“What we are seeing, still, is that many families have no choice but to continue business as usual,” said Laura Hidalgo, leader of a Covid-19 outreach team to meet every need with dignity, a non-profit group based in Pacoima.
In Pacoima – a predominantly Latin neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley, where much of our history takes place – one in five residents has been infected with Covid-19, compared with one in 24 residents of the much whiter Santa Monica. The average family income in Pacoima is about $ 56,000, compared to $ 97,000 in Santa Monica.
If you explore the map, other similar contrasts will appear: in El Sereno, a rapidly renewing Los Angeles neighborhood with an average household income of about $ 57,000, one in seven residents has been infected. In neighboring South Pasadena, a small town of tree-lined streets that often appears in movies as an idyllic American suburb, one in 22 residents has been infected. The average family income is approximately $ 106,000.
Daniel Flaming, president of the nonprofit organization Economic Roundtable, told me that the “income polarization” in Los Angeles County, coupled with the fact that a large number of low-income workers in the region are in service sectors where they must interact with customers the increase in the county, the most populous in the country, particularly intense.
[See the Covid risk in your county. Hint: It’s probably high, if you live in California.]
But if you zoom in or out, the patterns, the inequalities, are repeated.
As a reader pointed on Twitter, the city of Long Beach also has lower case rates on its richest, whiteest zip codes on the east side, according to the city’s health and human services department website. (Overall, as our map shows, one in ten Long Beach residents scored Covid-19.)
And on a larger scale, researchers at the Community and Labor Center at the University of California, Merced, wrote in a July political report that the rise of summer in California was reaching counties with high concentrations of low-income workers, including in the Central Valley, where relatively high case rates persisted during the pandemic.