While California continues to lose residents overall, San Diego County showed signs of stabilizing from the pandemic exodus by returning to population growth in 2022 — albeit a very small percentage gain.
U.S. Census Bureau’s 2022 county-level population estimates released Thursday showed that San Diego County added 1,254 residents from July 1, 2021, to July 1, 2022.
A year earlier, Census data pegged the county’s population as falling by 11,183 residents from July 2020 to July 2021 — mirroring the wider trend of more people leaving California’s high-priced coastal urban centers during the pandemic.
Much of the latest gain in San Diego County stems from natural factors, such as the number of babies born outpacing deaths in California’s second most populous county.
But the local population increase was tiny — only 0.04 percent of the region’s 3.28 million residents.
“It is literally no growth,” said Ray Major, deputy CEO of the San Diego Association of Governments, or SANDAG. “I think this is a trend you are going to see because of a whole lot of different factors, both external and just slowing of birth rates. We are not going to be growing very quickly.”
For California, the population declined by 113,649 residents for the year ending in July 2022, Census Bureau data shows. The state’s overall population stood at 39 million.
Los Angeles County continued to shed residents, according to the Census Bureau. The nation’s most populous county lost 90,704 people from July 2021 to July 2022 — the biggest decline in the nation.
A handful of Bay Area counties also lost population. They include Santa Clara County (-15,650); Alameda County (-14,800); and San Francisco County (-2,816.)
“To me, LA is a weird situation,” said Christopher Thornberg, founding partner of Beacon Economics. “If you look at any kind of data on housing vacancies in LA, you certainly don’t see anything resembling an increase in the number of vacant units. It is a bit of a conundrum. Everybody else has stabilized. But LA — 10 million people, an enormous county. It is not San Francisco. Why we are seeing this is beyond me.”
Riverside County added the most residents in California with a 20,754 gain. Santa Barbara County welcomed 6,403 additional residents, while Yolo County added 5,710, according to Census Data.
After some of the nation’s most populous counties saw residents leave during the pandemic in 2020-2021, relocations appeared to move toward pre-pandemic patterns last year, the Census data shows. All 10 of the top fastest-growing counties in the U.S. were in the South or West.
“The migration and growth patterns for counties edged closer to pre-pandemic levels this year,” said Christine Hartley, assistant division chief for estimates and projections in the Census Bureau’s population division. “Some urban counties, such as Dallas and San Francisco, saw domestic out-migration at a slower pace between 2021 and 2022, compared to the prior year. Meanwhile, many counties with large universities saw their populations fully rebound this year as students returned.”
Arizona’s Maricopa County — the home of the Phoenix metro area — led the U.S. in population gains at 56,831 new residents. After that, all other top gainers were in Texas and Florida.
Three counties around Dallas-Fort Worth added a combined 123,000 residents. Counties near Houston and San Antonio also made the Top 10. In Florida, counties near Tampa and Fort Myers notched the biggest increases in new residents.
During the height of the pandemic from July 2020 to July 2021, San Diego County lost population year over year for the first time in more than a decade, as remote work and high housing costs pushed people to move to lower-priced locales.
While some of those factors began to stabilize, they still likely linger in the 2021-2022 Census data, said Dowell Myers, a professor of policy, planning and demography at the University of Southern California.
“We had the pandemic effect, but we also had that big spike in housing prices,” he said. “I think the big spike doesn’t make people flee California. It stops people from coming, and so you get net domestic out-migration because of a lack of replacement (new residents.) The price barrier has gone way up.”
In San Diego, 18,650 more people moved out of the county than moved in — which is called domestic migration, according to Census data. That decline was eclipsed, however, by gains in births over deaths of about 12,700 and a net increase of international migration.
Major, the SANDAG CEO, said demographic trends, remote work and high housing costs point to continued low population growth in the San Diego region.
“What we see in California and San Diego is this out-migration where some people are leaving for lower cost housing in some cases, or in other cases people can telecommute now where they weren’t able to telecommute pre-COVID, so that gives them more flexibility,” he said. “So, I think what you are going to see is our region maintaining the population that we currently have going forward.”
