The Golden State is Turning Gray

Long seen as the bastion of youth and ambition, California is now getting old. The state’s aging population reflects an economy that—saddled with extremely high house prices—serves most residents poorly and is spurring younger people, particularly those with children, to head for the exits.

Compounding the emigration problem, even the Californians staying put aren’t having many babies. The state’s fertility rate has been dropping faster than that of the country, notes demographer Wendell Cox. Its total fertility rate—the number of children that the average woman has during her child-bearing years—which long outpaced the national average, is now the nation’s tenth-lowest. California’s birthrate more closely resembles that of New England or New York rather than that of prime Sunbelt competitors like Texas.

The state’s oldest counties tend to be on the coast, led by Marin, Napa, and Sonoma. Los Angeles and San Francisco rank last and second-to-last in birthrates among major U.S. metropolitan areas. Fertility rates have dropped so much that Californians over 65 now outnumber those in the critical 25- to 34-year-old cohort.

The state’s biggest urban areas, the one-time surfing paradises of L.A. County and Orange County, have seen birthrates plunge over 15 percent in the past decade. In L.A. County, the nation’s most populous, the under-25 population shrank by 19 percent between 2001 and 2021. Meantime, Texas, Utah, Idaho, Arizona, and Florida have enjoyed double-digit growth in this same age cohort over the past two decades.

California’s aging is accelerating, too. From 2010 to 2018, the state aged 50 percent more rapidly than the rest of the country, according to the American Community Survey. Since 2020, notes Cox, the state’s under-25 population has dropped considerably more than the national average, while its ranks of boomers have grown 10 percent more quickly. The state’s median age was 28 in 1970; it will be over 45 by 2060, according to a report from the state’s Little Hoover Commission. Since Californians’ life expectancy is among the nation’s highest, the elderly are likely to stay around for a long time. The California Department of Aging projects that one in four Californians will be over 60 by 2040.

California’s demographics increasingly resemble the pattern of outmigration long associated with Northeastern and Midwestern states. Since 2000, California has lost more than 4 million net domestic migrants. Almost 1.5 million of those left over the four years between 2020 and 2024.

Read the rest of this piece at City Journal.

---

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com, follow him on Substack and Twitter @joelkotkin.

Homepage Photo: Housing for seniors in California.