Young boost diversity as population ages
Thursday, May 14, 2009
The population of the United States - and of California - is becoming older on average and also more racially and ethnically diverse. But the folks who are aging are not the same as the ones who are increasing the nation's diversity, according to 2008 population estimates released today by the U.S. Census Bureau.
The data show two different demographic trends at play: non-Hispanic white people tend to be older - a median age of 41.1 - and their ranks are increasing only slightly. Latinos, meanwhile, are the nation's youngest population group and its fastest growing, at 3.2 percent over the previous year. And nowhere is the trend more pronounced than in California, where whites are older and Latinos are younger than the national averages.
Blacks and Asian Americans, meanwhile, are closer to the median age of the country overall, which is 36.8 years, up 1.5 years since 2000. The Asian population is growing rapidly - 2.7 percent nationally between 2007 and 2008 - while the black population is increasing at half that rate, census figures show.
"California is aging as the rest of the country is, but it's ahead of the curve in diversity and behind the curve in aging, and that's our big advantage," said Dowell Myers, director of the Population Dynamics Research Group at the University of Southern California. "We have a more useful workforce, and we have more young people in school. That costs more money up front, but it will repay huge benefits in 10 years when the rest of the country has few young people."
Almost half of the nation's children under the age of 5 - 47 percent - were minorities, according to the Census Bureau. In California, the majority of the nation's 0-to-4-year-olds have been minorities for a number of years - and more than half today are Latinos.
The Latino boom
The growth in the state's Latino population is primarily due to births, many of them to immigrant parents, according to David Hayes-Bautista, director of UCLA's Center for the Study of Latino Health and Culture, who has studied 65 years' worth of data on Latino health and behavior.
"When Latinos are half of the total population in California, overall people will have fewer heart attacks, cancers and strokes, they'll have healthier babies, live three to four years longer, work harder, work more in the private sector, use welfare less and have stronger families," he said.
The problem, said Hayes-Bautista, is that the state's Latinos have lower rates of high school graduation and college attendance than average, in part because their parents had less schooling.
Education a concern
"The biggest area of concern for me is the performance of the educational system," he said. "That's what's going to make or break the U.S. economy for the 21st century."
In the Bay Area, the population's growing diversity can be seen in its preschools. At the Lotus Bloom Child and Family Resource Center in Oakland's San Antonio neighborhood, Monday's playgroup takes place in Vietnamese and English, Tuesday's in Chinese and English and Wednesday's in Spanish and English, said director Angela Louie-Howard.
"When we're able to connect to people in their own language and culture, they feel more connected to this place," said Louie-Howard, who opened the center last year to help parents improve their children's readiness for elementary school. "You can't talk to people about deeper issues if you're not making them feel welcome and comfortable."
The Bay Area is one of the state's most diverse regions, with sizable numbers of Asians, Latinos and whites, and a somewhat smaller black population, said Hans Johnson, senior demographer at the Public Policy Institute of California.
Mixing it up
The number of people who identify as multiracial is also growing, and at a faster rate than any other racial or ethnic group. Almost 1 in 5 of the nation's 5.2 million mixed-race people live in California, and the vast majority of them are children, the census data show.
They include Louie-Howard's daughter, who is half Chinese American and half African American. They also include Heidi Durrow, a writer who grew up with a Danish mother and African American father and now co-hosts a weekly podcast called Mixed Chicks Chat.
"I'm not surprised, and I'm actually excited," said Durrow, who noted that half the kids at her niece's recent birthday party were multiracial. "There are a lot more different kinds of people (in California), so it's probably easier to mix here than in other places."
The estimated U.S. population as of July 1, 2008, was 304 million, of whom 36.8 million lived in California. The state's population is almost 37 percent Latino, 42 percent white, 6 percent black and almost 13 percent Asian, according to the bureau.
E-mail Tyche Hendricks at thendricks@sfchronicle.com.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/05/14/MNCT17K1F4.DTL
This article appeared on page A - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
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