PROFILE OF RESIDENTS IN THE CIVIL UNREST AREA

A brief look at a map that plots the locations of buildings that were severely damaged or destroyed during the civil unrest will reveal that while the damage was very widespread, it tended to be concentrated in definable neighborhoods and communities within the county. In order to better understand the underlying factors that contributed to the civil unrest it is worthwhile to examine available data that describe the economic conditions and demographic profiles of the residents of areas that were most strongly affected by the unrest. The following graphs, maps, tables, and descriptive narrative provide an overview of selected statistics that, taken as a whole, describe some of the ways in which the geographic areas that contained most of the severely damaged buildings differ from the areas of Los Angeles County that either suffered less damage, or were completely unaffected.

The data included in this section were derived from two sources:

1. 1990 Census, with detailed data on residents by census tract.
   
2. Various building and safety departments (city and county) which developed lists of buildings, by address, that were damaged during the unrest. Only the buildings that were designated for commercial use and that were at least 50 percent destroyed or that were designated as unsafe are included in this report.
   
   
3. In preparing the data for this section, the census data and the count of damaged or destroyed buildings were first summed to the 1990 census-tract level. For the tables and graphs, these data were then further aggregated to Los Angeles City Planning Areas, and to Census Places which had a significant amount of unrest-related destruction.
   
   While most of the geographic areas selected for analysis in this study vary significantly from the county as a whole in most of the statistics presented here, some of the areas-in particular the Wilshire, Hollywood, and San Pedro Planning Areas and the City of Long Beach--tended to fall more in line with countywide averages. This is because these populous areas are much less homogeneous, and most of the destruction that did occur there was usually in or near census tracts in which the population characteristics contrasted sharply with those of the residents in other parts of those same communities.
   
   Some of the Census Places shown are unincorporated county areas which are called census Designated Places" (CDP) because they are recognized, closely settled communities.
   
   
   

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Analysis of the 1992 Los Angeles Civil Unrest