One of the stereotypical images of Thanksgiving is the large extended family gathered around the dining room table. If you wanted every day to be like Thanksgiving—at least to the extent that you can find lots of people gathered around the table to eat together—where in America should you look? One likely avenue would be to find the congressional district with the largest average household size, and that’s California’s 40th district, in the close-in suburbs of Los Angeles.
California’s 40th district has 3.93 people per household, which may not seem like that much at first glance but is significantly larger than the national average of 2.65, and way more than the lowest CD, New York’s 12th district on Manhattan, which has only 1.92 people per household. The “household” that you’re envisioning might be two parents and the proverbial 2.3 kids, but keep in mind all the other different living arrangements someone passes through over their life; it also includes, for instance, young professionals living by themselves in their 20s, senior citizens living in one- or two-person households, or families with children but only one parent present. That variety of households brings the average down to between 2 and 3 overall, and below 2 in Manhattan, where there are a lot of small apartments, a lot of 20- and 30-somethings, and not a lot of kids.
If you scanned down the list of districts with the largest average households, you’d notice one major commonality: they’re predominantly districts with a large Hispanic majority. In fact, the top eight districts in terms of largest household size are Latino-majority seats in southern California; you have to drop down to the ninth spot before you find one that isn’t in California and isn’t mostly Latino (it’s New York's 5th, a black-plurality CD in Queens).
What’s behind that phenomenon is simply that Hispanic families are likelier to have more children; a Pew study from 2015 found that 51 percent of Hispanic mothers have three or more children (compared with 34 percent for white mothers). That’s already changing, though; the birth rate among Hispanics is declining faster than among other ethnicities, mirroring what has happened with many other immigrant groups; their first generations in America start out with high birth rates, and that rate gradually falls in line with the rest of the country as they integrate.
And there’s one other factor in the districts with the largest households, that you might not have noticed: it isn’t necessarily just the most Hispanic districts, but the most Hispanic districts in the suburbs. For instance, other districts near the top are California’s 46th in Orange County, and California’s 41st in Riverside County. The much more compact 34th, in downtown Los Angeles, or Illinois’s 4th district (the notorious “earmuffs” district that links two non-adjacent Hispanic neighborhoods in Chicago), aren’t near the top of the list. The smaller apartments in the latter districts place practical limits on household size; instead, the districts with the largest household size are ones with lots of single-family residences and garden-style apartments with more bedrooms.
The suburban cities of Maywood and Cudahy, which are part of the 40th, are prime examples. Despite their utter lack of New York-style high rises, they actually manage to be among the densest municipalities in the entire country, simply by packing a lot of extended families into their low-rise housing stock. Other, more middle-class cities within the 40th include Downey, a one-time manufacturing town dominated by the defense industry, and Paramount. The largest population center in the 40th, however, is East Los Angeles, which, confusingly, isn’t a part of the city of Los Angeles at all, but is a large unincorporated area next door to it.
With East Los Angeles—the traditional center of Mexican-American life in the Los Angeles area for a at least a full century—as its anchor, the 40th is the congressional district with the highest percentage of Hispanics in the country (at 88 percent). It’s also the district with the highest percentage of people who speak a language other than English at home (at 84.3 percent).
As you can imagine, the 40th, though characterized by low turnout, is an extremely blue district; Hillary Clinton got 82 percent of the vote here to Donald Trump’s 13 percent in 2016, while Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney here 82-17 in 2012. (Remarkably, this is only the fourth bluest district in the Los Angeles area; the 37th—which has both more African-Americans and more white hipsters—is tops at 86-10 in 2016.)
Lucille Roybal-Allard has represented this area in the House since 1993 (though her district was numbered the 33rd in the 1990s and the 34th in the 00s). She’s tied with New York’s Nydia Velazquez, who was also elected for the first time in 1992, as the first Democratic Latina House member (Florida Republican Ileana Ros-Lehtinen precedes them both by a few years). Her predecessor, Edward Roybal, was her father, so the district’s been in the family since 1963.
Roybal-Allard, a member of the Progressive Caucus, has had little trouble with re-election over the decades. She’s 76, though, so a retirement seems likely in coming years. One potential replacement when that happens may be state Sen. Kevin de Leon, who represents much of this same area in the state Senate and may be looking for another path upward if he doesn’t win his 2018 primary challenge to Dianne Feinstein.