California’s population declines for first time

One county in Bay Area gained — Contra Costa

California’s population shrunk in 2020 for the first time in more than a century, a stunning turnabout emerging not long after population shifts cost the largest state in the nation a seat in Congress.

The Golden State lost 182,083 residents last year — a 0.46% decline — according to new population estimates released Friday by the California Department of Finance, which analyzed data going back to 1900. The state had 39,466,855 residents as of Jan. 1.

The decline is significant, but don’t call it “an apocalyptic exodus from California,” cautioned department spokesman H.D Palmer. “The data do not bear that out.”

Instead, the department attributed the drop in part to

the COVID-19 pandemic, which last year resulted in about 51,000 more deaths than the average in recent years. On top of that, 24,000 more people died from non-COVID-19 causes than were born in California, where birth rates have been declining for years. Federal policies restricting immigration also cost the state about 100,000 residents, the department said.

The loss of international immigration exacerbated years of negative domestic migration, as more U.S. residents continue to move out of California than move in.

But the declines aren’t expected to last.

“As more people are getting shots in their arms and the pandemic begins to recede, we hope, we expect, deaths associated with COVID to go down,” said Palmer. “Our demographers anticipate we will be back to a period of population growth — not booming growth, to be sure, but a return to slight population growth.”

The population loss was felt strongly in the Bay Area, where Contra Costa was the only county to gain residents. The East Bay county added a modest 4,001 residents, a 0.3% increase. San Francisco lost almost 14,800 residents, a 1.7% decline. Lassen County had the biggest drop in the state, shedding 3.8% of its residents due largely to reductions in the state prison population. Marin, Santa Clara, San Mateo and Alameda counties also all lost population in 2020.

But the declines weren’t universal. San Benito County was the fastest growing in the state, adding about 1,050 residents, a 1.7% increase. Placer

County, home to many popular Sacramento suburbs, also saw its population rise.

The few counties that did grow provide clear data to suggest that the pandemic-driven move to remote work may be reshuffling California’s population somewhat, as families sought more space and bigger homes in areas farther from higherpriced urban areas.

“The economy isn’t going to snap back to a prepandemic, everybody back into the central office environment,” Palmer said. “That has a lot of implications for where people move to, above and beyond the issue of I can afford a better mortgage in the Central Valley than I can in parts of the Bay Area.”

Within the Bay Area, Oakland bucked the overall downward trend, adding nearly 3,200 residents. That 0.7% growth rate was the second-fastest among the state’s 10 largest cities, after Bakersfield. Santa Clara added about 3,400 people for a 2.7% growth rate — the fastest in the state among cities with at least 100,000 residents. Other fast-growing cities in the region included Morgan Hill, Mountain View, Oakley and Hercules.

Housing, the other topic explored in the report, was one of the few bright spots for California on Friday. The state built 103,073 new housing units in 2020, the first time it produced more than 100,000 units in a year since 2008. San Francisco built 4,138 multifamily housing units and Oakland 2,754, the second and third most new multifamily units in the state after Los Angeles.

“It is a move in the right direction,” Palmer said. “But we still have a ways to go to be able to have not just affordability but availability.”