Redondo Beach by the Numbers

The data from my community wasn’t too surprising for me but there were some things that definitely stood out. Redondo Beach’s racial background was dominated by white people at 60%, 20 full percentage points above any other race. Asian and Hispanic were second and third with population percentages of 16% and 14% respectively. This also coincides with the AP article that we read about the Asian population of California rising dramatically. English was the primary language spoken at home for the vast majority of the city with 76% of households being English-speaking only. That stood out to me because we tend to think of Los Angeles as a bilingual city but there are a few suburbs and neighborhoods that are still dominated by English speakers.

The almost 20% foreign population of the city is mostly from immigrants from Europe, Latin America, and Africa but 44% of the foreign population comes from Asia, the largest percentage of all the other groups.

Redondo Beach is also quite a wealthy city with a median household income of $109,019 and a per capita income of $63,680. Both of these numbers were about 1.5 times the average household and per capita income for the whole state of California. There was also a remarkably low level of poverty in Redondo Beach only clocking in at 2.8% of the population and with 0% of children under 18 living under the poverty line. Property values are also very high as the average median value of homes is slightly over $1,000,000.

Redondo’s coronavirus case numbers are moderate to low with current cases around 4,000 a case rate per 100,000 of 5814 or just under 6%. It’s a far cry from other nearby cities like Hawthorne which has a per 100,000 case rate of 14,029 but is still almost equal to nearby Torrance which has double the population but near the same case rate as Redondo Beach. The city has a surprisingly high number of its population vaccinated with at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine. 83% of the population over the age of 12 has had at least one jab which is the second highest rate of vaccination in the South Bay area next to Manhattan Beach. This data is either confusing or alarming given the case rate and the city’s population of 66,757 all crammed within six square miles of each other.