Will White Influx Put Down Roots in L.A. Core?

Over the last few years, Silver Lake has been dubbed Brentwood East, Echo Park the new Laurel Canyon and Koreatown a "blossoming bohemia." Though hardly Santa Monica, downtown's central business district is beginning to feel like a yuppie neighborhood. Is L.A. undergoing a quiet Anglo reconquista? It seems certain that young whites are increasingly comfortable settling in multiethnic L.A., but how rooted in its life and culture will they really become?

Though the reasons for white flight from the city have always been varied, discomfort with growing ethnic and racial diversity has long been considered a primary factor. In 1960, fully 72% of L.A.'s residents were white. By the end of the decade, that percentage had dropped to 59%. Between 1980 and 2000, the white share of the population fell from 44% to 33%. Nowhere was the decline more severe than in the southern and central portions of the city.

During the 1980s, the decline of the white population began to affect L.A. County at large. In a decade in which all other major demographic groups continued to grow, L.A. County lost 330,000 whites. Between 1990 and 2000, that loss grew to a whopping 570,000, much of it during the severe recession in the first half of the decade.

And even as California was becoming a magnet for international newcomers from Latin America and Asia, it lost its allure to domestic migrants. The state that had traditionally drawn large numbers of newcomers from within the U.S. was now losing more native-born Americans than it was receiving. And 70% of all domestic migrants leaving California in the 1990s were white.

By the end of that decade, however, California was experiencing a small, yet symbolically significant, net in-migration of college-educated Americans. In general, all the state's new domestic migrants had more education and higher incomes and were more likely to be single than those who were leaving, and 74% were at least third-generation Americans.

While L.A. County continued to lose people over 35, it too began gaining younger people, particularly college-educated, middle-class whites. With the economy gaining steam since 2000, demographers think that this trend has only increased. At least some of those new migrants may have moved into central L.A. Other downtown newcomers are thought to be domestic refugees from the expensive Westside or lonely suburbia.