California passes 38 million residents; growth remains steady in the South Bay

By Mike Swift
Mercury News
Article Launched: 12/17/2008 09:14:00 PM PST

Even in the face of a worrying recession, California's population topped 38 million this year for the first time, as Bay Area counties like Santa Clara continued to gain significant numbers of new residents.

The top two reasons, say state demographers: Babies and immigrants.

"Lots of births and lots of people coming from other countries," said Linda Gage, a demographer with the California Department of Finance, which produced new population estimates for the state's 58 counties as of July 1.

The data also shows that Santa Clara County, the state's sixth largest with 1.85 million people, gained about 32,000 people between July 2007 and July 2008, ranking fourth among the 58 counties in population growth. The county grew by 1.74 percent, ranking eighth behind slightly faster-growing counties such as Placer, Imperial and Riverside.

In the South Bay, the growth may well be temporary. Stephen Levy, director of the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy in Palo Alto, said the growth recorded in the latest state estimates reflect a time when Silicon Valley and the Bay Area were doing better economically than the rest of the nation, attracting job seekers from outside the region and the country.

"I don't expect those strong levels of migration to continue now that the Bay Area is going to participate in the recession," Levy said. "But certainly for the period that ended in June of '08 and began a year earlier, those folks were looking at very strong job pictures through the Peninsula, and that would be my explanation for the very high levels of growing population. I don't expect it to continue."

Nevertheless, Santa Clara County added more people through foreign immigration between 2007 and 2008 than any fiscal year since 2001, while many fewer people left the South Bay for other parts of the country than early in the decade. Santa Clara County "is still a very, very attractive destination for our foreign migrants," Gage said.

Births — which are related to immigration because immigrants tend to be younger and more likely to be in their childbearing years and have larger families — were another leading cause of growth for the South Bay. Santa Clara County gained 18,000 people in the past year through what demographers call "natural increase" — the surplus of births over deaths.

Births and immigration may not get the housing market up off the floor, however. "The newborn baby doesn't get a house of its own," Gage said, "and when people do come here from foreign countries they generally don't establish their own new household. They are more likely to live with kin or friends."

Overall, the state grew by 1.16 percent between July 2007 and July 2008, representing 436,000 new residents during the fiscal year, continuing what the Department of Finance said was a pattern of modest growth rates during the past few years. The new population estimate is 38.1 million people.

Despite the bad economic times, people did not leave the state at significantly higher rates than last year, perhaps reflecting the fact that in this recession, times are tough all over.

In the recession of the early 1990s, "when the recession was more concentrated in California, there were other options elsewhere, and people sought them out," Gage said. "But that doesn't seem to be the case this decade."

Contact Mike Swift at (40 271-3648 or at mswift@mercurynews.com.

http://www.mercurynews.com/census-and-d ... i_11258429