ABSTRACT
The major urban areas of the West, which include Los Angeles, San Francisco-Oakland, Seattle, Denver, San Diego, and Phoenix, experienced rapid growth from 1970 to 1990. The black population of the central city, however, declined by 8.5 percent to 461,000 even as the black population of the metropolitan area increased from 830,000 to 1.17 million. Employment growth in the San Francisco-Oakland metropolitan area was a robust 48.0 percent, from 1.30 million to 1.93 million. The housing market in the metropolitan area was booming, but it did not outstrip the growth in demand. The Seattle housing market actually tightened over the period. The strong job market produced a metropolitan poverty rate that was low in 1970 at 9.4 percent and changed only to 9.7 percent in 1990. The average population growth for the twenty-one metropolitan areas was 59.3 percent compared with 6.4 percent for the seventeen metropolitan areas of the North.
