UNITED STATES: According to the latest state report, California’s population has steadily declined, showcasing a sustained trend as it struggled to increase its housing stock and ameliorate an intense cost of living crisis.
According to a few experts, the fact that more high-income workers are working remotely during the pandemic is the cause of Californians’ continued mass migration to other US states in large numbers. Estimated 138,000 fewer people lived in the state in 2022 than in the two years prior, as per a report by the California financial department.
A demographer with the Public Policy Institute of California, Hans Johnson, said, “California is still losing a lot of people to other states.” But according to HD Palmer, spokesperson for the finance department, conservative pundits overstated their assertions that population losses would lead to a mushrooming “Cal-exit.”
According to him, state forecasts demonstrated that the population was finally starting to normalize following the pandemic. Johnson’s report stated, “During the pandemic’s peak, the outflows from the state were so large that nearly every demographic and socioeconomic group suffered net losses.”
California’s chief demographer, Walter Schwarm, mentioned, “We anticipate returning to the pre-pandemic pattern, where we experienced modest but positive growth for three to four years. The pandemic struck at a time when people in California were delaying births and leaving the state in droves due to serious cost difficulties.”
According to Schwarm, many reasons are contributing to this mass exodus, including increasing birth rates, return of foreign migration and the increasing number of people getting driver’s licences in the state in the last six months.
He highlights, “Affordability is not miraculously better, but, on the other hand, other places outside California are now equally unaffordable.”
According to the PPIC report, the US state has lost occupants caused by immigration from other states every year since 2000, most notably Nevada, Texas, and Washington, even though the state’s population increased slightly each year even before the pandemic and births.
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