long Beach Enclave Is in High-Density Area

Martin’s Long Beach neighborhood consists of high-density developments, where apartment walls can’t block out all sounds, and houses are packed within earshot of one another.

These places are ripe for such conflicts, said Anitra Dempsey, coordinator of the Human Dignity Program in Long Beach, which organizes community dialogues and responds to hate crimes.

“Race comes up when they are mad,” Dempsey said. “They sink to the lowest denominator.”

Latinos in Martin’s tract more than quadrupled in the ‘90s, replacing whites as the largest group. They made up 3,215 of the tract’s 6,790 residents in 2000. The number of blacks grew by 13%, part of a migration east from Compton.

In the early 1990s racial fights broke out between blacks and Latinos at nearby Jordan High School. Human-relations programs have relieved some of those tensions and continue today, police and community groups say.

Martin, 31, said he thinks the area is more transient than it used to be and is plagued by more auto thefts.

“Sometimes blacks, Latinos and Samoans don’t always get along,” he said.

Police say North Long Beach did have a slight rise in crime this year but attribute that to the higher concentrations of people who now live there.

The median home price is $170,000, but just 41% of all housing units are owner-occupied. The Latino home ownership rate is 44%.

A palpable tension hovers outside locked chain-link fences and apartment doors on the streets closest to Atlantic Avenue.

“There’s some conflict among the cultures,” said Romel Sanders, 28, an African American who has lived on Linden Avenue for four years. He starts to describe how people judge others by race, then ends abruptly: “I take care of my own, and that’s the bottom line.”

Community dialogues in the neighborhood, organized by the National Conference and the Human Dignity Program, help debunk notions that certain cultures tend to be raucous or allow their frontyards to become overgrown, Kohut said.

“That people aren’t doing something because of race,” she said, “but because of who they are.”

Because income levels, housing type and density are factors in racial conflicts, the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission has embarked on a new “predictive mapping” program, said Terri Villa-McDowell, assistant executive director.

By taking census tracts with significant racial shifts and adding socioeconomic factors like housing, officials hope to pinpoint neighborhoods with potential problems before trouble erupts.

Any Ethnic Influx Can Spur White Flight

In some areas like North Long Beach, where whites were once a majority, a significant influx of any ethnicity can often spur a hasty white exodus, said James P. Allen, a Cal State Northridge geography professor who specializes in population changes.

But in other cases, racial shifts evolve gradually as elderly white residents die or move, he said. That may account for what is changing the other half of the North Long Beach tract.

Several blocks west of Atlantic and Linden, close to De Forest Park, are quiet streets filled with tidy rows of post-World War II houses.

Lanet Jackson, 75, remembers moving to her Poppy Street home in 1955, when nearly all the residents were white, middle-class families. Just a few of those old-timers remain.

Not race, but pride of ownership, Jackson said, is her main concern. The only recent trouble was a renter who held a party that led to a shooting. That family is gone.

“Color doesn’t matter that much,” said Jackson, who is white and knows many of her neighbors, now primarily black and Latino.

“It’s the person.”