Santa Barbara County, you've changed.
From the double-digit growth that has converted pastures to suburbs in the North County to the burgeoning number of people with Spanish surnames listed in the telephone book on the South Coast, the population of this area has grown in number and diversity in the last decade, as confirmed by the release of the most recent batch of California Census data Thursday.
The change has broad implications for both the political and social makeup of the county, and the data, released to state and local officials, will be used to redraw political districts across the state.
The census - the once-a-decade attempt to count every man, woman and child in the United States - shows that the county, like the rest of California, continues to grow at a steady clip, adding 29,739 residents since 1990. The state grew by 13.8 percent, reaching a total population of 33.9 million people. It's clearly the largest state in the union. For the first time, the surge in Latino births and Asian immigration pushed whites out of the majority.
In Santa Barbara County, the population count of 399,347 is a whopping 14,853 people less than county officials and the state Department of Finance had projected, begging the question of whether the Census Bureau missed people in its count here.
"It's possible that the Department of Finance estimates were high," said Shirley Moore, administrative analyst for the county and a project manager for redrawing supervisorial district lines. "I am surprised by the number so we're going to work to verify that. If it is indeed correct, there may have been an undercount."
The numbers are important because the census count can translate to anywhere from $150 to $250 in state and federal money for each person in the county. In addition, the county's population must meet certain thresholds for the area to qualify for special Community Development Block Grant money.
According to the census figures, the county's population has grown by about 8 percent since 1990, far less than in the period between 1980 and 1990, but with much of the increase in the North County and among Latinos.
People of Latino descent now account for 34 percent of the county's residents. Although immigration is responsible for a portion of that increase, government officials said most of that rise is from births. Sometime in the next 15 years, Latinos will overtake whites, becoming the county's largest ethnic group.
"Our audience is growing," said Gerado Lorenz, who hosts a Spanish-language morning program on KSPE-FM in Santa Barbara. "We have more listeners, more advertisers. You can't help but notice that."
In part because of a booming economy, but also because of the growing number of Latino consumers in the county, the radio station saw a 35 percent increase in advertising revenue last year, Lorenz said.
"You have big companies - national companies - that want to get that Latino dollar," he said. "That's something you didn't see 10 years ago."
The change also can be seen in the faces of schoolchildren from Guadalupe to Carpinteria.
Latinos make up more than 50 percent of the 66,047 students enrolled in kindergarten through 12th grade in public schools in the county, according to the county Education Office. Census figures show a similar split, with Latinos making up about 50 percent of the population under 18.
In many area elementary schools the ethnic split is much greater, with Santa Barbara public elementary schools made up of nearly 70 percent Latino students. In Santa Maria, Latinos make up 78 percent of those enrolled this year. Some schools in the two cities are upward of 90 percent Latino.
But many school officials say the concentration of Latinos in certain schools and whites in other schools has less to do with race than with socioeconomic considerations.
"I don't perceive that as being a race issue," said Lanny Ebenstein, a former Santa Barbara city school board member. "I think most parents would prefer to have their children in ethnically diverse schools."
A school's performance, or perceived performance, accounts for a certain amount of "white flight" from some neighborhood schools, Ebenstein said.
In this clearly ethnically diverse county, the question is, are we truly mixed, or are we becoming more segregated?
"I don't know the answer to that question, but it's important that somebody ask it," said Pedro Nava, president of the Santa Barbara Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and a member of the state Coastal Commission.
National data show that Latino immigrants, much like immigrants in the past, are increasingly living in segregated neighborhoods.
According to a study by sociologists with the University of Albany in New York that was reported in USA Today this week, the growth of the Latino population has been accompanied by Latinos' increasing isolation within cities in more and more homogenous neighborhoods.
The census data ultimately will show if the same neighborhood lines are being drawn in Santa Barbara County.
Nava prefers to take a positive look at the new data.
"What I would stress about these numbers is that they present a real opportunity for California to show the rest of the country and the world the benefits of having a diversity of culture, of language and orientation," he said.
While the South Coast has grown - filling in the remaining empty spaces of Goleta and Carpinteria - one of the most striking changes is the rapid growth in the North County.
Buellton and Santa Maria are far surpassing the rates of growth of their southern neighbors. At some time in the next two decades, the population of North County communities is projected to surpass that of South Coast communities.
The change has been jarring for some.
George Pierce moved to Orcutt in the late 1960s, when there were just a few hundred people living there. His home, looking out over the rolling pastures of Rice Ranch, was bordered on three sides by empty fields. Today, the unincorporated community has reached a population of 28,830 people. There are plans for the construction of another 7,000 homes in the Orcutt area. Roads and sewer lines are being constructed for a new development that likely will surround Pierce's property with homes instead of pastures.
"We've got horse, cattle and deer on two sides of us," he said. "The deer would come up to the back yard, even. It was real rural here, but now we've got homes planned on all sides."
Chris Beebe moved there when the community had just a single stoplight.
Since then, Beebe, 52, has had plenty of opportunity to watch the evolution of Buellton and the Santa Ynez Valley as a whole. Her family lived in Buellton for three years in the early 1980s, moved to Los Angeles for a number of years, then returned to live in Solvang in the mid-1990s.
"Before we left, I remember when the first traffic signal went in in Buellton," she recalled. "There were no theaters in the valley. We'd drive to Lompoc or Santa Maria. Everything was shut up tight at 8 p.m. ... You could scoot through the valley and be the only car on the road."
She didn't really notice much change at first. But in the past five years or so, she realized that small stores were being replaced by large chain stores and that traffic backed up at the numerous stoplights in Buellton and Solvang.
Now, when she steps outside her Solvang home, she notices the constant din.
"The noise," she says, succinctly defining how growth has changed her community. "I remember when we were in Los Angeles, I called it 'white noise.' You heard the roar. When we first moved to Solvang, you could hear coyotes at night and owls. Now you don't hear them as much. I'm starting to hear the roar."
If it's not the noise, it's the lights. As a member of Women's Environmental Watch, Beebe has become involved in a "Turn out the lights" campaign, directed largely at valley newcomers who've installed high-power security lights on their ranch properties. The enormous lights, she and others say, are excessive and unnecessary in a community relatively free of crime.
Despite it all, the family remains.
"It's a wonderful place to live," said Beebe. "Even with the changes. It would have to change an awful lot more for us to not want to live here."
News-Press Staff Writer Nora K. Wallace contributed to this story..
Alejandra De la Mora, left, her sister Mary, and her 8-month-old daughter Gabrielle are members of Santa Barbara County's burgeoning Latino population.
California's overall population grew 13.8 percent to 33.9 million people.
