California is losing people, but this region wouldn’t know it

TO DRIVE AROUND Lathrop, a small town in California’s Central Valley, is to see a rural community in the throes of rapid development. Shelley Burcham is the town’s economic-development administrator. She takes your correspondent round in a silver Tesla, explains which fast-food joints are new (In-N-Out Burger), when new apartments were built (now leasing!) and where almond groves will be ploughed under to create an industrial park. “There’s goats there now,” she says, pointing to a field, “but if you come back again there will be something built there.”The biggest story in California recently has been the reversal of what had hitherto been the state’s defining characteristic: population growth. The Golden State lost people for the first time in its history in 2021. Republican governors claim that people are “voting with their feet”, and that California’s population loss is a reflection of poor governance. But not every place in the state is shrinking. Recent estimates from California’s Department of Finance suggest that the counties projected to grow most over the next four decades are inland from the coast and in the Central Valley, the state’s agricultural heartland.