Census Finds Cities’ Segregation Lingers : Minorities: The county’s population has grown nearly 140,000 since 1980, but communities are increasingly divided. One analyst says Oxnard alone has half of the region’s Latinos, Asians and blacks.

Ventura County, though more racially mixed than ever, is still largely made up of highly segregated cities and neighborhoods, a Times study of the 1990 census shows.

After strong Latino and Asian immigration in the 1980s, a third of the county’s 669,000 residents are minorities. Yet, more white residents live in predominantly white enclaves today than a decade ago.

About 57% of white residents now live in communities where at least four of five residents are white, compared to 53% in 1980. And four of the county’s five largest cities--Thousand Oaks, Simi Valley, Ventura and Camarillo--remain at least 77% white.

Conversely, the white population in fast-growing Oxnard, Santa Paula and Fillmore did not increase over the last decade, even though whites increased by 15% countywide.

All three cities, traditional ports of entry for poor immigrant laborers, now have Latino majorities after tens of thousands of farm workers flocked there during the 1980s.

This separation of races has persisted even as the county has boomed, growing by nearly 140,000 since 1980. About 82,500 of the newcomers were Latinos, Asians and other minorities, while 57,500 were white.

“We’re seeing a greater concentration and isolation of racial groups than ever. Everybody is segregated. Everybody is isolated,” said Jorge Garcia, a political scientist who is dean of humanities at Cal State Northridge.

“When you look at Ventura County’s data, imagine Oxnard disappearing. There would go half of your Latinos and half of your Asians and half of your blacks,” said Garcia, a Simi Valley resident.

Stubborn racial segregation is principally the result of the inability of most minorities to afford housing in most areas of the county, but it also reflects substantial white flight out of Oxnard, Santa Paula and the San Fernando Valley, Garcia and other analysts said.

The census figures point as well to a widening gap between the county’s haves and have-nots, they said.

The gap can be best seen in Oxnard, the county’s largest city, where about 32% of the city’s 142,000 residents are white. But in its central, southern and eastern sections, minorities make up as much as 99% of the population.

By contrast, nearly 90% of residents are white in Oxnard’s beach communities north of Channel Islands Harbor, where new oceanfront houses cost $1 million or more. There is also a white majority--and a substantial affluent Asian minority--in northwest Oxnard, where new houses costing as much as $500,000 have been built near the River Ridge Golf Course.

“It’s like there are two groups living in this city, and neither is aware the other exists,” said lawyer Marco Antonio Abarca, an Oxnard-based farm-worker advocate. “Thousands of Hispanics live in the Colonia section who never go to the beach because they don’t feel comfortable there. And there are thousands of people living at the beach who have never been to the Colonia.”

The same patterns can be seen to a lesser degree across the county.

All 10 cities showed sharp increases in Latino residents last decade. But even as more Latinos, blacks and Asians dispersed countywide, they generally settled in clusters in older neighborhoods, census data shows.

Meanwhile, disproportionate numbers of white professionals from Los Angeles bought houses in new commuter havens in the east county. Indeed, Thousand Oaks, Simi Valley and Moorpark accounted for 48,000 new white residents over the decade.

The hillside Wood Ranch golf-course development in Simi Valley illustrates housing patterns in the new developments in the east county, while nearby older communities on the flat valley floor are much more racially mixed.

At Wood Ranch, 86% of residents are white, 7.6% Latino, 3.8% Asian and 1.9% black, according to the census. But in the older neighborhoods down the hill, hundreds of white residents have been replaced by Latinos, Asians and blacks. Even there, however, whites still account for 75% to 80% of residents.

“There is definitely some movement out of the old barrios,” Garcia said. “We have a small, incipient middle class. There are Mexicans scattered throughout the community, but the concentrations are in the older, less expensive areas.”

“Step back and look at the overall pattern. The new houses are up on the hill, and they are still racially segregated,” said Garcia, who lives in a 20-year-old house in an increasingly mixed-race community on the Simi Valley floor.

The county’s continued racial separation demonstrates differences in earning power between the races more than anything, analysts said.

“Minorities have less income, and people kind of get stuck in some neighborhoods,” said Carmen Ramirez, a lawyer for low-income people in Oxnard.

The 1980 census showed that Latino households in Ventura County earned 25% less than white ones on the average, and black households earned 15% less. Because so many recent Latino immigrants are low-paid and white newcomers are mostly affluent, the 1990 census is expected to show an even larger disparity when income data is released.

Asians, however, earned 6% more than whites in 1980. And last year’s census showed that many Filipinos and white-collar Chinese had moved into expensive new communities in Oxnard and the east county.

Continued racial separatism also shows what low-income housing advocates say is the failure of city and county governments to address the housing needs of the poor.

Rodney Fernandez, executive director of the county’s most successful low-income housing corporation, said just 2,000 dwellings for the poor were built in the 1980s out of 45,000 overall.

“The housing built in the ‘80s was move-up housing that 80% of the people couldn’t afford,” he said. “The ones who could afford it were professional families with two incomes or those who already had a house.”

Over the decade, Ventura County became one of the two or three most expensive counties in the state to buy a house. The median price was about $240,000 in 1990.

But other factors influenced the integration trends of the 1980s as well, said Thousand Oaks City Manager Grant Brimhall.

The east county--with neither large traditionally Latino communities nor much agricultural land--has lured few immigrants, Brimhall said. And Latinos became more concentrated in some areas because of the group’s high birth rate, he said.

County Planner Steve Wood, a census specialist, said that racial separatism will diminish with time as the county builds fewer and fewer new houses.

Middle-class Latinos and newly arrived Asians are already moving into largely white communities, and the trend should accelerate, Wood said.

But lawyer Ramirez, of that emerging Latino middle class, said she fears her group may not prosper enough to dismantle housing segregation.

“I’m concerned about our fledgling middle class,” she said. “With the recession, I see a lot of squeezing going on. People are losing jobs in the middle professions.”

RACIAL PROFILE Chart lists communities by percent of Anglo population in 1990.

Community Anglo Latino Asian Black Channel Islands Beach 90% 7% 2% 1% Oak Park 89% 6% 3% 1% Mira Monte 86% 12% 1% 1% Ojai 85% 12% 2% 0% Newbury Park 85% 10% 4% 1% Meiners Oaks 84% 14% 1% 0% Oak View 84% 13% 1% 1% Thousand Oaks 84% 10% 5% 1% Simi Valley 80% 13% 5% 1% Camarillo 80% 12% 6% 2% Ventura 77% 18% 3% 2% Moorpark 70% 22% 6% 1% COUNTYWIDE 66% 26% 5% 2% Port Hueneme 58% 30% 6% 5% Santa Paula 39% 59% 1% 0% Fillmore 39% 59% 1% 0% Oxnard 32% 54% 8% 5% El Rio 32% 64% 2% 1% Piru 23% 75% 1% 0%