Where Is California's Population Really Declining?
- William Fulton
- May 17, 2021
- 4 min read
Updated: 6 days ago
So, it’s official: California is losing population. According to the state Department of Finance, the state lost almost 200,000 people in 2020, the year that COVID caused home prices to rise dramatically and people to flee large cities. This is the first time in the modern history of California – some 170-plus years – that the population has gone down. But a close examination of the trends reveal that the population isn’t going down everywhere. It’s only going down in expensive coastal areas, where pretty much any house will now cost you at least $1 million. The population growth is continuing at more or less the same pace in inland areas, though even there it did dip a bit in 2020. As this column has previously reported, California’s population growth continued to be reasonably healthy until 2017, when it started to flatline for the first time ever. Population growth has been plummeting ever since and finally went negative last year. So it makes sense to look at recent population trends in five-year increments: What happened in 2016-2021 compared to 2011-2016? What we see is a pretty clear trend that growth has been wiped out in coastal areas but not in inland areas. Take a look at the first chart, which compares raw population growth in coastal and inland counties during these two periods. Between 2011 and 2016, the coastal counties grew by 1 million people, while the inland counties grew by about a half-million. Now look at 2016-2021: The coastal counties lost population, while the inland counties continue to grow by … about a half-million people. Incidentally, even though the rate (i.e. percentage) of inland population growth has been much faster than coastal population growth for decades, this is the first time that the raw number has been higher in the inland areas than in the coastal areas. That alone may be the most important takeaway from DOF’s new numbers. But what’s happening within each metropolitan area? Is it true that people are fleeing the Bay Area in enormous numbers, while other regions are doing okay, as the popular press would have it? Well, not exactly. Take a look at the second chart, which depicts population growth at the metropolitan region level for the same two periods. What is shows is pretty startling: The population of the three coastal Southern California counties (Ventura, Los Angeles, and Orange) dropped dramatically between 2016 and 2021, while Central Coast counties dropped slightly – and Bay Area population hung in there and even grew slightly. (It is true that the Bay Area’s population dipped slightly in 2020, but it’s still higher than it was in 2016 – which is not true of coastal Southern California.) Meanwhile, population in the Sacramento region, the Central Valley, and the Inland Empire all went up between 2016 and 2021 – and, indeed, all three inland regions gained population even in 2020. Now let’s take this analysis one step further down, to the county level. And here is where the difference becomes truly startling: After adding almost 300,000 people in the first half of the decade, Los Angeles County alone lost more than 100,000 in the second half of the 2010s and is settling in at about 10 million. Meanwhile, both San Francisco and Santa Clara counties experienced population gains during this period, though they were much smaller than the gains experienced in 2011-2016. Curiously, Contra Costa County – which you’d think would gain population in a COVID rush from San Francisco to the suburbs – also lost a lot of population in the second half of the decade. And though it’s not depicted on the chart, all of Contra Costa’s population decline occurred during 2020 – while San Francisco and Santa Clara experienced miniscule population drops. It’s worth noting that the three large counties depicted on this chart – Riverside, Sacramento, and Fresno – all experienced more or less the same raw population growth in the second half of the decade as they did in the first (and in fact they all added population in 2020). Meanwhile, El Dorado County – the mountainous county east of Sacramento – added population faster, in percentage terms, than the larger inland counties.’ So, overall, we see two trends – one that’s not surprising and one that is. It’s not the least bit surprising that inland areas have held their population growth while coastal areas have declined. After all, the inland areas are just about the only place in the state where middle-class families can afford to buy a house these days. But it is somewhat surprising, given all the publicity about the urban exodus from San Francisco, to see that the Bay Area’s population is holding steady while L.A. County’s declines. You’d think it would be the other way around, given the Bay Area’s higher housing prices, the presence of many dense neighborhoods, and the publicity surrounding remote work in the tech industry. Yet that’s not the case. As economic geographer Michael Storper made abundantly clear in his book The Rise and Fall of Urban Economies, the Bay Area has done a much better job of managing to keep its economy afloat in a high-cost environment than Los Angeles. In many ways, L.A. these days has the worst of both worlds: It’s a low-wage, high-cost city – and the Bay Area, despite all of its inequities, isn’t quite in the same boat. It’s impossible, of course, to know whether the state’s current population decline will continue. Fertility and immigration may come back and the state may start growing again. But the internal trends are likely to continue: The bulk of the population growth will be in the inland areas, and the Bay Area is better positioned to weather this storm that L.A.
