L.A. Swept by Decade of Social, Economic Change
A chart Monday incorrectly reported the poverty rate in Los Angeles and the proportion of the city's population made up of blacks. The poverty rate is 18.9 percent and 14 percent of city residents are black. (Published 5/13/92)</br></br>Enormous social and economic changes swept over the city of Los Angeles during the 1980s, including rising poverty and unemployment and a wave of immigration that transformed the city's racial profile, according to census figures released today.</br></br>The detailed statistics, issued early by the Census Bureau to help guide the city in rebuilding from the recent riots, underscore the metamorphosis that many say helped set the stage for the violent upheaval.</br></br>At the heart of that change is an increasingly multi-ethnic population, fueled by the arrival of more than 750,000 immigrants since 1980. When the census was taken in 1990, nearly 40 percent of city residents were foreign-born, an increase of two-thirds in just a decade.</br></br>Hispanics and Asians together now make up half of the city's population, while both the white and the black share fell. And language and cultural forces made the new racial dynamic even more complex: Half of all Los Angeles residents speak a language other than English at home and, of those, the majority said they did not speak English very well.