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.
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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.
Last year, while states like Texas and Florida continued to grow (albeit more slowly), California’s demographic decline continued, notes the Census Bureau. The Golden State joined Hawaii, New Mexico, Vermont, and West Virginia as the only states to experience a net loss last year. Perhaps most revealingly, California now ranks last in terms of the percentage of residents who are new arrivals from other states—a remarkable figure for a place long characterized by its attractiveness.
California is also lagging other states, including notably Texas and Florida, in net international migration. With the U.S. border now effectively closed, this source of population growth is likely to decline further.
The reasons for California’s demographic decline are complex. At the top of the list is an economy that now produces few higher-wage jobs beyond those benefitting the tech elite. The state may be home to four of the world’s seven trillion-dollar companies and the most billionaires, but it lags in creating opportunities for everyone else.
The Golden State once epitomized opportunity for the middle and working classes. Today, it ranks at the bottom in creating jobs that pay above average, while it stands at the top of the heap in creating below average and low-paying jobs. The state has lost 1.6 million above-average-paying jobs in the past decade, double the total in any other state. Since 2008, low-wage job creation has outpaced high-wage job creation by five to one.
Even as states like Texas were booming across almost all sectors, the bulk of jobs created in California were found in government or in the largely government-financed health-care sector. These days, building in California heavily involves hospitals, driven by the needs of its aging population.
But the biggest cause of California’s demographic decline may be its sky-high housing prices. In virtually every survey exploring why residents decide to leave the state, housing costs rank at the top of the list. Of course, many California baby boomers, who bought into their neighborhoods long ago, have made out handsomely because of rising home prices. The average long-time homeowner in California made $265,000 selling his home, compared with $107,000 nationally.
The homeownership situation is demonstrably worse for younger Californians.
In 1980, 39.4 percent of 25–35-year-olds owned their own homes; by 2020, that share had declined to just 15.5 percent, according to UC Berkeley’s Terner Center. For 35–45-year-olds, the share fell from 64.4 percent to 39.7 percent over the same period.
Prospective homeowners—generally people in their thirties and early forties—are precisely the group deserting the West Coast for “cost of living” reasons. In 2022, California saw a net outflow of more than 200,000 residents age 25 and up; most of those who left had either an associate’s degree or a bachelor’s degree. The most likely to leave, according to IRS numbers, are those in their late thirties to late fifties, which includes people with families and those living in Silicon Valley.
The effects of the demographic drain are being felt in California schools. Between 2019 and 2023, enrollment fell by 325,000 students, or 5 percent, the largest numeric decline and among the highest percentage declines in the country. The drop-offs are particularly sharp along the coast. In San Jose, the epicenter of Silicon Valley, as many as nine elementary schools are now targets for closure. In Los Angeles Unified, the state’s largest school district, total enrollment has shrunk by 44 percent over the past 20 years.
All this bad news leaves the boomers, the last successful California generation, in a quandary. Many see their offspring leaving, while the remaining young Californians are increasingly restless. As in New York, many are opting for radical leftism, embracing higher taxes on the rich (meaning boomers) to pay for redistributionist policies like free health care and rent control.
Three of the leading Democratic candidates for governor are backing a radical “wealth” tax that even Governor Gavin Newsom admits would be a disaster. In Los Angeles, hapless Mayor Karen Bass—a former member of the radical-left, pro-Castro Venceremos Brigade—is facing a tough challenge from Councilwoman Nithya Raman, who is aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America.
As Californians gradually ditch surfboards for walkers, many boomers are embracing progressive obsessions like organic food, renewable energy, and electric vehicles. These pursuits may boost their self-esteem, but they do little to address issues like high food and energy costs and a lack of housing options.
These policies contrast sharply with those that supercharged the careers of boomers in the 1970s and 1980s. Back then, California politicians in both parties chose economic growth as the answer to poverty. Now, many young people seem more motivated to get ahead by confiscating the assets of seniors.
If boomers want to hold onto their hard-earned fortunes—let alone see their descendants prosper—they will have to embrace the kind of policies on energy, housing, and growth that allowed them to achieve the California dream.
Photo by Gabrielle Lurie/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images