Three years ago, as COVID-19 ravaged the nation, California’s population did something it had not done in the state’s recorded history: It fell.
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At the time, the state, the most populous in the nation, had just under 40 million people. The decline, while a blow, was not unexpected. Growth had been slowing for some time. The Trump administration had put the brakes on legal immigration. The pandemic was cutting a brutal swath through the state, particularly among seniors. As remote-work options made it easier for some employees to do their jobs from anywhere, some Californians fled the state and its high cost of living.
Still, if any natural law applies to California, it is that what comes down will eventually go up. As H.D. Palmer, a spokesperson for the state’s Finance Department, put it, channeling one of the four California governors he has advised in his long tenure: “We’ll be back.”
This week, Palmer proved prescient. California is growing again.
An annual population report released Tuesday showed that the state’s population increased last year by about 67,000 people, driven largely by lower mortality and rebounding legal immigration.
Proportionally speaking, that isn’t much. Picture adding, for example, the equivalent of the city of Davis. And California’s population is still not back to where it was in 2020, when the slump began. But it is once again moving in its traditional direction. Some 39,128,162 people were living in the Golden State as of January, the new figures say.
What turned the tide? A combination of factors, according to Palmer.
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Vaccinations and other public health measures have brought deaths in California down from their pandemic highs. Legal immigration has rebounded, in part because of the easing of restrictions on H-1B and other visas during the last year of the Trump administration.
And people are starting to think twice before leaving California for, say, Florida or Texas, the state found. According to the Finance Department, the rate of net migration out of the state last year was roughly a quarter of what it was in 2021.
The population is growing in 31 of the state’s 58 counties, mostly in the Bay Area, Central Valley and Inland Empire. The increases came with a bump in new housing units, including a net gain of more than 21,000 units in Los Angeles County, more than 5,700 in San Diego County and nearly 2,300 in San Francisco in 2023.
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Efforts to encourage more accessory dwelling units also appeared to gain traction, with the state adding more than 22,800 of them last year.
California still has a way to go to return to its peak population before the pandemic. Compared with the spring of 2020, the state is still down more than 400,000 Californians. That’s a hole the size of Bakersfield.
And the state still needs millions of new homes to address its housing shortage, not just tens of thousands.
But two of the biggest recent drags on growth — COVID and cutoffs of legal immigration — appear to be in the rearview mirror, at least for the moment.
“We’ve returned to positive and sustainable rates of growth for the foreseeable future,” Palmer said. “We’re back.”
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