Southland’s Average Family Income Dropped in the ‘90s

Household incomes fell during the 1990s in much of Southern California, according to Census 2000 data released Tuesday, reversing decades of gains and tarnishing the region’s historic image as a place of rising fortunes.

Los Angeles County suffered the worst drop in median household income in the state, while median income also fell in Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties, and was stagnant in Ventura County.

The income losses in Southern California occurred as median household income rose for California as a whole and sharp increases in income benefited parts of Northern California.

The census reports--the first data released from the “long form” questionnaire delivered to about one in six households nationwide--confirmed what many economists studying California had already observed during the 1990s: widening gaps between the north and south, and the rich and poor. For example:

* In Los Angeles County, the number of individuals living in poverty rose 28% to 1.6 million. Eighteen percent of the county’s 9.5 million residents live below the federal poverty line. The growing trend was mirrored throughout Southern California; Orange County, for example, experienced a 44% increase in the number of people in poverty.

* Los Angeles County’s median income dropped from $45,600 in 1990 to $42,200 in 2000 when adjusted for inflation. That was a striking change from the previous two decades, when median income in the county rose 3.5% in the ‘70s and 21.5% in the ‘80s. The median income in the city of Los Angeles fell even more sharply than the county figure.

* While the county’s population grew by 7.4%, its civilian labor force shrank by 5.1% to 4.3 million.

* As welfare reform took hold in the mid-’90s, setting time limits for cash aid and imposing strict work requirements, the number of households receiving welfare dropped. In L.A. County, 32% fewer households--199,000--were receiving welfare in 2000 compared with 1990. In California, the number of households on welfare fell by 42%, to 563,000. The average individual welfare payment shrank an average of 37% in L.A. County to $4,946.

Along with economic information, the long-form data showed other population trends:

* The number of Latinos in L.A. County grew by 26.6% to 4.2 million. County residents of Mexican heritage climbed 20% to more than 3 million.

L.A. County’s White and

Black Populations Fell

* The county’s white population fell 18.3%, and its black population fell 3.6% while the Asian/Pacific Islander population rose 26.4%.

* The number of adults with less than a ninth-grade education rose faster than the population growth, by 11.9%, to 955,000.

* The number of county residents with bachelor’s degrees climbed 19%, to 794,000. And the total of county residents with graduate or professional degrees rose 20%, to 517,000.

* Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura counties experienced increases of 36% to 70% in the number of foreign-born residents, while Los Angeles County’s figure increased by 19%, to 3.5 million, or 36% of the population. More than half of L.A. County’s residents--54%--said in 2000 that they spoke a language other than English at home, up from 45% in 1990.

In all, the census data show great gains and losses across the economy and the state.

The statewide increase in the percentage of people in poverty--30%--was greater than L.A. County’s. The state’s median income rose, however, partly because of a jump in the number of wealthy residents. About 216,000 California residents had incomes above $150,000 in 1990. In 2000, the number grew to about 642,000, without adjusting for inflation.

Los Angeles’ income drop was in sharp contrast to an estimated national growth in household income of $2,000 during the same period, said Heather Boushey, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. No national census figure is yet available because the government has released long-form data for only 13 states so far.

‘Something Is

Going Wrong’

Boushey said that in such a national “boom time,” Los Angeles’ income decline “really does indicate something is going wrong.”

Much of what went wrong was a loss of jobs in the recession of the early and mid-’90s that was never fully reversed. For example, the number of manufacturing jobs in Los Angeles County fell in the decade to 587,000 from 861,000, a decrease of 32%, census data show.

Current research suggests that a key reason why median income in Southern California is lower than Northern California is the low pay of jobs created during the 1990s in Southern California. For example, one of the sectors of the Los Angeles County economy that did expand in the ‘90s was the low-paying textile and apparel sector, which gained nearly 10,000 jobs.

An ongoing UCLA study of newly created jobs in California shows large disparities between development in the north and south, said Ruth Milkman, director of the university’s Institute for Labor and Employment.

The kinds of industries growing in the north were concentrated in high-tech and generated a large share of professional and managerial jobs. Southern California’s growth, meanwhile, was heavily skewed toward low-skill, low-wage jobs, in part because of an abundance of low-skilled immigrant workers.

Service Jobs Grew

More in Southland

“It’s part an immigration story, but it’s also driven by employer demand,” Milkman said. Service jobs, from valets to carwash attendants, also grew at a higher rate in Southern California, she said.

“What’s disturbing to me is the lack of a middle,” she said. “If you look at hourly wages for new jobs in Southern California, you get a strong polarization of high wage and low wage, a pretty steep ‘U’. In Northern California, you see more of a ‘J’. That presents real mobility problems for folks at the low end. We’re beginning to resemble much more a Third World society where a class of people are stuck at the bottom.”

Many of those stuck at the bottom are immigrants with low education levels--particularly those from Mexico and Central America, the largest ongoing stream of migration to the state, especially to Los Angeles.

Today’s immigrants are a diverse lot, including many college graduates and PhDs--the kind of immigrant entrepreneurs so visible in the high-technology sectors in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. Southern California, however, has been a particular magnet for newcomers from Mexico and Central America, who tend to lag in education and often wind up taking low-wage jobs in construction, the service sector, the factories and fields.

Those legions of working-poor immigrants contribute mightily to inflated poverty levels and declining per capita incomes. Their families tend to be larger than the median, stretching their limited ability to provide. Consequently, poverty extends to their children, many of whom are born in this country and are therefore U.S. citizens. The great bulk of people living in L.A. County now are either immigrants or second-generation Americans--the children of one or more immigrants.

Other census surveys have noted a downward trend in poverty among individual immigrants during the 1990s, said USC demographer Dowell Myers. But that growth is slow, considering that so many arrive with barely more than junior high school educations--and higher education levels are widely viewed as the best way out of poverty.

“All the efforts we see--living wage ordinances, Justice for Janitors, increased minimum wages--all of these are good for immigrants and help reduce poverty,” Myers said. “But it’s not enough to affect the basic trend. And you can’t hold the U.S. education system responsible for someone only having had an eighth-grade education level in Mexico.”

Manuel Pastor, a UC Santa Cruz economist, said an influx of poor immigrants “certainly had an impact on Southern California, but that’s only part of the story.” He also described Southern California’s recovery from the early 1990s recession as a period in which “employment increased, but not necessarily income,” because of the preponderance of low-wage jobs.

Pastor credits some of Northern California’s success at high-quality job creation to activism by businesses as far back as the 1970s. One example he cited was the Silicon Valley Manufacturing Group, an alliance of mostly technology companies started in 1977 by then-Hewlett-Packard Chief Executive David Packard.

The Manufacturing Group now has 190 companies as members and lobbies for transportation, education, energy and environmental improvements, which it believes fosters industrial growth. “They have led several fights to raise taxes for things like light rail, connecting freeways or starting a housing trust. They didn’t wait for community groups [to propose changes],” Pastor said. “You don’t hear a lot of business groups in Los Angeles proposing to raise taxes to do things like train workers.”

High-Tech Firms Draw

Educated Immigrants

Northern California’s high-tech industries also attracted large numbers of highly educated immigrants. Santa Clara County, which has roughly the same proportion of foreign-born residents as L.A. County, saw its median income climb 16.5% to $70,243 in the ‘90s.

When incomes are compared by counties, three tiers emerge, with wealth heavily concentrated in the San Francisco Bay Area. With median household incomes above $70,000, Santa Clara, Marin and San Mateo counties ranked at the top, followed by Contra Costa County at more than $63,000.

A second tier, consisting mostly of counties where median household incomes were between $40,000 and $60,000, included Southern California, the coastal counties south of San Jose and a swath of counties crossing the state east from the Bay Area. From Stanislaus County south, all the Central Valley counties made up a third tier of incomes between $32,000 and $40,000.

The northernmost counties were the poorest, with median incomes mostly falling between $27,500 and $32,000.

In the period covered by the 2000 census, the northern two-thirds of the state gained economically compared to Southern California.

While median household income was stagnant or declined in all five counties of the Los Angeles metropolitan region as well as Kern County, it increased in all but two of the state’s other counties. The greatest gains were in the Bay Area, the eastern Sierra and the Sacramento Valley counties. The counties of the San Joaquin Valley generally had small income gains.

Southland’s Poverty

Extends to Suburbs

Southern California’s poverty extended to suburbs long seen as refuges from Los Angeles’ urban problems. Some scholars think the rise in poverty in Orange County is even worse than the census data indicate.

“The income figures that are used to define poverty nationally obviously don’t factor in such things as the higher costs of housing in California in general, but particularly in places like Orange County,” said William H. Frey, a demographer and sociologist at the University of Michigan Population Studies Center and the Milken Institute in Santa Monica.

“The national poverty income figure is a figure we use as a yardstick, but it’s a faulty one. In Orange County, it obviously understates poverty,” he said.

The figures also paint a dreary portrait of the rapidly growing Inland Empire. Riverside County saw a 63% rise in individual poverty, and San Bernardino County sustained a 51% increase. “What you are seeing is the exporting of the coastal communities’ problems to the inland region,” said John Husing, an Inland Empire economist and consultant.

“Housing prices are way out of sight in Los Angeles and Orange County,” said Frank Williams, chief executive officer of the Baldy View chapter of the Building Industry Assn. of Southern California. The chapter represents builders in eastern Los Angeles County and throughout San Bernardino County.

“We’re getting, unfortunately, a poorer segment of the population coming into our counties because of housing costs.”

*

Times Director of Computer Analysis Richard O’Reilly, Research Analyst Sandra Poindexter and staff writers Doug Smith, Scott Gold, Ray Herndon, Patrick McDonnell and Carla Rivera contributed to this report.

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L.A. County by the Numbers

A varied picture of Los Angeles County emerges from the latest census material. Some key findings:

Commute to Work

(place/commute time in minutes)

Top 10

Lake Los Angeles/53.6 minutes

Palmdale/42.9

Malibu/36.9

Walnut/35.5

Westmont/35*

Diamond Bar/34.7

Rowland Heights/34.1

Florence-Graham/34.0

West Covina/33.8

Rancho Palos Verdes/33.1

Bottom 10

El Segundo/21.9

Beverly Hills/23.9

South El Monte/24.6

La Canada Flintridge/24.8

West Carson/24.9

Santa Monica/25.0

Burbank/25.1

Torrance/25.1

Artesia/25.3

Lawndale/25.3

*County area near South L.A.

Poverty Status

(place/percent of individuals in poverty)

Westmont/36.9%

Florence-Graham/35.8

Lennox/31.5

Willowbrook/30.7

Cudahy/28.3

Compton/28.0

Bell Gardens/27.3

East Los Angeles/27.2

El Monte/26.1

Huntington Park/25.2

Palos Verdes Estates/2.2

Rancho Palos Verdes/2.9

Manhattan Beach/3.2

Calabasas/3.3

Agoura Hills/3.5

Sierra Madre/3.7

La Canada Flintridge/4.3

El Segundo/4.6

Hermosa Beach/4.6

La Verne/4.7

Ethnic Shift*

(place/race-ethnic group/population gain or (loss))

Los Angeles/White non-Latino/(200,416)

Long Beach/White non-Latino/(59,856)

Downey/Latino Mexican/22,187

Pomona/Latino Mexican/20,136

Palmdale/Latino Mexican/18,871

Torrance/White non-Latino/(16,156)

Santa Clarita/White non-Latino/15,443

Norwalk/White non-Latino/(15,059)

West Covina/White non-Latino/(14,707)

Bellflower/White non-Latino/(14,481)

Hermosa Beach/Asian Pacific Islander/163

Agoura Hills/White non-Latino/(482)

El Segundo/White non-Latino/(541)

Sierra Madre/White non-Latino/(624)

View Park-Windsor Hills/Black non-Latino/(628)

Beverly Hills/Asian Pacific Islander/666

Manhattan Beach/Asian Pacific Islander/680

Commerce/Other Latino/903

Lennox/Other Latino/919

Palos Verdes Estates/White non-Latino/(950)

*Places with largest and smallest shifts among any race/ethnic group. Measured by absolute ‘population change of the group with the largest change, whether it was a gain or a loss.’

Divorced

(place/percent of population divorced at time of census)

El Segundo/14.8%

Lomita/14.3

Redondo Beach/13.5

Santa Monica/13.5

Sierra Madre/13.4

View Park-Windsor Hills/13.2

Culver City/12.3

Lancaster/12.1

Monrovia/11.9

West Hollywood/11.9

Lennox/3.4

Maywood/3.4

Walnut Park/4.0

Walnut/4.3

Huntington Park/4.4

Palos Verdes Estates/4.4

San Marino/4.4

Florence-Graham/4.5

Cudahy/4.8

South Gate/4.8

Grandparents as Care Givers*

place/percent of all households where grandparents care for grandchildren

Commerce/16.6

Vincent/15.5**

Carson/14.2

Valinda/14.2

West Puente Valley/14.2

Compton/13.9

Santa Fe Springs/12.2

South San Jose Hills/12.2

South El Monte/11.7

Norwalk/11.2

Agoura Hills/0.5

West Hollywood/0.5

Calabasas/0.9

La Canada Flintridge/0.9

Manhattan Beach/1.0

Hermosa Beach /1.1

Rancho Palos Verdes/1.8

San Marino/1.8

La Crescenta-Montrose/2.0

Palos Verdes Estates/2.1

*The percent of all households in which grandparents ‘are caregivers for their grandchildren under 18, instead of the children’s parents.’ **County area near Irwindale.

Lived in Same House in 1995

(place/percent or population living in same house)

View Park-Windsor Hills/69.4

West Puente Valley/69.0

Avocado Heights/68.1

Palos Verdes Estates/66.1

Walnut/66.1

Cerritos/65.3

South San Jose Hills/65.2

Pico Rivera/64.3

West Whittier-Los Nietos/63.6

Hacienda Heights/62.7

Hermosa Beach/41.7

Lancaster/43.2

Cudahy/43.4

Lawndale/44.5

West Hollywood/44.8

Long Beach/45.2

Bellflower/45.4

Hawthorne/45.6

Huntington Park/46.3

Palmdale/46.4

Source: Census 2000