Van Nuys Census Data: Trying to understand the numbers

Derek Ortega
3 min readSep 24, 2021

Van Nuys is one of the rural areas in all of Los Angeles, county. But how in-depth are we with Van Nuys?

We speculate that we know everything about our section, including race, the prices of homes, and how many people live in the household. Do we know the knit and gritty of the statistics and essential elements? I made use of this website, https://censusreporter.org/, to gain knowledge of the community.

Image from censusreporter.org

As I brought up before, Van Nuys is one of the rural areas within Los Angeles county. Within the current data, 54,890 people are living in the Valley at this moment. I believe that these numbers will at some point go down because it’s not a safe area to live in, and there is no appeal to live here at all. Living in the area, it’s mainly low-tier apartments.

Image from censusreporter.org

Van Nuys is somewhat affordable if you live paycheck to paycheck; the median household income is $59,472. The average price for a house is around $500k, which is exceptionally unaffordable residing in Van Nuys. People can’t buy nice things for themselves because it mainly goes to rent and utilities. I don’t know a single person who that kind of money to live here, let alone afford it. I believe people leave California because it’s too high in prices and go to other states to live a much better and affordable price.

the image about race from censusreporter.org

While looking at this information, I wasn’t dumbfounded at all. You can see Hispanics as the bulk all over the Valley. You can see them from all over the places from supermarkets, schools, churches, and anywhere you go. I didn’t know that only 4% of black people live here upon looking at the data. In contrast, white people make 26% of the other racial groups in Van Nuys.

Information on place of births from censusreporter.org

The information here doesn’t surprise me that Latin America’s foreign-born population is higher than in Asia. The numbers for Latin America are 68%, and Asia is 25%. The United States of America is such a melting pot of different cultures, religions, and backgrounds. But then again, Hispanics or Latinos, whatever we want to call ourselves, make up the majority here with these statistics.

Stats for language from censusreporter.org

It’s not shocking to see that Spanish spoken at home for children ages 5–17 is 64% high up because Spanish might be their first language when they are small. For parents, it becomes easier to teach and help them learn quicker rather than English. Some parents probably don’t know English. But drastically, it changes for adults 18+ from 47% it’s a massive 17% drop because now that they are older and speak another language, they often don’t want to talk to Spanish, maybe very little now.

Image from ABC7.

We are still in a pandemic, but things have seemed to have gotten better from the Covid-19 cases from last year to 2021. In Van Nuys, the amount of the number of patients is around 16,584. But some people are vaccinated and are more likely to be okay and survive the infection. At the same time, some others aren’t vaccinated because they choose not to.

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Derek Ortega
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CSUN Journalism Student, Yeezy Collector, Charles Bukowski fan boy, and X-Files Agent :D