Here’s One Area of California Where the Population Is Actually Growing

• In recent years, California has seen an exodus of residents, driven mostly by a lack of affordability.
• But the Central Valley is booming, making it one of the few areas of the state experiencing sustained growth.
• San Joaquin County has attracted the interest of Bay Area residents in search of cheaper housing.

For generations, the appeal of California living was buoyed by the state’s climate, its economic strength, and an attraction to the West, which made the Golden State the most populous state in the country.

But the 2020 Census revealed a stunning statistic: California’s population growth had slowed in the prior decade, which resulted in the state’s first-ever loss of a congressional district.

Many of those residents left populous centers like Los Angeles and San Francisco because of their skyrocketing housing costs, which strained working- and middle-class families.

But in California’s Central Valley, the population is booming, driven by higher birth rates and substantial migration from more expensive coastal counties, according to The Economist.

According to estimates from the California Department of Finance, the Central Valley — the heart of the state’s agricultural industry — and other inland counties are projected to have the fastest population growth in the Golden State through 2060.

Per The Economist, more San Francisco residents migrated to nearby Alameda County — home of Berkeley and Oakland — than any other destination during the first year of the coronavirus pandemic. And, during that same time period, nearly a quarter of onetime Alameda residents found new homes in two neighboring counties further away from the coast.

The phenomenon is not limited to the Bay Area.

In Southern California, roughly a quarter of transplants from Los Angeles County moved to nearby Riverside and San Bernardino counties — in the region known as the Inland Empire — during the first year of the pandemic.

In Northern California’s Central Valley, San Joaquin County is poised to become a primary beneficiary of this inward migration. The state is projecting that the Northern California county will have almost 1 million residents by 2060, up from its current population of about 780,000 residents.

What’s driving the boom in San Joaquin? The construction of housing, which has drawn swaths of Bay Area residents looking for a more affordable place to live.

While some conservatives have blamed the overall population slowdown as a result of California’s liberal-leaning politics, the numbers show that while hundreds of thousands of residents are actually leaving the Golden State, they are driven by the high cost of living. And a sizable number of residents aren’t actually leaving the state at all.