S.D. County suffers rare population exodus
High housing prices a factor in Census Bureau's report
By Lori Weisberg
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
March 16, 2006
For the first time in more than three decades, the population of San Diego County declined last year, joining other California coastal counties that are losing their allure as high housing prices drive home-buyers to more affordable regions.
The surprising reversal of the county's long-standing population gains is revealed in U.S. Census Bureau estimates released today showing thousands more people leaving the county than moving in from other parts of the state and elsewhere.
Graphic: The tide moves inland
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While the county's overall loss of population was 1,728 between July 2004 and July 2005, the more telling number is the net exodus of 43,126 people, many of them who likely headed up Interstate 15 to Riverside County, where housing prices are still considerably lower than in San Diego.
“This is pretty stunning,” said demographer Ed Schafer of the San Diego County Association of Governments. “The net out-migration (domestically) is so powerfully high. That's the story. Riverside (County) is just the opposite. Here you have the coastal counties with all these people leaving them but the counties just to the interior have all these people moving in.”
The dramatic change has sparked varying opinions among demographers and real estate analysts, some of whom look at the numbers with suspicion or view the drop as an aberration.
County demographers have forecast a long-term flattening in growth, although not a population decline. Housing analyst John Karevoll said he doubts the population loss is a long-term trend, nor does he believe it will have an impact on housing sales.
Census figures dating to 1970 show that San Diego County has never posted a population decrease. The decline is a far cry from the late 1980s, when the county was adding more than 80,000 people per year.
The Census Bureau said San Diego County's population was 2,933,462 as of July 1.
Santa Barbara and Ventura counties and several coastal counties in Northern California also had population declines last year.
Outward bound
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People also moved out of Los Angeles and Orange counties, but the two counties were able to muster modest population increases.
“What's driving this is the cost of housing,” Schafer said. “It's just pushing people further east.”
The Inland Empire continues to attract the lion's share of Southern California's growth.
According to the Census Bureau, 56,552 more people moved into Riverside County than departed, while the increase for San Bernardino County is estimated to be nearly 22,000. In fact, Riverside County had the second-largest overall gain in population in the nation, just behind Maricopa County, home to Phoenix. San Bernardino County ranked fifth.
The census figures, which also take into account moves by military households, do not show the split between in-state and out-of-state migration.
“The major demographic dynamic here is a greater exodus from San Diego, as well as a smaller draw from the rest of the United States,” said William Frey, a visiting fellow with the Washington, D.C.-based Brookings Institution. “This is quite a change from San Diego's image as a dream environment, but now 43,000 people are saying no. It's the price of the housing that's driving them away, so it's time to pay attention.”
As much as Robin Nelson and boyfriend Herb Sturdyvin are enchanted with the San Diego lifestyle, they decided they could get a much larger, more extravagant home in Arizona than in San Diego for much less money. And that's exactly what they did.
They've put their 2-bedroom, 1½-bath home in North Park up for sale and are asking $750,000 to $775,000 for the 1,500-square-foot house. They've bought a 2,000-square-foot home in Lake Havasu City that has a pool, spa and seven-car garage that will accommodate their hot-rod hobby.
The purchase price: $329,000.
“We considered different states, and I didn't want to go too far away from my folks, who live in La Mesa,” said Nelson, 49, who is leaving behind her job as a hairdresser. “We decided to not stay in San Diego County because of the higher prices, the economy, the city being in an uproar. We looked at Arizona because we knew we could get more for our money.”
Since 2000, San Diego County has continued to see a large outflow of people to other parts of the country, but the number has skyrocketed in the last couple of years, appearing to follow the meteoric climb in housing prices that only recently has begun to slow. Last month, the median price of a home was $502,000, a 6.4 percent increase in value compared with a year earlier.
The last time the number of people leaving the county was greater than the previous year's flight to other counties was in 1992, when the San Diego region was in the middle of a deep recession.
The fact that the county has been able to sustain any population growth at all is because of births (minus deaths) and a steady influx of foreigners immigrating here, although that number is starting to slow, census figures show. Last year, net international migration to the county was 16,674.
“There are a lot of reasons why California is no longer as strong a location of choice for international migrants as it once was. Housing is one,” said demographer Hans Johnson of the San Francisco-based Public Policy Institute of California. “In California and in San Diego, wages for low-skilled jobs aren't very different than those in Arizona and Nevada, but the cost of housing is much higher here.”
Still, Johnson said it is something of a conundrum that the county is losing population when it still is showing relatively strong gains in job creation and housing production.
The Census Bureau numbers are at odds with recent estimates released by the state Department of Finance for California counties. Although state demographers also showed a marked slowdown in San Diego's growth, the county remained in positive territory for 2004-05.
State demographer Linda Gage pointed out that her agency uses federal tax returns, along with driver's license address changes, to compute domestic migration trends, while the Census Bureau relies largely on the federal returns. As a result, she said, the bureau doesn't capture all households because not everyone files tax returns.
Still, both sets of figures depict a county that is no longer the population magnet it once was.
Nellie and Phillip Wood are packing up the contents of their Del Mar home with a sweeping view and moving to Las Cruces, N.M., where they've bought a custom home on a half-acre for $470,000. They paid cash, using a portion of the proceeds from the sale of their current home for $1.2 million.
“The traffic is driving me crazy and so is the affordability problem,” said Nellie Wood, 71. “I look at the taxes that were paying – they're $6,000 a year – and we could pay cash for the house we bought. I picked the area because the weather is wonderful, a lot like here.”
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Lori Weisberg: (619) 293-2251; lori.weisberg@uniontrib.com |
