More than 200,000 people left California, on net, between 2018 and 2019 to move elsewhere in the country, the Census Bureau reported Monday, making it the nation’s leader in out-migration.
California was one of only three states to have population losses greater than 100,000. The others were New York at 181,000 and Illinois at 105,000.
The net out-migration was not enough to reduce California’s total population, which stands at about 39 million, but it contributed to an overall slowdown. Last week, the state’s Finance Department reported that the population had grown by just 0.35% over the last year, the lowest since 1900.
California leaders have linked the migration to the state’s shortage of available housing. “Our failure to build enough housing is at the heart of CA’s challenges: It’s exploding housing costs; It’s fueling homelessness & poverty; It’s creating sprawl, increasing traffic, commutes & wildfire risk,” tweeted Democratic California state Sen. Scott Wiener.
Census Bureau estimates released Monday reportedly showed the country’s slowest population growth rate in a century, as demographic shifts to the south bring impending changes to the House of Representatives.
“While natural increase is the biggest contributor to the U.S. population increase, it has been slowing over the last five years,” Sandra Johnson, Census Bureau demographer, said in the release. “Natural increase, or when the number of births is greater than the number of deaths, dropped below 1 million in 2019 for the first time in decades.”
Monday’s estimates, which are close approximations of changes to state populations for the last year which ended July 1, project a seat shuffle in the House of Representatives, with Texas and six other states poised to gain seats, while California, New York, and six other states look set to lose representatives.
The upcoming reapportionment is a smaller change than after the 2010 census, when eight states gained 12 House seats from 10 states.
California, which recorded its lowest level of population growth in over a century, lost an estimated 200,000 people to domestic migration over the last year and is expected to lose a Congressional seat for the first time in its history. New York, which the Census estimates lost over 180,000 to domestic migration, will likely lose another House seat after losing two in 2010.
They may NOT be the “intended consequences”; but they are consequences nonetheless. California makes new housing construction so expensive that low income residents are at constant risk of ending up on the street at the slightest economic setback. At the same time an incredibly generous benefits regime and lax to non-existent enforcement of quality of life crimes,ie squatting, petty theft, public illegal drug consumption.. etc. et al; act as attractors to to fringe individuals across the country. They; the state and local governments, are getting EXACTLY what they’re paying for.
Unsurprisingly those same high tax rates and rapidly deteriorating quality of life issues are causing increasing numbers of those who can… to flee. They recognize the longer they stay, the worse their financial position will become. Add in a tidal wave of non-assimilated 3rd world peons gobbling up ever scarcer government resources and the stage is set for a Venezuela style meltdown. The ones heading for the lifeboats now are the smart ones, the rest; not so much.
AC