Public school enrollment is dropping fast in some of the most notoriously crowded neighborhoods of Los Angeles as soaring rents and property values displace low-income, mostly immigrant families.
"It's getting too expensive to live here. I hear that from parents all the time," clerk Mina Rocha said recently from her post at the front counter of Hobart Boulevard Elementary School in Pico-Union, in the crook of the 10 and 110 freeways.
The school opened this year with 1,652 students, about 500 fewer than in 2002. Next year's student body will be smaller still. "We've lost a lot of kids, and not a lot are enrolling," Rocha said.
It's a story repeated at dozens of schools in the central city and the southeast San Fernando Valley, in neighborhoods long characterized by poverty and overcrowding and now changing rapidly.
School enrollment figures offer an early glimpse of demographic trends that won't show up in census data for several years. A Los Angeles Times analysis of those numbers, grouped by ZIP Codes, found an unmistakable pattern: Families with children are leaving the city's core.
Overall, kindergarten through fifth-grade enrollment in the sprawling Los Angeles Unified School District dropped only modestly -- by about 30,000, or less than 10% -- since the fall of 2002. But half of that loss came from just 15 of the 118 ZIP Codes the district covers, all in neighborhoods once dominated by working-class immigrants.
The families began leaving a few years ago, as property values and rents soared. School administrators and housing advocates said residents of the restored homes or new luxury condominiums tend to have fewer or no children.
"Our ZIP Code is one of the last areas to get a big boost in the real estate market," said Jim Kennedy, principal of Pico-Union's Magnolia Elementary, which is losing about 75 students a year. "It's been a shock to the families."
The 90006 ZIP Code covers two square miles and five elementary schools, including Magnolia and Hobart. In the last two years, average rents there jumped by 60%, to $932 a month, according to RealFacts, a Novato-based real estate research firm. During the same two years, the combined elementary school enrollment dropped by 800 to 5,284.
A similar pattern of rising rents and declining school enrollment shows up in Westlake, Echo Park, Boyle Heights, South Los Angeles and pockets of the San Fernando Valley, including Pacoima and North Hollywood. It is the mirror image of what happened in the same neighborhoods a generation ago.
