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In the suburbs, population growth sees a diverse shift

In a change from the 1990s, growth among minority groups is outpacing whites in three big suburban counties

By DAVID PETERSON, Star Tribune

Last update: August 6, 2008 - 11:29 PM

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There's an extensive discussion of immigrant movement into Twin Cities suburbs in a chapter of the new book "Twenty-First Century Gateways: Immigrant Incorporation in Suburban America" (Brookings Institution)

Dakota County offers details of the demographic change in a section of a Community Indicators report, online at www.co.dakota.mn.us/CountyGovernment/Reports/Demographic/2007AnnualReport.htm.

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Arriving in the Twin Cities 20 years ago, Vietnamese immigrant Tracy Tran remembers standing out as the rare Asian at Apple Valley High School.

These days, the clientele at Tran's new Japanese steakhouse and sushi bar in downtown Apple Valley can be almost entirely Asian, and the employees include Asians and Latinos.

"People are so used to the idea that 'Apple Valley is where all the white people are,'" she said. "But Apple Valley is actually very diverse. You see more different types of skin in every neighborhood now."

New census numbers emerging today suggest that all of the three big suburban counties in the Twin Cities area have undergone a decisive shift in this decade, compared with the 1990s. People of color now account for more of their population growth than whites.

Even experienced demographic analysts blinked when they saw the new numbers for Dakota, Anoka and Washington counties.

But they stressed that the reasons behind the numbers are subtle.

Plenty of white people are still settling in fast-growing suburbs such as Woodbury, Lakeville and Blaine. Dakota County is almost 90 percent white. But that type of growth is slowing. In older suburbs, meanwhile, an aging white population is passing from the scene. And across these counties, vast numbers of white households are emptying out, as baby boomer parents see their grown kids off to colleges and apartments.

Meanwhile, a single immigrant decision to move into a city like Eagan can bring multiple generations.

"My neighborhood in Eagan looks a lot different than it did when we arrived in 1991," said Jane Vanderpoel, an analyst for Dakota County. "Two doors down there's an Asian household with two elderly women who take care of several kids while Mom and Dad work. Down the street there's a Somali family with teens, Mom, Dad -- and what looks like grandparents."

Although influenced locally by the particular blend of a large number of Southeast Asians and African refugees, the trend is national, said Hazel Reinhardt, an Edina-based demographer.

"The pattern in many large metros is that cities are becoming more white, while losing minorities to suburban areas," she said. "And that's what we're seeing here very dramatically."

The reasons for that are many, said Katherine Fennelly, a University of Minnesota immigration expert who co-wrote a chapter on the Twin Cities' experience in a new book on suburban diversity nationwide.

Perhaps most fundamentally, she said, minorities today are much likelier than whites to be at that phase of life at which the suburbs are most attractive: parents of young kids, seeking safe neighborhoods and quality schools.

"Nationally the Hispanic population in 2006 had a median age of 27, compared with 36 among the population as a whole," she said. "About a third of the Hispanic population was younger than 18, compared with a quarter of the total population."

Today's census data are just by county, and don't separate Minneapolis or St. Paul from their suburbs in Hennepin and Ramsey counties. But the same things are happening in those counties, Fennelly said.

For example, her book reports, nearly 7,000 refugees entered Minnesota between January 2005 and May 2006. Over a third were resettled in the suburbs of the Twin Cities. The largest groupings: Liberians in Brooklyn Park, Hmong in Brooklyn Center and Somalis in Eden Prairie.

In Dakota County, meanwhile, Tracy Tran's kids are living a childhood much like her own.

For the past four to five years she and her Chinese-American husband have been in Lakeville, where things for her 9-year-old son are a bit like they were for her, closer in, decades ago. "He goes to school in Farmington, which is still not the area a lot of [minorities] like to move to yet. I see the school yearbook" and there are very few Asians.

David Peterson • 612-673-4440

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