The Golden State’s Future in Three (F)acts
A CCB Data Brief on People of Color, Population Growth,
and California’s Diversifying Counties
INTRODUCTION
California’s diversity is well known. In 2000, California became the second state in the nation to become majority non-white. [1] In 2014, we became the first state with a Latino plurality. By 2040, it’s estimated the non-white population will be more than 70% of California. As a state, we are now an incredible mix, with almost 5% of the population identifying as two or more races or “Other” (Chart 1). [2] And, as we showed in our recent report on middle income California, Californians of color also make up a majority of both lower- and middle-income residents in the state.
CHART 1:
CALIFORNIA POP., 2020
CHART 2:
CALIFORNIA POP. CHANGE, 1990-2020
While our diversity is something that most Californians likely recognize, many still assume that the economic and population centers of Los Angeles, the Bay Area and San Diego are also the growth center of our multiethnic, multiracial majority. This is incorrect.
To put it simply, California is diverse everywhere and that diversity is growing dramatically — if unevenly — at the county level. While people’s imaginations of non-white communities might remain in older urban neighborhoods or small rural towns, major suburban and exurban counties like Riverside (population 2.4 million), San Bernardino (2.2 million) and San Joaquin (800,000) are also home to almost four million Californians of color and are some of the fastest- growing areas of the state.
This is crucial, because – as we and other organizations have pointed out – Californians of color face severe disadvantages when it comes to homeownership and wealth creation. They are also more likely than whites to be rent-burdened, which impairs not just their ability to become homeowners, but also to live safe, economically stable, and dignified lives.
The goal of this policy brief is twofold. First, we hope to illustrate where BIPOC California is growing most in terms of both population numbers and population percentages. Second, we intend to use our findings to ask a question which we will elaborate on further in our next policy brief: Are our housing policy proposals designed to work in communities outside of major urban centers where we see some of the largest proportional growth?
[General note] All county populations are rounded to the hundred-thousand (populations at or above one million) or the ten-thousand (populations below one million). Population growth is rounded to the nearest thousand.
[1] It was the first to become that way through migration and demographic change. Hawaii became the first when it became a state in 1959, but it never had a white majority.
[2] See the excellent Multiracial and Multiethnic Growth in California report from the UCLA Latino Policy & Politics Initiative, which also shows how the current growth is driven in particular by Latino and Asian Californians.
Above: The Stockton Sikh Temple, America’s first and founded in 1912. Photo credit: South Asians in North America Collection, Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley; via Punjabi and Sikh Diaspora Digital Archive, UC Davis
FACT 1:
Communities of color are everywhere in California and have been for a long time.
California’s history of diversity is one that has always been about much more than its big cities. Indigenous and Californio California covered the entire state. Gold Rush migration didn’t just come from Europe – immigrants from Latin America and Asia helped build neighborhoods and towns throughout the state in the 19th century. Places like Marysville (Yuba County) and Stockton became important centers of 19th century Chinese-Californian life, and Chilean and Peruvian miners built neighborhoods throughout the Sierra. [3]
The 20th century brought major waves of Japanese, African Americans, Filipinos, Punjabis, Assyrians, Armenians and Mexicans, who formed new communities throughout California in the early 20th century. [4] Stockton’s Little Manila was the largest Filipino community outside the Philippines from the 1920s through the 1960s. Fresno was an important home for Armenians, Yuba City for Punjabi Sikhs. Small places like Livingston (in Merced County) have had residents from Asia and Latin America for more than a century. [5]
Suburbanization and post-1965 immigration only added to a diverse world. By 1990, once- rural San Bernardino County had more than half a million people – 40% of its population – who identified as Latino, Black or Asian American. Half of Fresno County’s population was non-white in 1990. While recent growth matters, we need to remember just how long many predominantly POC communities have existed both inside and outside of the big coastal cities.
[3] Tom, Lawrence and Brian Tom (2020). Gold Country's Last Chinatown: Marysville, California. Charleston, South Carolina: The History Press. Nasatir, Abraham P. "Chileans in California during the Gold Rush Period and the Establishment of the Chilean Consulate." California Historical Quarterly 53.1 (1974): 52-70. See also places like Locke (Sacramento County) which is a largely preserved example of a Chinese-Californian rural community build around the turn of the 20th century.
[4]See the current exhibit at the California African American Museum entitled “We are not strangers here: African American Histories in Rural California”.
[4] For more on the relationship between immigration and California’s rural communities (and agricultural economy), see McWilliams, Carey. California: The great exception. Univ of California Press, 1999 (1946). This is a legendary book that shows not only where communities grew, but how so many parts of our agriculture system (rice, fruits, nuts) came from immigrant communities who planted what they knew.
FACT 2:
Communities of color are living, and growing unevenly, throughout California.
CHART 3:
COUNTIES WITH HIGHEST % OF POC RESIDENTS, 2020
Chart 3 above shows the counties with the highest percentage of residents of color in 2020. The list includes counties in Northern, Central and Southern California. It includes rural mid-size counties like Imperial (pop. 180k) and Merced (pop. 280k); larger rural counties with big cities like Fresno County (pop. 1M) and San Joaquin counties (pop. 800k); counties which are now major suburbs of our biggest regions, such as San Bernardino (pop. 2.2M), as well as more typical urban counties like Alameda (pop. 1.7M); and the mega-county that is larger than most states, Los Angeles County (pop. 10M).
Regardless of the type of county, each saw growth in Asian, Latino and mixed-race residents between 1990-2020, and many of the counties saw large increases in their Black population. San Bernardino, for instance, saw massive increases: the county’s Asian American and Pacific Islander community grew by 237,000 between 1990 and 2020, equivalent to almost 30% of the county’s total population growth during that period. The Latino population grew by almost 800,000 residents during that time period, which is greater than the total net growth of the county during that period (763,000). [6] While the growth in the Black population is smaller in absolute numbers at 65,000, it still represents an almost 60% net increase over 30 years.
CHART 4:
COUNTIES WITH HIGHEST % OF POC GROWTH, 1990-2020
Chart 4 above shows that counties with small-to-midsize populations saw the largest percentage increases in residents of color, even if the absolute number of resident growth is small when compared to the state’s large and mid-size counties. That said, there are exceptions where large counties also saw significant percentage growth, this large percentage growth is particularly the case in the areas adjacent to major middle-income job centers like Sacramento and Los Angeles.
Placer County (pop. 400k) in Northern California saw an astounding 555% increase in people of color over the past 30 years. Since 1990, the county saw tremendous growth among Asian and Pacific Islanders (885%), as well as Black (552%) and Latino (337%) residents. Similarly, Riverside County in Southern California – our state’s fourth largest county – saw its population of color grow by almost 300%. The POC percentage growth was led by Asian and Pacific Islanders (348%), Latinos (291%), and Black residents (145%). Interestingly, although quite small in absolute numbers, those who choose “Other” in the Census actually saw the largest percentage growth in both Placer (2,125%) and Riverside (503%) counties.
At the state level, the most complicated aspect of the story of diverse growth in California is the changes we see in the Black community. Chart 5 shows that similar to BIPOC diversity throughout the state, the places where the Black population changed over the past thirty years include urban, suburban, and rural counties. While 18 counties, including the largest and wealthiest counties in the state such as Los Angeles, San Diego, and much of the Bay Area, [7] saw their Black population decrease by roughly 320,000 overall, the overall Black population grew by almost 350,000 in 40 other counties. Places as diverse as Placer County in the Sierra Foothills, San Joaquin in the Central Valley, and Riverside in southern California saw some of the largest proportional growth.
CHART 5:
COUNTIES WITH LARGEST DECREASE IN BLACK RESIDENTS, 1990-2020
CHART 6:
COUNTIES WITH LARGEST INCREASE IN BLACK RESIDENTS, 1990-2020
[6] San Bernardino’s net growth includes a change in the White population by -296,000.
[7] The following Bay Area counties lost African American residents between 1990 and 2020: San Mateo (-19,300 / -57%); San Francisco (-31,271 / -41%); Alameda (-63,372 / -28%); Santa Clara (-10,435 / -20%); and Marin (-1,409 / -19%).
FACT 3:
Six less-studied counties are driving the growth for people of color.
CHART 7:
TOP COUNTIES ADDING POC RESIDENTS, 1990-2020
While those counties with the most dramatic percentage growth tend to be midsize (Placer), small (Nevada), or very small (Trinity), and those counties with the largest absolute growth also happen to have the largest total populations to begin with (Los Angeles, San Diego), there are six counties that account for more than half of the growth of non-white California over the past 30 years but are not historically large population centers: Riverside, San Bernardino, Orange, Sacramento, Contra Costa, and Kern counties.
These counties differ greatly in whether they are predominantly suburban, exurban or rural, their economic drivers, and how diverse they were to begin with. But they all experienced high percentage growth in POC population over the past three decades. Chart 7 shows that — excluding the mega-county of Los Angeles — Riverside County leads the state in the number of POC residents added to the county since 1990, while the previous Chart 5 shows it is is also a leader in the percentage growth of POC residents. Another county discussed previously, San Bernardino, is not only in the top 10 counties with the highest percentage of POC residents (74% per Chart 5) but is a significant driver of POC growth overall in the state.
Orange and Sacramento counties – respectively, California’s third largest county and the location of our state capital – both saw significant POC population percentage growth and almost three million new non-white residents since 1990. Contra Costa and Kern counties together make up five percent of the state’s total population as of 2020, but combined accounted for almost 10% of the state’s growth in Black, Latino, and Asian Pacific American communities.
These six counties represent perspectives and regions that are too often left out of policy conversations – or, if they are included, it is often in a tertiary, one-dimensional way. While Los Angeles and San Diego counties represent our largest counties, and Alameda and Santa Clara counties have very large urban and suburban populations that generate disproportionate economic activity, the data shows us where else policymakers and housing advocates need to expand our attention if we’re to really support all communities in California, especially communities of color.
What does this mean for those working on California housing policy?
While California’s communities of color may be constantly evolving and changing, our housing policy imaginations often focus on snapshots from a past that no longer exists. This is true in terms of the types of housing and communities we prioritize, but also how and where we imagine people live. Housing policy still largely focuses on either older communities of color or exclusive and often majority white communities, both the products of intentional segregation. While those issues are important, this focus fails the rapidly growing population of Californians in the newer suburban, exurban and rural communities they call home, many of which were built long after the heyday of redlining and racial covenants – even if they still suffer from the reverberations of those policies.
To close the racial wealth gap and provide Californians at all income levels real housing opportunity, while at the same time improving our land use, economic, and climate policies, we need to update our housing imaginations to include everywhere folks actually live in 2024.
In the coming months, CCB will release a follow- up to this brief that explores potential solutions and ideas that are good for the state and are especially beneficial and achievable for those areas where we see more and more Californians moving, including people of color.
Data Source
Steven Manson, Jonathan Schroeder, David Van Riper, Katherine Knowles, Tracy Kugler, Finn Roberts, and Steven Ruggles. IPUMS National Historical Geographic Information System: Version 18.0 Dataset: nhgis0003_ts_geog2010_county. Minneapolis, MN: IPUMS. 2023. http://doi.org/10.18128/D050.V18.0
Authors & Acknowledgments
Principal Author: Alex Schafran, Schafran Strategies
Additional Authors: Greg Magofña, Tina Lee, Gillian Welcher
Layout & Web Design: Michelle Nazzal
Editor: Bruce Mirken