Why California doesn't have 40 million residents, yet

Sounds like a lot, right?

That number actually represents the slowest growth in the state’s entire history, a meager 0.47% increase over the year before.

It brought the state’s total population as of Jan. 1 to 39.9 million, just shy of the 40 million that Tina Daley, who heads demographic research for the state’s department of finance, told me that her office was tentatively predicting earlier this year.

The anemic increase isn’t great; economists will tell you that a stagnant or declining workforce makes it tough to sustain economic growth. But when I checked in with Daley again Thursday, she said it wasn’t surprising.

Daley said declining births and rising numbers of deaths aren’t new, as baby boomers age and young people around the world wait longer or decide not to have children. And the people who are moving to California, from other states and abroad, tend to have higher education levels, which is correlated with fewer births.

Also, she said, high costs of living mean California has been losing residents to other states.

What was unexpected, Daley said, was the degree of slowing in migration from other countries.

“What we’re seeing is it’s decreasing a little bit more than we had thought it would,” she said.

Still, H.D. Palmer, a spokesman for the department, emphasized that the slow growth should not be taken as a sign that the state can take its foot off the gas when it comes to housing development.

The estimates showed the state netted just 77,000 new units, which falls far short of the 200,000 units the department estimated the state needs to add each year. It is also well below the pace that would be necessary to build the 3.5 million homes Gov. Gavin Newsom has said California needs by 2025.

“The affordability issue is pervasive throughout the state, but particularly urban areas,” Palmer said. “We’ve been historically behind the curve in terms of keeping up with population growth.”

And some communities are still growing relatively rapidly.

Some of that can be traced to the devastation wrought by wildfires. Chico, for instance, was the state’s fastest-growing city with a population over 30,000 last year. It notched a 20.7 percent jump, largely because of an influx of displaced Paradise residents.

But Daley noted that among the state’s 10 largest cities, the fastest growing were Sacramento, which grew by about 1.5%, with 7,400 new residents, and Bakersfield, which added 4,300 people for a 1.1% gain.

That, she said, lines up with broader shifts in the state away from pricey coastal communities to less expensive inland cities.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.