Middle-Class Flight From San Fernando Valley: Will taxpayers who are leaving “America's suburb” behind doom L.A.?

L.A. Weekly reports:

With new data suggesting that a net 50,000 to 100,000 people left Los Angeles County last fiscal year, the San Fernando Valley is emerging as the poster child for middle-class flight — even as L.A. politicians try to spin an almost opposite tale.

The Valley was once America’s suburb, the nation’s most firmly rooted bastion of families holding jobs sufficient to pay for homes, cars, leisure and college tuition. Its more than 1 million people poured such a wealth of taxes into downtown’s municipal treasury — subsidizing other areas — that Valley secession was seen as an attack on L.A.’s fiscal health.

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa recently claimed that people are moving here. But, in fact, an L.A. Weekly analysis based on U.S. Census data clearly shows that for the middle class, the opposite is true.

L.A. grew in 2007-2008 due to high birth rates among the poor and working class, mostly Latinos, and due to illegal immigration. But since 2001, on the key measure of an area’s ability to attract the middle class, 901,426 more citizens have fled the county for other states than arrived from other states, and last year, they continued that flight.

One of the starkest changes is the collapse of the Valley’s middle class. U.S. Census figures we analyzed show that in 1970, 60 percent of Valley families could afford an average house and college costs, far outpacing other urban areas recently evaluated for the same era by the Pew Research Center. Even before the recession hit in late 2007, the Valley had lost a huge swath of middle-class workers, with just 43 percent of families by 2006 earning $50,000 to $149,000 — the identical income group, corrected for inflation, that made up 60 percent in 1970.

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