Despite Flight, Whites Still Hold Slim Majority in O.C.

The houses on the Rancho Santa Margarita side of the Mission Viejo border had just what P.J. Dye was looking for.

They were new. They were affordable, running about $160,000 back in November 1990. And they weren’t in Westminster, home of a growing Vietnamese-led immigrant community.

“We just needed to get out of the neighborhood,” said Dye, 46, a white mother of three who works in the office at Rancho Santa Margarita Intermediate School. “The old neighborhood was just really rundown, and there were a lot of problems with graffiti and gangs and the school district.”

Throughout the 1990s, a massive regional churn in population radically altered the makeup of Orange County and the rest of Southern California, according to an analysis of 2000 census data released Thursday.

As Latino and Asian populations were growing rapidly through both immigration and births, the numbers of whites decreased under the stress of a crumbling aerospace industry. Demographers said Friday they suspect the white exodus has ended.

“There was a trigger that pushed people out,” said Stephen Levy, director of the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy in Palo Alto. “I don’t see a trigger like that in the next decade.”

Still, the five-county region’s white population already dropped by more than 840,000, or 11.7%, in the last decade, part of a shift that made California the nation’s first large state without a racial majority despite a slight flow of highly skilled whites who returned when the state’s economy revived.

The census put Orange County’s white population as low as 51.3%, with Latinos accounting for a minimum of 28% and Asians accounting for a minimum of 14%.

Given the continuing flow of Latinos and Asians into the area, the county probably will have no single race or ethnic group as a majority of the population by early next year, said William Gayk, director of Cal State Fullerton’s Center for Demographic Research.

“Just by looking at the trends, we’re real close,” Gayk said. “It would be no surprise to me if we were just barely above 50% [white] as we talk.”

The scale and composition of the change caught some state population experts off guard. In keeping with regional history, the trend was most precipitous in Los Angeles County, which saw its white count plunge 18%. But San Bernardino County’s white population dropped almost 13% even as the county gained almost 300,000 new residents.

The shift in population was not entirely because of migration. Widening gaps in age and fertility between whites and other racial and ethnic groups, particularly Latinos, also have contributed.

Orange County, which lost 6% of its white population, played out a somewhat different cycle. The older northern communities, which came to life with the postwar boom of young couples seeking both the suburban and California lifestyles, have given way to a new wave of Latino and Asian residents.

And South County has come to life in this post-suburban era as young white families continue the sprawl begun, in many cases, by their parents.

Brian Colclough, 30, moved from Tustin to Rancho Santa Margarita about five months ago, touching on two trends.

Tustin itself is now one of 10 cities in the county where whites are a minority, compared with just Santa Ana a decade ago. And his new home lies in a neighborhood that was just coming into existence in 1990, which helped make it the fastest-growing white census tract in the county.

“It was affordable,” Colclough said Friday morning as he stashed a caulking gun in his car and rushed off. “I grew up in Huntington Beach and would have loved to have lived there. My parents’ house is worth a half-million [dollars], and I’m not ready to do that.”

Colclough lives off Santa Margarita Parkway west of O’Neill Regional Park, an area that looks like a developer’s brochure--nearly identical tan stucco houses crowded together on gentle slopes. The neighborhood still has the look of newness, yet only six of 16 houses on Colclough’s street, Via Topacio, still house their original owners.

Debbie Arata is an anomaly. She is not only an original owner--she and her husband camped out in the nascent neighborhood to claim the lot as their own--but also part Latino in a census tract that is 77% white.

The couple have since divorced, but Arata and their three children stayed in the neighborhood, which she described as a welcome change from Anaheim, where she previously lived.

“It was brand-new and a planned community,” she said Friday as she waited for a plumber to show up to repair a leak in a second-floor pipe. “The taxes are high, but the schools are better. I love it.”

Arata, a native of Santa Barbara, said she and her former husband decided to move south in part because of the relatively crowded lifestyle in Anaheim and what was then more house for the dollar as developers converted ranchland into instant neighborhoods.

“What we were going to pay for a condo, we were able to get a house,” she said. “It was brand-new, clean and beautiful.”

In the early years, there was a fair amount of socializing. But as other original families moved out, she never grew as close to the newer neighbors. Most of the families now are two-income, and the pressures of work and home life leave little time for socializing.

Still, Arata said, there’s an undercurrent of agreement that the main reason families move in is so their children can grow up where crime is low and academic standards are high. The neighborhood often is quiet by 8 p.m. “when the kids do their homework and we relax.” In the early evening and weekends, the cul-de-sac makes for an improvised playground for neighborhood kids.

“Everybody in this area worked pretty hard to have what they have,” Arata said as a hummingbird flitted in a bougainvillea bush across the street. “And that’s good.”

But the lifestyle comes at a cost that not all can afford. Thus the white slice of the population pie is likely to keep shrinking as the white-heavy middle class moves in search of a better balance between paychecks and mortgages.

“They just can’t afford the ‘50s- or ‘60s-era vision they had of life in the California suburbs,” said William Frey, a demographer at the Milken Institute. “They used to move further and further out, but then they’re stuck with two-hour commutes and high taxes. Now they head for Las Vegas or Arizona.”

Also, the census showed that the white portion of the under-18 population slipped in virtually every census tract in the region.

“We’re finally coming to terms with the estimates we’ve been seeing for 30 years,” Fulton said. “We can’t pretend we’re a white, middle-class state anymore. We haven’t been for 20 years, but we’ve pretended.”