Published Thursday, March 22, 2007, by the San Francisco Chronicle

Central Valley outpaces Bay Area in population
Home costs credited for inland growth

By Tyche Hendricks
Chronicle Staff Writer

The Bay Area's population continued to increase slowly between 2005
and 2006 while Central Valley counties were growing much faster, a
trend that was mirrored in other movement inland from the West Coast,
according to county population estimates to be released today by the
U.S. Census Bureau.

"Coastal California is clearly becoming the gateway to the West,"
said Brookings Institution demographer William Frey, pointing to
surging growth in the counties that include Phoenix, Las Vegas and
Riverside. "These are the safety valves for people leaving L.A. and
the Bay Area. And that population continues to spread out to other
parts of the West."

Much of California's movement inland is driven by the high cost of
housing in the Bay Area, Los Angeles and San Diego, analysts say.
Nationally, population has tended to move from the "rust belt" and
northeastern industrial cities to the West and South in recent years.

While California's population is still growing -- quite rapidly in
the Central Valley and Inland Empire -- the rate of growth has
slowed.

"California is still experiencing population growth because we still
have international migrants coming in and we have more births than
deaths," said Hans Johnson, a research fellow at the Public Policy
Institute of California in San Francisco. "But we're not the hot spot
in population growth in the nation, and we haven't been for a while."

San Francisco and Alameda counties, which had been losing population
each year this decade according to the census estimates, saw that
trend reverse with a modest population increase from mid-2005 to
mid-2006. The U.S. Census estimates that San Francisco now has about
744,000 people, down from almost 777,000 in 2000. It estimates
Alameda County's population at 1.46 million in mid-2006, up from
1.44 million in 2000.

State demographers, however, who do their own population estimates
using more detailed data sources, did not find as many people
leaving those counties in recent years. The state Finance Department
estimates San Francisco has actually grown to 803,000 people since
the Census Bureau counted heads in 2000.

Two California counties -- Riverside, in Southern California's Inland
Empire, and Placer, in the Sierra foothills north of Sacramento --
were among the 100 fastest-growing counties from 2000 to 2006. The
number of people in those two counties increased by 31 percent over
those years, according to the census estimates.

The population estimates can be found at the Census Bureau's Web
site: http://www.census.gov/popest/counties

Changing Bay Area

U.S. Census Bureau figures for 2000 are from decennial count and for
2006 are from bureau estimates for mid-July.

County 2000 2006
Alameda 1,443,741 1,457,426
Contra Costa 948,816 1,024,319
Marin 247,289 248,742
Napa 124,308 133,522
San Francisco 776,733 744,041
San Mateo 707,163 705,499
Santa Clara 1,682,585 1,731,281
Solano 394,513 411,680
Sonoma 458,614 466,891
California 33,871,653 36,457,549

E-mail Tyche Hendricks at thendricks@sfchronicle.com

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