1990s Brought Increased Wealth to Ventura County

As new census 2000 figures confirm Ventura County’s increased racial diversity, a variety of data show the county also grew richer during the past decade.

During the 1990s, upscale Ventura County lured tens of thousands of urban professionals from the Los Angeles Basin, hundreds of high-tech immigrants from Asia and thousands of immigrants from Mexico, state and federal figures show.

Incomes shot up as Ventura County--now about 57% white and 31% Latino--moved closer to having no racial or ethnic majority. That is already true in the county’s 190 public schools, where white enrollment first dipped below 50% in 1997.

“Ventura County is, overall, definitely more affluent than it was 10 years ago,” said Mark Schniepp, director of the California Economic Forecast, a research group in Santa Barbara. “The ‘90s was the best decade on record for Ventura County in terms of income growth.”

As high-tech and biotech firms expanded in the east county and the Ventura Freeway corridor boomed in the west, the county’s per-person income surged 20% after being adjusted for inflation--nearly double the statewide increase, Schniepp said.

The county’s average per-person income shot up $5,381 to $32,781 during the past decade; the statewide average increased $3,080 to $31,420, Schniepp reported in an analysis of state and federal data.

Likewise, the county’s median family income, about $50,000 in 1990, jumped to $63,100 in 1998. That compares with a California median of $58,500, a federal housing analysis found.

The state also reported this week that just 10% of Ventura County children live in poverty, slightly lower than in 1990 and well below the 18% rate for California overall. School officials also say that since 1997, the number of local students receiving subsidized lunches has dropped.

“Today, versus 1990, there’s been a huge improvement,” Schniepp said. “Just 10 years ago, we were much more of a farming community with lower salaries. Now we’ve developed more of a technology base. For example, Amgen has grown to about 4,500 employees, and they average around $84,000 a year [in salary].”

Ventura County is increasingly affluent, partly because residents who moved here in recent years were far wealthier than those who moved away, a Times analysis of Internal Revenue Service statistics shows.

The typical household income of residents moving into Ventura County from 1992 to 1996 was about $41,000, compared with incomes of about $35,000 for departing households. The difference created an income gain of $136 million over the five years.

And that was during the recession of the early 1990s, before a five-year economic boom kicked in to set local records for jobs and income.

Home Prices Grew to All-Time Highs

During the last years of the decade, builders erected houses, business parks and office buildings at the fastest pace since the county’s construction peak in the 1980s.

Home prices climbed to all-time highs, so the typical house cost $259,000 by the end of last year, exceeding even the inflated home prices of the late ‘80s.

In the emerging high-tech and biotechnology industries, dozens of companies in Thousand Oaks, Moorpark and Camarillo recruited hundreds of skilled employees from other nations, employers said.

And Camarillo’s new luxury outlet malls and Oxnard’s business and industrial construction may have changed those farm cities even more significantly, Schniepp said.

“They used to be where you bought sod and flowers and lettuce,” he said. “Now they’re where we go to shop or to build a new business.”

Census 2000 reported last week that--despite an emerging anti-sprawl movement--Ventura County grew nearly 13%, or 84,181 residents, over the previous decade, a rate of growth almost as fast as California overall. Latinos accounted for most of that growth, as the county’s net white population dropped slightly.

Until the census releases its income data next year, it is difficult to say to what degree historic differences have continued between the white-collar east county and blue-collar west.

Growth trends suggest, however, that many of Ventura County’s prosperous newcomers have settled in cities in the east and central county.

Asians, historically the most affluent of all races, flocked to Moorpark, Camarillo, Simi Valley and Thousand Oaks. The only local cities with a net increase in white residents were Moorpark, Thousand Oaks and Simi Valley.

Neighbors Julie Taylor, 44, and April Brandes, 46, illustrate the migration of Los Angeles County residents to eastern Ventura County. Both moved about three years ago to a sprawling, new subdivision of $400,000 homes in the rolling hills of Newbury Park, a community in Thousand Oaks.

“It’s good schools and low crime,” said Taylor, who works part-time at her husband’s photography shop in Agoura. “If I were in the [San Fernando] Valley, I’d have to put my children in private schools.”

Brandes, whose husband is a professional photographer, said she likes the mix of races in Newbury Park, which is home not only to upscale professionals but to poorer Mexican immigrants.

“We live across the street from a Hispanic man who works for CBS and a Persian man who works for Amgen,” Brandes said.

“I like the diversity,” Taylor said. “It keeps things a little more in balance.”

Latino Population Climbed to 31%

Meanwhile, the legal immigration of about 20,000 Mexicans from 1990 to 1998 helped boost a Latino population that has grown from 21% of residents two decades ago to at least 31% today. Such immigration--and a birth rate double that of whites--hiked the number of Latino schoolchildren to 43% of those in public school. And until recently, that had led to a sharp rise in poorer students who receive subsidized school lunches.

For the past three years, however, students receiving free or reduced-price lunches dropped from 35.4% to 34.2%. That tells county schools Supt. Charles Weis that a corner has been turned.

It may also reflect a drop in legal Mexican immigration from 3,642 in 1992 to less than 2,000 in 1998, the most recent year for which Immigration and Naturalization Service data is available.

“I think we are becoming generally more affluent and more stable overall,” Weis said. “That’s why our test scores are going up and our dropout rates are going down.”

The fact that Ventura County Latinos are moving up the economic ladder was also documented in a 1996 study by Pepperdine University in Malibu.

It found that the economic progress of U. S.-born Latinos outpaced that of the county’s population overall in some key categories--such as home ownership. About 55% of all local U. S.-born Latinos--the large majority of Latinos here--qualified as middle class through income or home ownership, the study found.

Ventura County’s cost of housing, among the highest in the region, helps explain the change that beset the region the last decade. Steep rents and mortgage payments routinely pushed residents--especially the young--out in search of a place where they could afford a house.

“In this county, it is becoming very difficult for the low income to survive,” said Jamshid Damooei, an economics professor at Cal Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks. “The cost of housing is so high, they have to go.”

On the other hand, he said, when urban workers prosper, they eye bucolic Ventura County as a step up; “these premium locations attract high-income people from Los Angeles.”

More People Moved Out Than Moved In

IRS figures document this flow of poorer migrants out of Ventura County and richer ones in.

For example, nearly 95,000 Los Angeles County residents migrated into this county from 1990 to 1997. Those households earned an average of $43,300. At the same time, about 57,000 Ventura County residents moved to Los Angeles, taking with them average household incomes of $34,400.

The story was the same with six of the eight Southland counties--those to which Ventura County residents were most likely to move, and vice versa.

In all, 219,396 residents moved to Ventura County in 1990-97, while 246,494 moved out. Of those departures, nearly half were to locations outside California. That reflected a statewide trend that reversed as the economy rebounded.