Image upgrade for Santa Ana's core ("Informal Economy" HURL! )

Incomes and population were underestimated by census, says a study that could make retailers and bankers take note.

A study of central Santa Ana released Monday found that it is home to more people, with more money, than previously documented.

It shows the neighborhoods surrounding downtown are home to 9.5 percent more people and 32 percent more household income than U.S. Census projections. Santa Ana city leaders, who requested the study, hope these findings will help it attract more retailers and banks to the area.

The study was done by Social Compact, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit research group that gets funding from financial and real estate companies. Since 1998, the group has conducted similar studies in 101 neighborhoods in eight cities, including Houston, New York and Oakland.

Unlike the census, which gets its data from household surveys, Social Compact "drills down" to little-used sources of data to create an economic portrait of urban neighborhoods, studying utility usage, property transactions and credit records. Its specialty is to model an area's "informal economy," such as street vendors and day laborers, that isn't captured by tax records.

In the Santa Ana study, the city's downtown and the neighborhoods to the east and west of it are portrayed as densely populated, with an average household size of 5.75 people. Residents, who are 92 percent Latino, spend most of their money elsewhere, the study says.

"There is so much wealth in Orange County that sometimes we think of just poverty in Santa Ana," said Rep. Loretta Sanchez, a Democrat who represents the area. "But the reality is we have a lot to offer."

I downloaded Social Compact's Santa Ana "Drill Down" study. It's 122 pages of mission statement babble:

"DRILLDOWN builds on current, finely sieved, reality-based market information drawn from a spectrum of diverse commercial, proprietary and local government sources (e.g. tax assessor, building permit, commercial credit companies, realtors, utility and police). Rather than relying on any one information set, the DRILLDOWN looks for a set of findings that surface from the combined body of data. These findings are then tested against supplemental data as well as the intuitive knowledge of local market leaders. These findings serve as the foundation for an objective, systematic analysis of the business attributes of the markets.

"The foundation of the Santa Ana Neighborhood Market DRILLDOWN is a real estate inventory derived from three core sets of data: private and public tax assessor data and building permits. Addresses were further validated using first source credit data, utility data and home sales data.

"Supplemental information sources for understanding population trends included school enrollment data, utility data, market surveys and development activity in the market including property sales, building alterations and new construction. Buying power was assessed based on first source credit data reinforced by DRILLDOWN informal economy indicators including bill payment patterns, percentage of un-banked households and immigrant populations."

And then there's the "reality-based" marketing info regarding the "informal economy" and "intuitive" data of "unbanked households" within the large "immigrant" population ... aka, "underserved population":

"According to the American Community Survey (ACS) conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau in 2004, 76.2% of Santa Ana’s residents speak Spanish at home, the highest proportion recorded anywhere in the country. The ACS also found that 55.4% of residents were born in foreign countries, the second highest proportion in the nation, behind Miami. Many of the city’s neighborhoods, particularly those with large immigrant communities, are very densely populated. According to the National League of Cities, Santa Ana is the eighth most densely populated city in the nation.1 Combined, these powerful demographic traits are helping to drive the growth of small businesses in the city. According to the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City, a Boston based research organization, between 1995 and 2002 small business job growth in Santa Ana’s inner-city was faster than in the surrounding MSA2, one of only ten inner city areas across the country to have witnessed this growth trend.3 Nowhere are these demographic traits and trends more prominent than in the two areas of the city profiled in this report."

Also years back, Santa Ana hired another firm for image enhancement. Forget who that was, but it appears they were only successful in attracting more of the undeserved ... er, underserved.

undeserved ... er, underserved

Good point, Newman. Doncha know that the Mexican illegal aliens have become the recipients of choice for our tax dollars? Doncha know that they have been led to believe (by our own government) that they are the ENTITLED ones? They believe that it is our responsibility to provide them all the freebies with our hard-earned bucks.

GWBush sent this message out loud and clear when he didn't secure the borders, even after 9/11/01. He sent the message that it was also OK for terrorists to come over the borders as long as the long stream of illegals kept coming too...

If places like Santa Ana, Wilmington (and I could name twenty more) are the future of California, I'm glad I'm old, but I weep for my kids and grandkids.

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