ROBERT LANG: The second season of the popular FOX television show The OC (as in Orange Country, California) starts this week. The OC focuses on the lives of several families that live in ocean-front McMansions in wealthy Newport Beach. Almost everyone in the show The OC is white. But in the real OC, according to recently released census data, not even a majority of the county is white. Orange County falls under the census category of “majority-minority” places. My comment on this got picked up by USA Today last week: “If Disneyland were built today, it would be Miguel Mouse’s home.” I was trying to capture the dramatic change in Anaheim’s ethnic make-up, which now contains a higher percentage of Asians and Latinos than even LA. And to reflect the fact that Anaheim, and not Newport Beach, comes closer to defining the real OC.
Anaheim has grown so diverse that it qualifies as a “New Brooklyn,” or a big and formerly white suburb with a high percentage of foreign-born residents. My Virginia Tech colleague Jennifer LeFurgy and I coined this term to evoke the difference between traditionally diverse urban places, such as Brooklyn, and new suburban immigrant gateways, such as Anaheim. In fact, Anaheim now has the same percentage of foreign-born residents as Brooklyn (or 38 percent). Neighboring Santa Ana, Orange’s county seat, has a population that is over half foreign born (or 53 percent)—or out Brooklyns even Brooklyn. Even the mostly affluent and master-planned Orange County community of Irvine is just under a third foreign born (or 32 percent). That means residents in the FOX show The OC could drive just a couple of miles from their coastal enclave and hit nearly Brooklyn-level diversity.
Anaheim’s tract-style subdivisions built just after Disneyland opened are where most of the city’s new immigrants live. These are the very neighborhoods that exemplify the American dream of a home in the suburbs, which in the 1950s was limited to mostly whites due to restrictive covenants. This post-war Anaheim suburban landscape, which is much derided by New Urbanists for its supposed banality, now comprises some of America’s most dynamic and off-beat places. It features retail strips that contain great Mexican and Asian restaurants. Some of the nation’s best mid-century modern architecture, including so-called “Googie-style” coffee shops and “Tiki-Modern” hotels, lie along the wide boulevards just outside of Disneyland.
The phenomena of recycled post-war suburbs as home to America’s growing ethnic diversity is hardly limited to Anaheim. All of the nation’s big immigrant gateway metro areas have such places—even the heart of Texas does. About 40 percent of Irving, a suburb famous for being home to football’s Dallas Cowboys, is non-white. Almost one in ten residents is Asian. There are entire shopping strips just south of Texas Stadium where the marquees are in Cambodian and Laotian. Irving is now more diverse a place than Dallas itself.
Despite Anaheim’s big-city traits, such as an immigrant presence greater than Brooklyn and a population that exceeds both Pittsburgh and Cincinnati, it struggles with an image problem. During the 2002 World Series between the San Francisco Giants and the Anaheim Angels, San Francisco Chronicle columnist Rob Morse asked his readers rhetorically, “What does Anaheim have?” His answer was “Plenty of free parking.” Moore than asked, “What does San Francisco have?” He answered “Everything but parking.” But in truth, Anaheim has plenty besides free parking. It exemplifies the real OC, which unlike the fictional one, surpasses many of the nation’s traditional cities in the very qualities that make a place urban—its ability to draw immigrants.