Community's not that different from other areas, despite image  No longer is the San Fernando Valley a jobless bedroom community. Census figures show it's remarkably similar to the rest of Los Angeles.

BY LISA FRIEDMAN, Washington Bureau
LA Daily News

WASHINGTON - "America's suburb" is as economically vibrant and ethnically diverse as the heart of Los Angeles, according to the U.S. Census Bureau's first-ever demographic snapshot of the San Fernando Valley.

Officially quantifying what local leaders have long known, the report released Thursday shows the Valley has evolved from a predominantly white bedroom community into a metropolis, with top wage earners as well as poverty, long commutes and heavy immigration.

If the Valley, Glendale and Burbank were one city, the area's 1.74 million residents would make it the nation's fifth-largest city, behind only New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Houston.

"It's time for people to understand that the Valley as it was envisioned in 1950 is not the Valley of 2005," said Robert Scott, chairman of the Valley Industry and Commerce Association.

"This Valley has opportunities and challenges that are very similar, in many cases, to the rest of Los Angeles."

The Valley census tract includes San Fernando, Burbank, Glendale, Calabasas and parts of Los Angeles city and county.

It also mirrors data released last month for the 27th and 28th congressional districts - technically not the entire San Fernando Valley, but a significant swath.

With strong support from Rep. Brad Sherman, D-Sherman Oaks, the Valley won status as a separate region with the Census Bureau late last year - a distinction that could give it the detailed information needed to achieve the economic and political clout it has sought for decades.

The designation capped a five-year effort that began after the Valley's secession campaign failed in 2002 amid bitter challenges over the accuracy of information about what would have then been the nation's sixth-largest city.

Scott, who led the campaign for the Valley census, said the data will help business leaders and policymakers prove that while the region is distinct from Los Angeles, its population has the same needs as the rest of the city and county.

"For those people who somehow think of the Valley as a bedroom community of well-to-do whites, that's a myth of 40 years ago," said Eugene Turner, geography professor at California State University, Northridge.

The new report, he said, "shows that the Valley is not that different from the Los Angeles (area) as a whole."

The average Valley family is older, better educated and earns nearly $12,000 more annually than a family in another part of Los Angeles, the report shows. But in other ways, Valley residents are strikingly like their city counterparts.

The typical mortgage in the Valley hovers in the $2,000-a-month range, about even with the rest of the city. That mortgage is likely to account for about 35 percent of a household's income in both the Valley and the remainder of Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, 13 percent of Valley residents earned wages below the federal poverty level last year, compared with 20 percent citywide.

And when it comes to immigration, nearly 42 percent of Valley residents are foreign-born, compared with 41.2 percent of city residents.

Similarly, a language other than English is spoken in 59 percent of Valley homes. That's the case in about 61 percent of all Los Angeles city homes.

USC demographer Dowell Myers said Los Angeles overall is "remarkably homogenous" and noted that the city and county poverty levels are not strikingly different.

The image of the city as "an island of poverty" is as obsolete as the image of the San Fernando Valley as the predominantly white burbs.

"Reputations are usually 20 years out of date. People also think Orange County is a largely white Republican bastion, too. It's not. The image from the past is always what people hold onto."

Daniel Blake, director of the San Fernando Valley Economic Research Center at CSUN, noted that there are more jobs in the Valley than there are employed residents in the labor force.

"That's an urban thing," Blake said. "The Valley has become a job center as opposed to a bedroom community."

Blake, who has been crunching census data for the Valley since 2001, also has said future Census Bureau reviews will provide a greater perspective on the changing Valley.

The greatest information boom will come after the 2010 Census.

Sherman said the Valley census will have important political implications when it comes to fighting for everything from transportation dollars to social services.

"We need what any important section of a huge metropolitan area needs," he said. "We need transportation and we need housing."