In honor of the city of Irvine’s 50th Anniversary in December 2021, I was involved in three different reports describing different unique features of the city. They are:
- Irvine at 50: A Tale of Continuity and Change. The city of Irvine has experienced significant change over its 50-year history, and yet one constant is that crime has remained at a low level, and, if anything, has been declining in the most recent decade. Why is that? In this report, we explore some of the possible factors that may help account for this phenomenon. Although Irvine contains some characteristics that criminologists typically identify in cities with higher crime rates–such as population growth, racial and ethnic diversity, a relatively high concentration of rental housing units, and the presence of a large industrial area–nonetheless, the city has maintained a relatively low level of crime. In fact, for 15 straight years Irvine has been named America’s safest city of its size, based on FBI Uniform Crime Reporting statistics from 18,000 jurisdictions.
- Irvine at 50: From a Planned Community to a Growing Job Center. This MFI Report presents the evolution of Irvine with a focus on its function as a job center. Although Irvine is well-known as a planned community with villages allowing for a comfortable suburban lifestyle, it nonetheless functions as a large job center to a degree that might surprise many people. Since 1980, it has retained the highest jobs/workers ratio in the Southern California region while also experiencing the fastest job growth in professional service industries throughout the region, particularly in computing and engineering occupations. As a consequence, the city has a much higher composition of high income jobs compared to the region—about 70% to 90% more than the region overall—and therefore fewer low and average income jobs. We explore how Irvine has grown and transformed over the last 50 years with a focus on the number and types of jobs that are located in the city. We also describe where the workers in these jobs are coming from.
- Irvine at 50: The Changing Landscape of Housing, Commuting, and Amenities. This MFI report presents how Irvine has matured and transformed over the last several decades. The present report pays close attention to the city’s residents and their living environment (or the quality-of-life metrics). In Chapter 2, we explore the growth of Irvine’s boundaries and its villages. In Chapter 3 we describe the types of housing in Irvine, whether detached single family units, condominiums and townhomes, or various sized apartment complexes. Given these housing patterns, and the presence of so many jobs in Irvine, in Chapter 4 we explore the commuting patterns of residents in the city—both based on distance and time, as well as mode of commute—and compare them to the rest of the region. A feature of Irvine is the presence of many parks along with the small commercial districts in the Village model that the city has followed, and therefore in Chapter 5 we ask whether Irvine residents indeed live closer to parks and commercial areas compared to residents in the rest of the region. Chapter 6 describes the demographic changes that have occurred within the neighborhoods of Irvine over its history. Finally, Chapter 7 concludes by summarizing what we have learned in this Report, and considers what the future of Irvine might look like.