Why Is California's Population Falling? Housing Costs

"34% of Californians say they are considering moving out of the state due to housing costs," according to statistics from a new report from the Public Policy Institute of California. It's a nonprofit think tank founded in 1994 "to inform and improve public policy in California through independent, objective, nonpartisan research." (Founded with a grant from Bill Hewlett of Hewlett-Packard, it also gets funding from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation). The report's startling conclusion? "After a century of explosive growth, California is likely to become a slow-growing state." After the year 2030 California's seniors (older than 65) are expected to outnumber its children. "In 2020, California had nearly four residents ages 18-64 for every adult 65 and older. This ratio is expected to drop to 2.8 by 2030 and 2.2 by 2060, if current trends continue." Births are outpacing deaths by over 106,000 people a year. (Even during the pandemic California had a lower COVID mortality rate than most states.) And international immigration remained a net positive with a 90,000-person increase in 2022. Yet all of this was offset in 2022 by a net loss of 407,000 people migrating out of the state. California already has a population of 39 million - but the full report cites July 2023 projections from the state's Department of Finance that now "suggest that the state population will plateau between 39 and 40 million residents in the long term." The caption on one graph notes that California "is losing households at all income levels."[W]hile the majority of domestic outmigrants are lower- and middle-income, an increasing proportion of higher-income Californians are also exiting the state. The "new normal" of remote work in many white-collar professions has enabled some higher-income workers to move. Politics might also play a role, as conservatives are much more likely than liberals to say they have considered leaving the state. One other factor:Declining birth and fertility rates are a nationwide, even a global, phenomenon as economic and social events have changed the status of women and their access to educational and job opportunities. Total fertility rates - the number of births the average woman will have in her lifetime - have fallen across the U.S. in recent decades. No state has a rate at or above 2.1, the level necessary to maintain a population's current size (not taking immigration and migration into account), but California's fertility rate has fallen faster than most. In 2008 its rate was above the national average (2.15); by 2020 it fell to the seventh-lowest (1.52). The declining birth rate among young adults in their 20s is the biggest driver of the fertility rate decline. One major factor is that 20-somethings are now less likely to get married, which can affect decisions to have children... In the past, higher birth rates among immigrants also helped offset lower birth rates among US-born Californians, though more recently birth rates among immigrants have declined, reflecting patterns in sending countries.

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