Clark County grows increasingly diverse

Clark County is the most rapidly diversifying county in the Portland metropolitan area, thanks primarily to its youngest residents.

As older, whiter generations die, they’re being replaced by a more mixed group of youth, particularly those of Hispanic origin or who identify with two or more races. About 79 percent of Clark County’s population describes itself as non-Hispanic white, according to 2015 U.S. Census estimates released today. But less than 70 percent of local children identify as non-Hispanic white.

At the last official Census in 2010, about 82 percent of the local population identified as white. While not a huge difference, it’s more change than surrounding counties experienced during the same period. The population of Multnomah County, Ore., for instance, stayed 71 percent white between 2010 and 2015.

That may not come as a surprise to anybody who’s been around for a while and knows that the area — and the Northwest, in general — has been overwhelmingly white for decades. At the last official Census in 2010, Portland was determined to be the whitest big city in the country, and Seattle had the fifth-greatest population of white people.

As a suburb of Portland, Clark County follows a similar pattern. However, while Portland had historically segregated neighborhoods, the Vancouver Housing Authority and the community decided that people should be integrated and live wherever they want to live, said Jane Elder Wulff, author of “First Families of Vancouver’s African American Community: From World War II to the Twenty-First Century.” She worked on the project with Cornetta Smith with help from people and organizations including the Clark County Historical Museum.

“There was no statistically black population in Vancouver or Clark County until 1942,” Wulff said. “That was when people started to arrive.”

The Vancouver branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, also known as the NAACP, was chartered in 1945 when there were thousands of black residents.

While the lack of segregation was seen as a win, it also means that minority communities here today can be geographically and culturally fragmented. Although the Census released only county-level data today, one can get an idea of which neighborhoods are more diverse by looking at the racial breakdown of Clark County public schools.

Rural areas in Clark County, at least according to the OSPI data, tend to be less diverse. Besides the tiny Green Mountain School District, Hockinson has the least diverse student body. In 2014, more than 90 percent of the student body identified as white.

Overall, Washington state schools were 57 percent white, 21.7 percent Hispanic, 7.2 percent Asian and 7.1 percent two or more races in 2014.

Multicultural kids

The largest minority group are Hispanics, who represent 9 percent of the total population and 16 percent of children younger than 8 years old. That population grew 29 percent between 2010 and 2015, which doesn’t surprise Felisciana Peralta, multicultural retention manager at Clark College, considering that the Hispanic population is growing around the country.

Rosalba Pitkin, who works at the college’s Office of Diversity and Equity, points out that there are much larger populations of Hispanics and Latinos in Adams, Franklin, Yakima and Grant counties.