Features

The gulf between rich and poor widened in California during the 1990s. 

New census data show that vast disparities persist in cities and rural California, while the economic leveling effect of sprawl helped some suburbs close the income gap. 

The numbers, which were collected at the height of the economic boom in 2000, show a state that got more golden for the wealthy while the working poor struggled to keep up. 

The income gap widened in 54 of the 58 counties, according to results released Tuesday from the census long form, which asked about one in six Californians to report their 1999 income as well as everything from their country of origin to whether their children are in preschool. 

Some regional wrinkles emerged from the data: 

n The income gap increased fastest in low-population counties in the Sierras and the state’s far north, including Alpine, Modoc and Siskiyou. Other areas of high inequality included southern San Joaquin Valley farm communities. 

n Cities remained centers of inequality. In Los Angeles, which encompasses both Pacific Palisades and Watts, the disparity between rich and poor was so extreme that it skewed the statewide average. San Francisco, Oakland and Fresno also all had a wider income gap than the state average. 

n The only four counties where the gap decreased were semi-rural, but on the cusp of a new surge in growth from the state’s population centers. The income gap was relatively low in the sprawl east of the Bay Area, north of Los Angeles and around Sacramento, where two-income families can be the norm. 

n California has the fourth highest disparity among the 25 states for which long-form data has been released this summer. 

Those conclusions are based on a statistical formula economists use to measure income disparity called the “Gini coefficient,” named after an Italian demographer. 

High immigration rates explain some of it — nearly 40 percent of California’s 33.9 million residents lives in a family headed by an immigrant, the Census Bureau has reported. 

During the 1990s, waves of low-wage workers from Mexico and Central America arrived along with highly skilled engineers and computer programmers from Asia, increasing the gap. 

During the 1990s, Reed said, the income of a family of four in the lowest quarter of wage earners fell from $28,600 to $27,200 in constant dollars, while a family of four in the highest quarter earned $90,600 as the decade began and $94,900 by its end. 

Though that gap closed slightly during the late 1990s, more recent economic woes have likely forced it wider again, Reed said. 

“This is very consistent with what we’ve seen over the last 20 years in California, which is the rising of the income gap due to the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer,” Reed said. 

Counties with a high median income tended to be more homogenous and thus have a relatively small gap, while counties with high poverty rates had higher inequality. Immigration and education levels appear to be less of an influence on the wage gap, Reed said. 

“The poor counties have diverse populations ranging from poor through rich, while the rich areas are more exclusive,” she said. 

The state is trying to close the gap by training the often transitory low-wage work force in skills that will help them move up the career ladder incrementally, according to Michael Bernick, director of the Employment Development Department. 

A certified nurse assistant earning $9 an hour who qualifies as a senior nurse assistant — but not a fully registered nurse — might earn about $10.50 an hour, he points out. 

Beyond earning more, a career-track nurse will tend to be a better worker, Bernick said. 

“It’s a consumer issue, a quality-of-service issue,” he said, “as well as an issue of income inequality.”