Over the last 30 years, the percentage of poor neighborhoods in
suburban Los Angeles County quadrupled, according to a report
released at UCLA. Experts are saying that in an integrated
community such as Los Angeles these findings should serve as a
wake-up call to government officials and the public.
“The Trajectory of Poor Neighborhoods in Southern
California, 1970-2000″ report was released Dec. 1 by the UCLA
Ralph and Goldy Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, in
conjunction with the Brookings Institution in Washington and
several local governmental agencies.
“We wanted to see what is happening to the absolute and
relative number of people living in poverty,” said Paul Ong,
director of the Lewis Center and co-writer of the report.
In order to compile data for the study, Ong and co-writer
Shannon McConville pored over census information and other
population data sources.
Among the report’s findings was that areas outside
inner-city Los Angeles experienced the most rapid increases in poor
neighborhoods.
McConville said those findings were to be expected, given the
large numbers of people moving out of the inner city in the 1980s
and 1990s to relocate into the San Fernando Valley and Long Beach
areas.
The report also touched on the ethnic composition of poverty in
Los Angeles, stating that the Latino proportion of the population
living in very poor neighborhoods had increased almost threefold,
while the proportion of the black population in poor areas declined
almost as dramatically.
However, one of the main findings of the report was the
discovery of a growing concentration of poor neighborhoods in the
Los Angeles area, one of the only large metropolitan areas to
demonstrate this phenomenon.
Ong said such a concentration of poor neighborhoods in one area
will prevent residents from having access to many services and will
increase crime and other societal ills.
He added that he certainly expected to find a large proportion
of urban poverty in a city as large as Los Angeles, but he still
was surprised by the study results.
“The problem of having persistent poverty is not
surprising. Its magnitude is,” Ong said.
Dan Flaming, president of the Economic Round Table, an
independent research organization, said Los Angeles’
concentrated poverty has a lot to do with California’s
economy.
“We have a very pluralized economy. A whole segment of the
population lives very comfortably, while another segment, many of
them immigrants, are extremely poor,” Flaming said.
Ong also said the increase in immigration to Los Angeles may be
a contributing factor to the increased poverty concentration.
Nancy Berlin, a coordinator at the L.A. Coalition to End Hunger
and Poverty, said another reason for high poverty might be a loss
of manual labor jobs, which California has experienced in recent
years.
“Those jobs are being replaced with work in the service
sector, where people are making minimum wage, when they used to
have better-paying, often union jobs,” Berlin said.
Berlin said this report might serve as a tool to lessen poverty
by pressuring politicians to put an end to income inequality in
L.A.
“It is good to know that there is scientific background to
something that we already know. It will help us to garner political
support to make the changes that we need to implement,”
Berlin said.
Flaming added that this report also might serve another
important function by spreading the idea of urban poverty to people
who otherwise might not be aware of it.
“It is simply a level of common humanity. We are all
interconnected and interdependent. We take the same roads, go to
the same schools. Their limitations are shared by everyone in the
region, “ Flaming said.