As assuredly as the pastoral epoch ended with the passing of the 19th Century, so now has the era of Anglo demographic dominance which characterized the Valley's 20th Century emergence as "America's suburb" Less clear is the question of the ultimate future of the Valley as it becomes increasingly diverse, not only in its demographic but also in its cultural and economic life.
To many observers, right and left, the prospects for such a multi-racial Valley are not particularly good. Some observers, such as USC's Michael Dear, see immigrants in Southern California as creating a permanent "ghettoization" in which "the status of people of color will remain compromised."63 Perhaps more importantly, there are significant numbers of ordinary middle class Valley residents - including minorities - who also see a less than bright future for the region and have, or are planning, to move to other, more agreeable areas.
Such negative perceptions are not without some justification. As the Valley has changed, and become more diverse, major problems have emerged. Serious crime, which has fallen in the late 1990s, had begun to rise, although only a fraction of the rates on the eastside and southside of Los Angeles. Similarly, the Valley, although far less so than South-Central of Los Angeles, now has a serious gang problem.
Some areas, notably the Foothill division, have seen a marked increase in gang-related violence over the past five years.64
Perhaps an even greater problem revolves around schools, particularly those located within the jurisdiction of the Los Angeles Unified School District.
Simply put, the Los Angeles school district not only performs poorly, but its dysfunction affects the demographics of the region by forcing many parents to leave the Valley for other regions, often to the Coñejo and beyond. Results on reading tests tell the sad tale; only twenty-nine percent of the second grade students in the L.A. portions of the Valley performed at the 50th percentile, only slightly better than the twenty-six percent for the rest of the district.
Sources for charts Indicators 2000; Economic Alliance of the San Fernando Valley
In contrast, other districts, particularly the Las Virgenes unified, did vastly better, but so too did schools in Burbank and Glendale, which also have high percentages of minority and immigrant students. 65 Clearly a region where so many students are falling behind stands at a distinct economic and cultural disadvantage which the growing numbers of private schools will be unable to fulfill.66
Finally, the Valley, like the rest of California, faces severe shortages in housing, particularly for the low and middle income markets. Unlike schools, where perhaps a breakup of the L.A. school district might facilitate improvement, this problem is largely based on supply and demand. Housing prices have been rising because relatively little new construction has taken place and much of that is oriented to more affluent consumers.
Many of the fastest growing elements in the Valley's demography - immigrant families, young singles and the elderly - are often without feasible housing options.67 Overcrowded conditions are particularly rife in heavily immigrant areas such as the Northeast Valley and in Glendale, where densities have been rising steadily since the 1980s with little new supply to reduce pressure on the markets.68
"When I was first running for office, I would look for a voter and they would say look in the back," Councilman Alex Padilla recalls. "Then I would go to house in the back and they would say go further back to the shed in the backyard. A lot of my district is like that."68
Given these and other problems, Valley residents, whether in the City of Los Angeles or not, face many great challenges. Yet these are not unprecedented. The rapid growth of the region in the 20th Century also required massive changes; a shift from a quasipastoral to a dense suburban region took place in less than three decades. Leadership was required to build the schools, roads, offices and houses to accommodate that growth.
Today, the Valley faces a similar challenge, but one that is not beyond the resources of this region to reach. This time growth per se is not so much the main challenge, but the quality of that growth. The Valley now is neither part of the urban periphery or a homogeneous community as in the past. It boasts a sophisticated and diverse economy; its peoples reflect, as much as any region, the enormous diversity of Southern California.
What is ultimately needed then is a new conceptualization of what the Valley is and what holds us together. Some proponents, particularly in academic and media circles, see the Valley becoming ever more fragmented, divided into racial and ethnic enclaves. Some believe this is inevitable, as immigrants, particularly Latinos, fall behind in their integration into the digital economy.
George Borjas, a leading critic of U.S. immigration policy and professor of public policy at the Kennedy Center at Harvard, suggests that recent immigration laws have tilted the pool of newcomers away from skilled workers to those with less skills, seriously depleting the quality of the labor pool and perhaps threatening the social stability of the immigration centers.69
Many on the left, who believe that racism is endemic to American society, share the pessimism of Borjas, a political conservative. Thus, to them, ethnic separation and fragmentation are inevitable, if not even desirable. According to Robert Jiobu, upward mobility of an ethnic group is determined by its infrastructure and by the infrastructure of the situation that the group encounters.70 The infrastructure includes demographic composition, intermarriage rates, residential segregation, and labor force characteristics. When viewed collectively, these factors can provide an idea of the group's assimilation level and success. Assimilation, or the blending of a culture and structure of an ethnic group with those of another, can lead to the minority becoming like the majority (Americanization), both groups changing and blending in (a melting pot), or coexisting, but maintaining their uniqueness (cultural pluralism).71
"The national economy is demanding more skilled workers and I don't see how bringing more unskilled workers is consistent with this trend…When you have a very large group of unskilled workers, and children of unskilled workers, you risk the danger of creating a social underclass in the next Century. "69
Rather than the old ideal of the "melting pot" academics like Jiobu see a pattern of discrimination that is so entrenched that ethnic mobility is sharply curtailed. Although large gaps do exist, this is not the full reality - particularly in the San Fernando Valley. Many, if not most, immigrants regard the move to the Valley as a "step up" – from a smaller apartment to a larger one, from a large apartment to a rented house and ultimately to a home or condo of their own.
This middle class, along with the aspiring working class, as researcher Gregory Rodriguez pointed out in his 1996 Pepperdine landmark study, often does not exhibit the behaviors that many observers, both conservative and liberal, associate with immigrants. As Latino immigrants settle longer in Southern California, he notes, they tend to escape poverty; after thirty years barely one in ten are poor and three out of four are solidly middle class.
As they enter the middle class, the newcomers also tend to intermix and intermarry with other groups. In the Rodriguez study, more than one in three US born Latinas in the five county areas intermarry; the same is true for US born Asian women.72 This is likely even more prevalent in the Valley, including the city of Glendale, where the prevalence of mix raced households tends to be higher than in the rest of Los Angeles.73
Karin Lane (MPP '05) is director of the Prevention of Mother-to-Child Transmission Program of AMPATH, which runs 23 HIV/AIDS clinics in Kenya.
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