Study: Income disparity greatest in resort areas

Gillian Flaccus

Monday, Nov. 24, 2003 | 8:58 a.m.

PALM SPRINGS, Calif. -- Graciela Ramirez must choose this year between Christmas presents for her three grandchildren and surgery to repair a painful hernia.

Ramirez has worked for four years at the premiere Casino Spa Resort in downtown Palm Springs, where she spends her days washing the sheets of guests who spend up to $200 a night to stay there.

Like thousands of other unskilled laborers who live in the Coachella Valley's posh communities, Ramirez struggles to make ends meet on a meager salary in an increasingly expensive resort town where low-income housing is almost nonexistent.

Ramirez pays $434 a month for a subsidized one-bedroom apartment on the outskirts of Palm Springs, in an area where the average new home goes for $333,000.

"It's my dream to buy a house," said the 48-year-old Ramirez as she sat in her cramped living room by a plastic Christmas tree. But she figures she would have to take on more work, and "to have two to three jobs just kills you."

A recent analysis of 2000 Census data by the Associated Press found that Palm Springs and the neighboring towns of Cathedral City and Palm Desert have some of the greatest income disparities in California.

The AP ranked 122 towns and cities with populations greater than 1,000 to find out which ones had the greatest income gap between the poorest and richest residents.

In general, resort communities such as Palm Springs, Santa Monica and Santa Barbara had some of the highest income gaps, as did agricultural areas in the Imperial and Central valleys that rely heavily on immigrant workers.

People in fast-growing bedroom communities outside San Francisco, Sacramento and Los Angeles overall made about the same amount as their neighbors. Those suburbs have seen explosive growth in the past decade as people try to escape soaring real estate prices closer to the city.

"New suburbs are fairly uniform in terms of income and age," said Dowell Myers, a University of Southern California professor of public policy and planning. "To qualify for the housing, people have to have similar kinds of incomes."

In the Coachella Valley, the division between the rich and poor is as much geographic as it is economic.

The valley, in the arid desert east of Los Angeles, forms a gentle arc that stretches from the extravagant casinos and resorts of Palm Springs and Rancho Mirage to the rutted trailer parks and unincorporated agricultural outposts of Mecca and Thermal.

Within six miles, median household income jumps from $34,624 in working-class Indio to $93,986 in Indian Wells, where retirees have flocked in recent years to dozens of gated communities.

Further east in Mecca, immigrant workers pack into unregulated trailer parks on tribal land. The median household income drops to $22,973, with 98 percent of residents listing themselves as Hispanic on the 2000 Census.

Many of these people commute 30 miles or more to the resort towns to the west, where they work as gardeners, maids or in casinos -- but can't afford to live.

"This is a community that's always been thought of as a leisure community and nobody thinks about who's cutting their grass or taking care of them," said Ivana Krajcinovic, a regional organizer working to unionize workers at the Agua Caliente's Spa Resort Casino in Palm Springs.