BLACKS, LATINOS IN L.A. ON MOVE.

Byline: Beth Barrett Staff Writer

Los Angeles County's African-American population has become more integrated than the rest of the nation since 1980, while its rapidly growing Hispanic population has become more segregated, says a U.S. Census Bureau study released Wednesday.

The shift has been so dramatic that there is now virtually no gap between black and Latino residential segregation, according to the study, ``Racial and Ethnic Residential Segregation in the United States; 1980-2000.''

In 1980, the county's black population was rated 41 percent more segregated than the Hispanic population, the report said. In 2000, it was just 5.2 percent more segregated.

The index measures the percentage of a group's population that would have to move away for the remaining neighborhood to look like the rest of the region.

Joel Kotkin, senior fellow at Pepperdine University's Davenport Institute, said the ``Latinization of the city'' played a big role in both the integration of African-Americans, as well as the segregation of Hispanics and, to a lesser extent, Asians.

``There's a tremendous amount of churn,'' Kotkin said. ``Latinos move into every neighborhood, and African-Americans are moving out of neighborhoods that have become too Latino.''

Local demographers said the study was consistent with the tremendous changes in Southern California over the past 20 years, dominated by the increase in the Hispanic population.

Other factors - including economic gains that allowed minorities to move to outlying communities - have also been at work, they said.

The San Fernando Valley, in the last decade, for example, has gained 185,933 Hispanics, 26,573 Asians and Pacific Islanders, and 8,637 blacks, while 128,331 non-Hispanic whites moved out of the Valley.

Hispanic immigrants who speak limited or no English, have limited economic means, and are unfamiliar with the culture are more likely to stay in segregated communities. Others live in segregated communities simply because so much of the county is made up of minority neighborhoods.

Daniel H. Weinberg, chief of the Census Bureau's Housing and Household Economic Statistics Division and the study's co-author, said Los Angeles was the only region broken out as a case study in the report, because of the size of its minority populations going back to 1980.

``Los Angeles is a laboratory in a sense,'' Weinberg said.

The data doesn't explain why large declines in African-American segregation and isolation have occurred in Los Angeles County, nor where blacks and whites are increasingly living together.

Previous demographic studies have suggested that while the city of Los Angeles has one of the wealthiest African-American middle classes in the nation, middle-class blacks have increasingly moved to the suburbs, including surrounding counties with established black communities.

Other poorer black families have moved out of the city to pockets of relative poverty elsewhere in the region, or to the South.

William Fulton, president of the private Solimar Research Group in Ventura, said the study underscores how dramatic the demographic changes have been in the region.

``Los Angeles is the land of extremes. I think a lot of the old assumptions might, in fact, have to be thrown out of the window.''

Fulton said the study suggests that while racial tensions may still remain, blacks and whites with similar incomes and class backgrounds may be finding commonalities.

``They both have stagnating populations and are declining in political power,'' Fulton said.

``A white and black family of the same socioeconomic status might discover they have more in common with each other than people of other races who seem more different, partly because of language,'' he said.

``If a white family in the Valley and a black family make the same amount of money, they may look way less different than an immigrant Asian or Hispanic family.''

In 1980, African-Americans lived in Los Angeles County neighborhoods significantly more segregated than the United States as a whole, or 11 percent higher on the segregation index.

That gap closed as integration between African-Americans and whites in the Los Angeles-Long Beach region increased at a rate 65 percent higher than the rest of the nation.

Kotkin, the institute fellow, suggested that Los Angeles' size allowed large minority communities to exist for years, unlike in denser East Coast cities.

With the increase of the Hispanic population into traditionally black communities, monolithic minority neighborhoods broke apart.

``The biggest thing that ended segregation of blacks was that a lot (of African-American communities) are now half or more Latino,'' Kotkin said.

The Census Bureau study, however, did not consider communities made up of more than one minority group to be integrated.

As such, Weinberg, the study's co-author, said African-Americans may be living with non-Hispanic whites even more than the study indicates.

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SOURCES: Census Bureau, Associated Press