California: The Exodus of the Affluent

 Don Lee at LAT: 

In 2021 and 2022, about 750,000 more people left the state than moved in, according to recently released Census Bureau data. That was about as many as the total net loss of residents for all five years before the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020.

But it’s not just the sheer numbers of people who have left. What’s different is that in each of the prior two years, more than 250,000 Californians with at least a bachelor’s degree moved out, while an average of 175,000 college graduates from other states settled in California, according to an analysis of census data by William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution.

In prior periods over the last two decades, that balance was about even or slightly in California’s favor, even though the state consistently lost many more residents overall to other states than it gained from them. The recent out-migration has been particularly pronounced among Californians with graduate and professional degrees.

California is heavily dependent on high earners to meet government fiscal needs. Tax filers in the top 1% of income, earning around $1 million and above, have typically accounted for 40% to 45% of the state’s total personal income tax revenue, said Brian Uhler, deputy legislative analyst at California’s Legislative Analyst’s Office, which estimated the $68-billion budget deficit.
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In the tax filing years 2020 and 2021, the average gross income of taxpayers who had moved from California to another state was about $137,000. That was up from $75,000 in 2015 and 2016, according to migration and personal income data from the Internal Revenue Service.

IRS and other data show that Texas has long been, by far, the top destination for Californians. And in the years 2015-16, an individual or couple who had moved from California to Texas reported an average income of $78,000, about the same as Texans who relocated to California. But by 2020-2021, California transplants in Texas reported an average income of about $137,000, while tax returns from former Texans who moved to California showed an average income of $75,000.

The income gap between those coming into California and those going out is even bigger when it comes to Florida, which, as far away as it is, has become a top five destination for emigrating Californians. Statistics show more older Californians are likely to move there. Florida, like Texas and Nevada and Tennessee, another more recent hot spot for Californians, doesn’t have a personal income tax.

In California, the top tax rate for personal income is 12.3%.

California Update: Losing Population, Flunking Computer Science

Erin Davis at Axios:

New data from the U.S. Census shows that around 820,000 people moved out of California and 550,000 out of New York in 2022. They join more than 8 million Americans who moved states in 2022.

Why it matters: The rising cost of living is pushing people out of expensive coastal areas, and the trend doesn't look likely to change in coming years: four in ten Californians and and three in ten New Yorkers say they're considering moving out of state.

• Many of those moving are headed to Florida or Texas, the states with the largest influxes in 2022.
• But Texans worried about the "California-ing" of their state may not need to worry: Democrats are much more likely to move to blue states, while Republicans move to red states.

Carolyn Jones at CalMatters:

Five years ago, California embarked on an ambitious plan to bring computer science to all K-12 students, bolstering the state economy and opening doors to promising careers — especially for low-income students and students of color.

But a lack of qualified teachers has stalled these efforts, and left California — a global hub for the technological industry — ranked near the bottom of states nationally in the percentage of high schools offering computer science classes.

“I truly believe that California’s future is dependent on preparing students for the tech-driven global economy. You see where the world is going, and it’s urgent that we make this happen,” said Allison Scott, chief executive officer of the Kapor Foundation, an Oakland-based organization that advocates for equity in the technology sector.

Scott was among those at a conference in Oakland this week aimed at expanding computer science education nationally. While some states — such as Arkansas, Maryland and South Carolina — are well on their way to offering computer science to all students, California lags far behind. According to a 2022 report by Code.org, only 40% of California high schools offer computer science classes, well below the national average of 53%.

California’s low-income students, rural students and students of color were significantly less likely to have access to computer science classes, putting them at a disadvantage in the job market, according to a 2021 report by the Kapor Center and Computer Science for California.

 

Sticky States

Texas natives likeliest to ‘stick’ around, pointing to state’s economic health

Ana Pranger, Pia Orrenius and Madeline Zavodny

Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas August 29, 2023

The share of people born in a state and who stay there can provide an important measure of its attractiveness to workers. The stickiness of native residents is also key to maintaining a stable (or growing) population and workforce, which is vital to economic growth.

To figure out which states are best at retaining their native residents, we calculated the stickiness of each state. Using American Community Survey (ACS) data, we estimated the share of people born in each state who still lived in that state as of the 2021 survey (Chart 1).

Downloadable chart | Chart data

Texas is the stickiest state in the country by far, with approximately 82 percent of native Texans still living here in 2021. Other sticky states include North Carolina (75.5 percent), Georgia (74.2 percent), California (73.0 percent) and Utah (72.9 percent).

At the other end of the spectrum, Wyoming is the least-sticky state, with only 45.2 percent of natives remaining there. North Dakota and Alaska were the only other states with less than half their native population staying there (48.6 percent and 48.7 percent, respectively). Rhode Island (55.2 percent) and South Dakota (54.2 percent) round out the bottom five.

Notably, the least-sticky states tend to see high levels of outmigration of everyone—not just their native residents (Chart 2).Downloadable chart | Chart data

Overall outmigration numbers track everyone moving from one state to another state, including both people born there and those who moved there before leaving, making them a better indicator of population flows.

In addition to being the stickiest state, Texas had the lowest outmigration rate in 2021, followed by Maine and Michigan. Wyoming, Alaska and Hawaii experienced the highest outmigration rates.

New York and California are Losing Affluent Taxpayers

 Justin Fox at Bloomberg:

New York has been losing people to other states for a while. But something new happened during the pandemioc: The people who left had higher incomes than those who stayed behind — much higher.

The 2020-21 numbers here were released in late April by the Internal Revenue Service. They sort taxpayers by whether and where they moved between filing their taxes in 2020 and filing them in 2021; the adjusted gross incomes are for the 2020 tax year. It has been two years since May 17, 2021 — that year’s belated income tax filing deadline — and a lot has changed. But New York has continued to lose population, and if the trend depicted above were to continue, even in less extreme form, it would be disastrous for the finances of a state that relies on income taxes paid by those making $200,000 or more a year for almost half its revenue. (That is, before the pandemic in 2019, personal income taxes accounted for 65% of state revenue, and those making $200,000 or more paid 71% of the income taxes.)

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The role of taxes in driving interstate migration is often exaggerated, but it’s not nothing. In a couple of recent papers, Joshua Rauh of the Stanford Graduate School of Business has shown that the percentage of very-high-income taxpayers leaving California jumped in the wake of one, a 2013 increase in the state’s top income tax rate, two, the 2017 Tax Cuts and Job Act’s curtailing of state and local tax deductions and three, the pandemic. Still, that’s not many people and for years those leaving California and New York have been mainly lower— and middle-income residents for whom expensive housing and other cost-of-living issues probably played a bigger role than tax rates per se.

In New York, the initial pandemic exodus was led by those who could afford to leave quickly and could work remotely. The composition seems to have shifted since then, with affluent Manhattan gaining population from mid-2021 to mid-2022, according to Census Bureau estimates, and the state’s poorest county, the Bronx, losing the biggest percentage of population. (The recent New York Times analysis showing an accelerating exodus of college graduates from the New York City metro area relies on different Census numbers that aren’t available yet for 2022.) New York has been finding all sorts of different ways to drive away all sorts of different people — and it looks as if that’s about to start seriously hampering the state’s ability to pay its bills.

Census: Aging America

 From the Census Bureau:

Today, the U.S. Census Bureau released the 2020 Census Demographic Profile and Demographic and Housing Characteristics File (DHC). These products provide the next round of data available from the 2020 Census, adding more detail to the population counts and basic demographic and housing statistics previously released for the purposes of congressional apportionment and legislative redistricting.

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• The 2020 Census shows the following about the nation’s age and sex composition: Between 2010 and 2020, median age in the U.S. grew older due to an increase in the older population.In 2020, there were 55.8 million people age 65 and over in the United States (16.8% of the total population), up 38.6% from 40.3 million in 2010. This growth primarily reflected the aging baby boom cohort.
• Centenarians grew 50% since 2010, the fastest recent census-to-census percent change for that age group

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• In 1970, after all the Baby Boomers (1946-1964) had been born, half of the population was younger than 28.1 years old. By 2020, the median age was 38.8, an increase of more than 10 years over the past five decades.In 2020, the population age 45 and over accounted for 42% of the total population, up from 27% in 1940, the census before the Baby Boom began.
• The share of the population age 65 and over more than doubled between 1940 and 2020, from less than 7% to nearly 17%.
• In 2020, there were over 73.1 million children under age 18 (22.1% of the total U.S. population), down 1.4% from 74.2 million in 2010. The biggest decline was among the under-5 age group, whose share of the population dropped by 8.9% or 1.8 million. This finding is consistent with the decline in the total number of births and the birth rate for the United States since 2015.
• Among the states in 2020:Fourteen states had a median age over 40, twice as many as in 2010. Twenty-five states had higher shares of population age 65 and older than Florida had in 2010 (17.3%), when it had the highest share of any state. In 2020, Maine had the highest share at 21.8%, followed by Florida (21.2%) and Vermont (20.6%).
• Utah and Maine were the youngest and oldest states (as they were in 2010). Nearly half of Utah’s population was under age 31 while more than half of Maine’s population was over age 45.

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The public can explore these age and sex statistics in two data visualizations:
Exploring Age Groups in the 2020 Census. This interactive map shows certain measures — percent of population, percent change from 2010, percent female and racial and ethnic diversity index and prevalence — for a variety of age groups for the nation, states, counties and census tracts. The visualization also provides ranking lists of the measures.
How Has Our Nation's Population Changed? This interactive visualization shows population pyramids and ranked age and sex measures for the total population, as well as race and Hispanic origin groups, for the nation, states, metropolitan areas, micropolitan areas and counties in 2020, 2010 and 2000.

A series of downloadable ranking tables related to each visualization is also available.

More information about age and sex is also available in the America Counts stories: An Aging U.S. Population With Fewer Children in 2020 and 2020 Census: 1 in 6 People in the United States Were 65 and Over, and two briefs: Age and Sex Composition: 2020 and The Older Population: 2020.

Enlarging the House: Practical Considerations

Danielle Allen at WP:

A system requiring one person to represent the interests of almost 1 million people would have troubled Washington — as it should us. But let’s set his ratio aside for a moment. In a previous column, I argued for a bill put forward by Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) that would bring us to 585 seats. And after that initial step up, we could transition to “a cube root rule” — pegging the number of House members to the cube root of the national population — for growth in subsequent census years. In this way, the size of the House would increase continually with the population but at a steady and manageable rate. Based on population projections, this would put us on track for a Congress that would grow from 435 to 585 to 736 over the next 40 years.

But what would happen to the Capitol? Wouldn’t we need a new building? Doesn’t that make this impossible?

The Capitol has already undergone multiple extensions. In 1850, growth in membership led to a major renovation project. By 1869, the work delivered the Capitol that we know now. But even after the Capitol was complete that year, the House continued to grow. In the 1870s, it grew from 243 to 293 members, continuing up to the current 435, established in 1929.

And here’s the extraordinary thing: It still has room for more growth — quite a bit of it.

I engaged architect Michael Murphy to explore what is possible. Murphy is a visionary designer committed to architecture for the public good. He designed Bryan Stevenson’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice — the memorial for lynching and racial violence victims, as it’s better known — in Montgomery, Ala.

Murphy and his team took the current dimensions of the House and halls, shown in this image, as a starting point.

The chamber now comfortably accommodates about 450 people on the floor, along with more than 400 in the gallery on the second level.

The team’s first idea was to create a new elevated section that could easily allow seating for up to 904 members.

Options for Enlarging the House

At WP, Danielle Allen writes that we need smaller House districts.

But how big should the House be? That is also to ask how small should a district be. And based on what math? And on what principle of growth?

Scholars and advocates have been working on this question for decades. There are seven basic options, all compiled in a report on enlarging the House by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences commission on the state of our democracy, which I co-chaired. Those options would increase the size of Congress from 435 to between 572 to 9,400. They are as follows:

The Wyoming Rule. Peg the size of a district to the population of the least-populous state, which is currently Wyoming (with about 580,000 people). That’s 180,000 fewer constituents than today’s average of 762,000 — and would yield a House of 572 members. The difficulty with this rule, though, is that it could cause the number of members to fluctuate dramatically depending on the growth patterns of the smallest states. One way to address that would be to pick the current number (580,000) as a stable ratio going forward. But that would lead to speedy growth in the size of the House over time.

The Deferred Maintenance Rule. When the size of the House was capped in 1929, new seats could shift to growing areas only by taking them away from other areas. The number of seats lost by particular states since 1929 through this method is 149. If we restored those seats and added one more to keep the total an odd number, then reallocated to achieve even districts, we would have a new base of 585 seats. This method is clean and yields districts slightly smaller than the current population of Wyoming. However, we would still need to figure out a principle of growth under this method. Would we take district sizes after such a reform as the standard ratio, and simply let the House grow in relation to it? This, too, would result in relatively fast growth.

The Cube Root Law. This method was developed to ensure that growth is slow and steady. Instead of picking a fixed number of House seats and establishing it as the target ratio for constituents to representatives, we would use the cube root of the national population to establish the number of legislators, then apportion across the states in proportion to state populations. Whenever the national population grows, so too would the number of representatives, but slowly compared with the other options. At our current population, this rule would give us 692 seats.

Here is a chart laying out the number of representatives you would have over time on three different growth principles, given population increases:

California Is Losing Affluent Residents

Many posts have discussed California's many problems.

Hans Johnson and Eric McGhee at PPIC:

During the height of the pandemic, the flows out of the state became so large that almost every demographic and socioeconomic group has experienced net losses. For example, California used to gain college graduates even as it lost less educated adults. But in the last couple of years, the state has started losing college graduates as well, quite markedly—albeit still not to the same extent as less educated adults. Even among young college graduates in their 20s, a group that California has disproportionately attracted in the past, the flows out of the state have been about the same as the flows into the state.

Perhaps most striking, California is now losing higher-income households as well as middle- and lower-income households. During the pandemic, the number of higher-income households moving to California declined a bit, but the number leaving the state increased dramatically (from less than 150,000 in 2019 to almost 220,000 by 2021).

The losses of college graduates and higher-income households are likely related to the ability of many highly educated and highly paid workers to work from home. The Census Bureau’s Household Pulse surveys show that about two-thirds of the almost three million Californians who telework full-time (five or more days per week) have at least a bachelor’s degree. Among recent higher-income Californians leaving the state, over half (53%) report working from home.

Shrinkage in California

Ben Christopher at CalMatter:

In 2021, it was big news — the “California exodus.” Now, it just looks like the new trend: California’s population is still shrinking.

According to the latest population estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau, California’s total population declined by more than 500,000 between April 2020 and July 2022.

Put another way, 1 out of 100 people living in California at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic had, two years later, left the state — either by U-Haul or by hearse.

Where’d they all go? 

• Some died, though there were far more births;
• Some left the country, though on net, more immigrants arrived;
• The major driving factor: Californians departing for other states.

Just counting out-of-staters coming in and Californians leaving, the state’s population saw a 871,127 net decline. If you’re wondering why the state lost a congressional seat at the beginning of this decade, this is why.

This isn’t a national problem. It’s a California, New York, Illinois and Louisiana problem. California is one of only 18 states that saw its numbers decline and had the fourth biggest drop as a share of its population.

USA Grows, California and Illinois Shrink

From the Census Bureau:

After a historically low rate of change between 2020 and 2021, the U.S. resident population increased by 0.4%, or 1,256,003, to 333,287,557 in 2022, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Vintage 2022 national and state population estimates and components of change released today.

Net international migration — the number of people moving in and out of the country — added 1,010,923 people between 2021 and 2022 and was the primary driver of growth. This represents 168.8% growth over 2021 totals of 376,029 – an indication that migration patterns are returning to pre-pandemic levels. Positive natural change (births minus deaths) increased the population by 245,080.

“There was a sizeable uptick in population growth last year compared to the prior year’s historically low increase,” said Kristie Wilder, a demographer in the Population Division at the Census Bureau. “A rebound in net international migration, coupled with the largest year-over-year increase in total births since 2007, is behind this increase.”
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Increasing by 470,708 people since July 2021, Texas was the largest-gaining state in the nation, reaching a total population of 30,029,572. By crossing the 30-million-population threshold this past year, Texas joins California as the only states with a resident population above 30 million. Growth in Texas last year was fueled by gains from all three components: net domestic migration (230,961), net international migration (118,614), and natural increase (118,159).

Florida was the fastest-growing state in 2022, with an annual population increase of 1.9%, resulting in a total resident population of 22,244,823.

“While Florida has often been among the largest-gaining states,” Wilder noted, “this was the first time since 1957 that Florida has been the state with the largest percent increase in population.”

It was also the second largest-gaining state behind Texas, with an increase of 416,754 residents. Net migration was the largest contributing component of change to Florida’s growth, adding 444,484 residents. New York had the largest annual numeric and percent population decline, decreasing by 180,341 (-0.9%). Net domestic migration (-299,557) was the largest contributing component to the state’s population decline.

Eighteen states experienced a population decline in 2022, compared to 15 and DC the prior year. California, with a population of 39,029,342, and Illinois, with a population of 12,582,032, also had six-figure decreases in resident population. Both states’ declining populations were largely due to net domestic outmigration, totaling 343,230 and 141,656, respectively.

Shrinkage: Natural Decrease in Population

From the Census:

More than 73% (2,297) of U.S. counties experienced natural decrease in 2021, up from 45.5% in 2019 and 55.5% in 2020, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Vintage 2021 estimates of population and components of change released today. Natural decrease occurs when there are more deaths than births in a population over a given time period. In 2021, fewer births, an aging population and increased mortality – intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic--contributed to a rise in natural decrease. The statistics released today include population estimates and components of change for the nation’s 384 metropolitan statistical areas, 543 micropolitan statistical areas and 3,143 counties.

In 2021, all counties in Delaware, Maine, New Hampshire and Rhode Island experienced natural decrease. Some counties also experienced population declines attributable to migration. Counties with net international migration loss (more people moving out of than into the country), were most frequently found in California (41.4%), Oregon (27.8%) and Mississippi (23.2%). States with the highest percentages of counties with net domestic migration loss (people moving from one area to another within the United States) were Alaska (80.0%), Louisiana (71.9%) and Illinois (65.7%).

Most of the nation’s counties – 2,063 or 65.6% -- experienced positive domestic migration overall from 2020 to 2021. Arizona’s Maricopa County gained the most (46,866) residents from domestic migration, followed by Riverside County, California (31,251), and Collin County, Texas (30,191). Los Angeles County, California, experienced the greatest net domestic migration loss (179,757 residents), followed by New York County, New York (113,642).

Slowest Population Growth Since the Founding

From the Census Bureau:

According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Vintage 2021 national and state population estimates and components of change released today, the population of the United States grew in the past year by 392,665, or 0.1%, the lowest rate since the nation’s founding. The slow rate of growth can be attributed to decreased net international migration, decreased fertility, and increased mortality due in part to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Population growth has been slowing for years because of lower birth rates and decreasing net international migration, all while mortality rates are rising due to the aging of the nation’s population,” said Kristie Wilder, a demographer in the Population Division at the Census Bureau. “Now, with the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, this combination has resulted in a historically slow pace of growth.”

Since April 1, 2020 (Census Day), the nation’s population increased from 331,449,281 to 331,893,745, a gain of 444,464, or 0.13%.

Between July 1, 2020, and July 1, 2021, the nation’s growth was due to natural increase (148,043), which is the number of excess births over deaths, and net international migration (244,622). This is the first time that net international migration (the difference between the number of people moving into the country and out of the country) has exceeded natural increase for a given year.

The voting-age resident population, adults age 18 and over, grew to 258.3 million, comprising 77.8% of the population in 2021.

The South, with a population of 127,225,329, was the most populous of the four regions (encompassing 38.3% of the total national population) and was the only region that had positive net domestic migration of 657,682 (the movement of people from one area to another within the United States) between 2020 and 2021. The Northeast region, the least populous of the four regions with a population of 57,159,838 in 2021, experienced a population decrease of -365,795 residents due to natural decrease (-31,052) and negative net domestic migration (-389,638).

The West saw a gain in population (35,868) despite losing residents via negative net domestic migration (-144,941). Growth in the West was due to natural increase (143,082) and positive net international migration (38,347).

Between 2020 and 2021, 33 states saw population increases and 17 states and the District of Columbia lost population, 11 of which had losses of over 10,000 people. This is a historically large number of states to lose population in year.

Also released today were national- and state-level estimates of the components of population change, which include tables on births, deaths and migration.

Black Population Outflow from Big Cities

Shia Kappos and colleagues at Politico:

Chicago — and neighborhoods like Englewood — offer perhaps the most extreme example of a demographic upheaval reshaping power in cities across the country. The 2020 census shows Black Americans moving, in huge numbers, out of their longtime homes in Northern and Western cities, and resettling in smaller cities, the suburbs and — in a twist on the Great Migration of the 20th century — the South. Nine of 10 of the cities with the largest numbers of African Americans saw significant declines in their Black populations over the past 20 years, according to census data compiled by POLITICO.

In sheer numbers, Chicago’s outflow has been particularly dramatic. In 1980, about 40 percent of the city’s total population was Black — one of the country’s most formidable concentrations of Black business and political power. Since then, that number has dropped to just under 29 percent. Only Detroit, a city with its share of troubles, has seen a bigger drop in Black residents.

Birth Dearth

 

 Janet Adamy and Anthony DeBarros at WSJ:

America’s weak population growth, already held back by a decadelong fertility slump, is dropping closer to zero because of the Covid-19 pandemic.

In half of all states last year, more people died than were born, up from five states in 2019. Early estimates show the total U.S. population grew 0.35% for the year ended July 1, 2020, the lowest ever documented, and growth is expected to remain near flat this year.

Some demographers cite an outside chance the population could shrink for the first time on record. Population growth is an important influence on the size of the labor market and a country’s fiscal and economic strength.

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The phenomenon is most acute in rural America, where small towns and lightly populated counties often lack the jobs, housing and child-care options young families need. The combination of aging residents and fewer young people in such counties has helped push deaths higher on average than births for the past eight years, according to the estimates.

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Historically, nearly half of the country’s economic growth has been driven by the expansion of the working-age population, including immigrants, said Neil Howe, an economist, demographer and managing director at Hedgeye Risk Management, an investor-oriented research company. Recent federal-budget projections suggest the potential labor-force growth rate will hover just above zero for years to come, down from a range of 2.5% starting in the mid-1970s to 0.5% from 2008 through last year.

The shifts will make the U.S. more reliant on immigration to grow the workforce, economists say, although that faces its own pressures. Mexico’s fertility rate has steadily declined, while China and India—two other top suppliers of immigrants to the U.S.—face talent shortages of their own, along with China’s own flattening population growth.

Counting Students and Prisoners

 Paul Mitchell at The Redistricting Report notes that the Census Bureau needed to count college students just as the pandemic emptied campuses.

It appeared to be a problem, but the Census Bureau assured college students they’d be all counted together at their respective campuses through a process called Group Quarters whereby the bureau receives manual tallies of the populations of college dormitories, nursing homes, and prisons based on the records kept for those facilities instead of direct interviews with the census enumerators or self-responses. You can really geek out on how this process is performed by reading the Census Bureau’s blogpost about it.

And for many this was confusing. What if a student was living off campus, not in the dorms? Would they be counted in the group-quarters or would they have to report themselves as living in their off-campus apartment? What if their parents already put them on their census form – would they be in trouble if they got double-counted? This was something that colleges were email blasting students about as they wanted them to report as living in their college community.

The census has a process for de-duplicating in a case where someone is accidentally, or purposefully reported being in two places at once. They also have processes for imputing populations where there was no reporting at all – which could have been significant in a once-bustling college town that turned into a ghost town overnight.

And that’s where the Republican lawsuit comes in. The GOP harbors some doubt about how those headcounts were arrived at and they’re suing to find out exactly how the Census arrived at the numbers of students who will be counted at college campuses, which often carry significant heft in the drawing of electoral districts.

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Similarly, in the increasing number of states like California that are confronting the “prison gerrymander,” Group Quarters plays a part as well. These states are planning to count prison inmates in the communities they resided in at the time of arrest instead of where they were incarcerated on April 1. For California, that’s an estimated 116,000 people statewide that would be removed from the headcounts in the largely rural communities in the Central Valley and desert communities, depleting them of that redistricting currency in the upcoming redraw. A higher prison imputation by the Census Bureau in Kings County’s prison facilities, for example, means that county will have that many more individuals removed from their population base in the maps drawn for Congress, Assembly, and Senate.

California Shrinking

 From the California Department of Finance:

California’s population dipped by 182,083 residents last year, bringing the state’s total to 39,466,855 people as of January 1, 2021, according to new population estimates and housing data released today by the California Department of Finance. California’s negative growth rate of -0.46 percent represents the first 12-month decline since state population estimates have been recorded. Three principal factors contributed in this year-overyear population decrease: 

• Continuing declines in natural increase – births minus non-COVID-19 deaths (loss of 24,000)  
• Continuing declines in foreign immigration – accelerated in recent years by federal policy (loss of 100,000)  
• Deaths in 2020 separately associated with the COVID-19 pandemic (loss of 51,000)

In recent years, the slowdown in natural increase – a nationwide trend affecting California more than other states – has contributed to the state’s population growth slowing and plateauing. The addition of 2020’s COVID-19-related deaths, combined with immigration restrictions in the past year, tipped population change to an annual loss.

Hans Johnson at PPIC:

People who move to California are different from those who move out. In general, those who move here are more likely to be working age, to be employed, and to earn high wages—and are less likely to be in poverty—than those who move away.

Those who move to California also tend to have higher education levels than those who move out—an especially important factor given the state’s strong need for college graduates. Notably, this gain in educated residents is concentrated among young college graduates (generally, adults in their 20s) looking for opportunities as they start their careers.

Also of note: people who move to California have higher incomes than those who move away. Some have argued that the opposite is taking place—that California’s relatively progressive and high personal income tax rates drive out higher-income residents. But the fact is that California has been losing lower- and middle-income residents to other states for some time while continuing to gain higher-income adults. In the past five years the flow of middle-income residents out of the state has accelerated.

Most people who move across state lines do so for economic or family reasons. The vast majority of adults who left California in the 2010s cited jobs (49%), housing (23%), or family (20%) as the primary reason (according to the Current Population Survey). The PPIC Statewide Survey finds that one-third of Californians have seriously considered leaving the state because of housing costs.