High-Tech Boom Offset by Rise in Poverty

Although rich compared with the rest of California, Ventura County treaded water financially during the 1990s as a high-tech boom was offset by a sharp increase in poverty, especially in farm worker communities.

Even as the number of county families earning $150,000 annually tripled during the past decade, the number of residents living below the poverty line rose nearly 44%, the U.S. Census Bureau reported Tuesday.

Overall, the $59,666 income of the typical Ventura County household was still 26% higher than the statewide norm, the census reported.

But poverty in the county increased at a faster pace than statewide, from 7.3% of the local population a decade ago to 9.2%, accounting for 68,540 people.

Also, the number of impoverished children rose by 39%, three times the county’s overall growth rate during the past decade, according to the census.

County residents are generally richer, better educated and own more homes than a decade ago. But they also live in more crowded dwellings, speak less English at home and are more racially segregated in their communities.

“There’s a widening gap between the rich and poor in this county,” economics professor Jamshid Damooei of Cal Lutheran University said. “We’re looking at an increasingly rich county with a very bad income gap. We’re getting richer, but only for certain groups, not all.”

The widening gulf often breaks along lines of race, ethnicity and educational attainment--a well-educated white majority and a less-skilled Latino minority. And between the affluent east county and the poorer west.

Income and educational breakdowns by race won’t be available for months, but new census data and previous studies show the disparity.

For instance, in predominately white Thousand Oaks, where 42% of adults have at least a four-year degree, income per person is more than double that in Oxnard, Santa Paula and Fillmore.

In those three farm communities of the Santa Clara Valley and Oxnard Plain, between 9% and 14% of adults have college degrees, and English is spoken as the primary language in fewer than half of the homes.

“In this county, even more than the state, we’ve created a two-tier world,” planning expert Bill Fulton of Ventura said. “The two tiers are geographically segregated, which is pretty common, but is starker here because of our land-use policies.”

Since 1995, voters throughout the county have approved anti-sprawl measures that set city boundaries and guarantee separation among cities.

“Ironically, land-use policies that have allowed our communities to retain their distinctive characteristics have also made them more segregated and more different,” Fulton said.

Mark Schniepp, executive director of the California Economic Forecast in Santa Barbara, said he isn’t alarmed by the increasing poverty rate. Nor does he believe Ventura County is less affluent overall.

The poverty statistics reflect large Latino families, not the increasing spread of poverty, he said. Indeed, just 6.4% of the county’s 184,378 families were impoverished in 2000, up from 1990 but still low compared with the state’s 10.6%.

“I don’t agree that the county is getting worse off,” Schniepp said. “Yes, the lower end seems to be widening, with increased immigration. But overall, salaries are rising, more people own homes, we’ve got better schools and lower crime rates, hardly any inflation, and anybody who wants a job can find one.”

The working poor of Oxnard, Santa Paula and Fillmore are not as well off as other county residents, Schniepp said.

“But the broader question is: Are these people worse off than they were?” Schniepp said.

No, he said, because they immigrated to this country for jobs and have begun to work themselves up the American economic ladder.

“These three cities are poorer, more Hispanic and more segregated, but that doesn’t mean they’re worse off,” Schniepp said. “Their quality of life is improved, not diminished.”

Karl Lawson, director of Oxnard’s census outreach project, agreed the increase in the poverty rate is not necessarily a bad thing, or something to worry too much about.

The higher number of poor people reflects the type of crops being picked today--a broad switch from citrus to strawberries, a labor-intensive crop, he said. The increased poverty rate, he added, also reflects an end to migrant labor. Workers now generally stay put instead of following seasonal crops.

“The poverty is not permanent, and that’s the key,” Lawson said. “Nobody wants to see it increase, but we’re talking about an immigrant group rising up the economic ladder.”

A sure sign that is occurring is the increase in home ownership in Oxnard and Fillmore, Lawson said.

In Oxnard, nearly 4,000 more individuals and families lived in homes they owned in 2000 than did a decade earlier, and that city’s rate of ownership--57.3%--is now higher than California’s overall.

Fillmore’s rate is even higher, at 63.2%, and rising. Santa Paula’s rate of 57.7% reflects a slight decline. In comparison, the Ventura County rate rose to 67.6% in the 1990s.

“If home ownership rates continue to increase, and we avoid any massive new influx of immigration, those [poverty] numbers will come down,” Lawson said.

“It means wealth accumulation and eventually a way out of poverty. Home ownership opens the door for seed money for training or college or to start a business.”

When the two faces of Ventura County are viewed as a whole, this semirural coastal area of 753,000 residents still stacks up favorably with the rest of the state.

About 38% of households earned more than $75,000 a year, compared with 29% statewide, according to the data. About 27% of local households earned less than $35,000, compared with 37% statewide. County residents also had a higher rate of college degrees and high school diplomas, fewer crowded homes, and more families spoke English at home than elsewhere.

Yet, the county’s household income barely stayed with inflation during the 1990s. The median household income--where half are higher and half lower--increased $14,054 in 10 years to nearly $60,000, the figures show. But after adjustments for inflation, the 1990 figure was within $158 of the 2000 median.

In fact, incomes gauged by household, family and person increased slightly slower in Ventura County than in the state overall, according to the census data.

To Schniepp, the 1989 to 1999 income figures are misleading, because they compare one economic boom with the next and do not reflect recovery from the doldrums into which the county fell during the early 1990s, when income growth stopped cold.

And adjusting the 1989 figures for inflation distorts true buying power, Schniepp said, because many basic costs do not go up with inflation.

An example is the cost of housing in 1990 and 2000. After being adjusted for inflation, home mortgage payments and rents fell. Just 31.3% of renters reported spending more than 35% of their income on housing in 2000, down from 35.2% in 1990.

“Taken together, these figures show the county’s affluence,” Damooei of Cal Lutheran said.

“But look at the increase in the number of children in poverty. This puts an emphasis on how we can improve education and vocational training, and prepare everyone for higher-earning jobs.”

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The 2000 Census: A City Comparison

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Tabular data not included.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau