Southland Gets Mixed Grades in Annual Study

First, the good news: Southern California is safer, has more jobs and cleaner air.

The bad news? Good luck driving to work, finding a decent place to live and a school for the kids.

These are the conclusions of the annual report card by the Southern California Assn. of Governments, a research and planning group for the six-county region. The overall picture shows Southern California's economy is healthier, but dramatic work is needed to improve housing, transportation and public education.

And while the economy is prospering, the gap between rich and poor grows wider.

Southern California improved in three categories: employment, air quality and safety. But SCAG officials gave the region the same low grades as last year in four areas: income, housing, mobility and education. Those grades ranged from Ds--for mobility and education--to a C-plus for income.

"In a region as large and complex as Southern California, we need to look for constant yearly improvement," said Ron Bates, SCAG president and a Los Alamitos city councilman. "But it's not going to be easy."

Southern California, home to 16 million people, has grown rapidly for more than a century with no indication of slowing, according to one chapter in the SCAG report. Considering the impact of overcrowding on the environment and the overall quality of life, "it's time to rethink our idea of what growth is in our vast metropolis," wrote author William Fulton, president of Solimar Research Group in Ventura and author of "The Reluctant Metropolis."

Most of the report, however, focused on existing areas of community life. The biggest improvement occurred in the category of employment, which improved from a B-minus in 1999 to an A-minus. Los Angeles County added more than 80,000 jobs in 1999, the second best performance of the decade--1998 was the best. Even so, the county has not replaced the jobs lost during the 1990s recession, says the 60-page State of the Region report, which will be released today.

The area's increasingly diversified economy has buffered it from turbulent economic times, the report says. California's healthy economy kept the state jobless rate at 4.9% in 1999, the lowest level in the 30 years that it has been tracked. The state is adding jobs at a higher rate than the rest of the United States, but California's unemployment rate is still slightly above the nation's rate, 4.1%.