Valley Is L.A.’s Melting Pot, Report Finds

Today’s San Fernando Valley is a multiethnic “epicenter” where people live and work in some of the most diverse and rapidly changing neighborhoods in Los Angeles, a new study says.

One-third of the Valley’s population is foreign-born, nearly 40% is Latino, and while the white population has slightly declined in the last decade, both the Latino and Asian populations have boomed.

The old Valley was solidly middle-class. Today, many Valley residents are aspiring to reach the middle class, and they’re as likely to come from Central America, Mexico, Thailand or China as the Midwest.

At a Van Nuys news conference, the study’s author connected the findings to the debate over Valley secession, in which some secession opponents have argued that separating from Los Angeles would be a form of “white flight.” About 45% of the Valley’s population is white.

“I just hope that this will dispel the idea that secession is a racial issue. It is an issue of governing, of what works and what doesn’t,” said Joel Kotkin, a senior research fellow at the Davenport Institute for Public Policy at Pepperdine University.

Kotkin, an urban affairs writer, said he has taken no stance on secession. Neither has the nonprofit Economic Alliance of the San Fernando Valley, which commissioned the report from Pepperdine. The alliance’s chairman, however, is Studio City lawyer David Fleming, who has been a major financial supporter of the secessionist group Valley VOTE.

According to the study, titled “The Changing Face of the San Fernando Valley,” the region of 1.7 million is a more ethnically diverse place than the rest of Los Angeles.

“The other side of the hill is becoming much more like Manhattan, more bifurcated,” with poor and rich neighborhoods sharply divided and more single people and couples without children, Kotkin said.

People move their families to the Valley because housing in many of its neighborhoods remains more affordable than in other parts of the city. In the Valley, middle-class people can still buy homes and have backyards for their children, Kotkin said.

Valley Neighborhoods Often More Diverse

And while the Valley has poor, largely segregated neighborhoods, such as Pacoima, many neighborhoods are very mixed.

“Rather than being made up of distinct ethnic pockets, much of the Valley is cross-quilted, with middle-class and working-class pockets often in close proximity, a nuance lost in statistical averages and medians,” the study states.

Everto Ruiz, a Chicano Studies professor at Cal State Northridge and a lifelong San Fernando city resident, said at the news conference that he felt out of place when he arrived at CSUN as a student in the 1960s.

“The place was rather new to me, and I felt that I was new to them,” he said. “But it’s much different today.... We surely saw that we were going to be living with each other, so it would do us well to get to know each other.”

The study, which draws heavily on census data and the work of previously published articles, was commissioned as part of Vision 2020, the alliance’s effort to map out a vision for the area.

Vision Statement Due Next Week

For the past six months, 400 leaders and representatives of groups and communities throughout the Valley have been working on the vision statement, which will be released next Thursday.

Kotkin said he hoped the updated demographics will help the Valley’s population come together.

“The Valley is not America’s suburb. It’s not Valley girls.... It’s a very diverse, cosmopolitan place, and it needs to find a common purpose,” Kotkin said.

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The Ethnic Mix

A new study argues that, with its fast-growing, highly diverse population, the San Fernando Valley has become “the epicenter for much of ethnic Southern California.”

L.A. County Valley

Total pop 7.40% 10.70%

Latino 26.5 43.3

White -7.9 -5.3

Black -6.2 18.5

Asian* 22 25.8

*includes Pacific Islander

Source: U.S. census 1990 and 2000; Report of Findings on the San Fernando Valley Economy; San Fernando Research Center; Cal State University Northridge - College of Business Administration & Economics