I have no trouble believing that the “churn” has steadily BoBo-ized the Bay Area and is maybe still BoBo-izing it (if it can be any more BoBo-ized than it already is). I wonder whether non-BoBos in the silicon world keep a low profile.

For me, what is significant is the change in the feel of California. During my own eleven-plus years there, from late 1977 to the beginning of 1989, there seemed to me to be no “middle.” On the low end, there was a polyglot, polyracial mass of no real economic vigor; on the high end, there was an affluent white population that was living in what amounted to an enclave. This was in Los Angeles, where I lived first in East Hollywood and then in Brentwood’s lower section, just above Wilshire Boulevard. There seemed to be none of the ordinary, middle sort of American life that had existed in Los Angeles until the Watts riots, I guess. I’m talking about the normal, white, neighborhood life in which the Beach Boys grew up, right there in Los Angeles. I’m talking about the normal, white Los Angeles that you see in “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” I’m talking about white mailmen and white grocery stores, whites behind the counter in the post office.

Among the things that stick out in my mind from that time are the following:

1 — A young white man with a Southern accident half-whispers to me, a female relative of mine, and a girlfriend of hers, “It’s so good to hear somebody speaking English.” This is on a balmy evening up at Griffith Observatory, where I’ve taken the two young women for the nighttime view of L.A., while they’re visiting me from Pennsylvania.

2 — A friend of mine who writes advertising copy shows me a pair of demographic maps that an Hispanic radio station has provided to an ad agency where he works (or had worked). Intended to show the size of the audience the radio station can reach for advertisers, the maps compare Los Angeles of, maybe, 1960 and 1980. On the older map, Los Angeles is almost completely white. The Hispanic area, in East Lost Angeles, might even be smaller than the black area, in what I took to be Watts. The latter map shows whites in what amounts to an enclave, which consists of the city’s west side and then stretches westward out toward Malibu and parts of the San Fernando Valley–the “white triangle,” as my copywriting friend calls it. The black area hasn’t really changed in size, but all the rest of what had been white is Hispanic.

With the rise of Silicon Valley, the Northern and Southern parts of the state now seem to be the same: an affluent white population that oversees a glamorous industry with a worldwide market lives up against the Ocean, in properties no white mailman can afford; the rest of the state is turning into the third world.

Being well aware how limited my knowledge of this subject is, I realize I could be completely wrong about this, but that’s how it seems to me. Some years ago, at YouTube, I saw a comment below “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” The commenter, who, as I recall, was familiar with many of the locations on view in the movie, said something like, “This is L.A. before the onslaught of illegal immigration.” That comment and a few other things, I suppose, are what eventually made me realize that I’d always been bothered, during my California sojourn, by L.A.’s lack of a middle, even while its palm trees, its great cars, and the movie industry–in the “white triangle”–were somehow preserving its mystique.

After posting my previous comment, in which I cited your numbers re a white population of 15 million in CA, I encountered comment 43, below, from “Bill.” There, you will see some information that indicates a decline in the absolute number of CA whites. As Bill himself says, with respect to the size of the decline, “It’s not like a refugee flow, but it is pretty fast change as demographic change goes.”

I think you misread Lot. He said CA’s white population is the same in absolute number, though not in share. That’s exactly what you’ve just said: The absolute number, 15 million, is unchanged, though that is now only 3/8 of the population, not the 3/4 it was in 1970. Lot indicated that the 15 million remained the same because in-migration of whites has balanced their out-migration. He was simply pointing out that the much-spoken-of out-migration of whites from CA has not reduced the number of whites in the state.

I doubt Lot would disagree that the demographic change is seismic; he was simply pointing out that the change consists of a growth of the non-white population.