Comparisons between 1990 and newly released 2000 Census data (Summary File 3) indicate there is a widening gulf between the two ends of the economic ladder in California, according to Paul Ong, director of UCLA’s Ralph and Goldy Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies.

According to Ong and center researchers, while proportions of households with incomes over $100,000 increased in the 1990s, the proportion of people living in poverty also increased. Other data released show that overall in California there has been a slight decline in median income, and poverty rates (the proportion of people living below the federal poverty level) have increased for the state as a whole, from 12.5 percent in 1989 to 14.2 percent in 1999.

The findings also show differences between Northern and Southern California urban areas, with the Bay Area doing better economically than Los Angeles County. The number of poor neighborhoods increased in Los Angeles, and the number of affluent neighborhoods increased in the Bay Area, according to Ong, who is also a professor of urban planning at the UCLA School of Public Policy and Social Research.

Analysis at the neighborhood level (census tracts) supports the center’s findings. For example, about 28 percent of census tracts in Los Angeles are “poor� (at least 25 percent of the tract population below the poverty line) compared with only 5 percent in the Bay Area. The number of these tracts has grown since 1990, but remained the same for the Bay Area, Ong said.

Data sources for the UCLA study are from the 1990 and 2000 Census Summary File 3 (SF3), 2000 Census Demographic Profiles and the Census 2000 Supplemental Survey (C2SS).

More detailed information on the research findings may be found on the center’s web site.