Inland Empire Among Top in Growth : Census Bureau Puts Area as No. 1 in Large Metropolitan Category

California’s Inland Empire, made up of Riverside and San Bernardino counties, is the fastest-growing large metropolitan area in the country, according to report released Thursday by the U.S Census Bureau.

With a growth rate of 46.2% in the 1980s, the population explosion in Riverside-San Bernardino will help ensure that the five-county area surrounding the city of Los Angeles will have experienced more growth in terms of sheer numbers of people, 2.2 million, than any other region of the nation when the 1990 census is taken, the Census Bureau reported.

However, the ethnic and economic characteristics of the growth within the five-county region of Los Angeles, Ventura, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino is by no means uniform.

In Los Angeles County, for example, a tide of immigrants, many of them poor, is gradually tipping the population balance in favor of Latinos and Asians.

But in San Bernardino and Riverside counties, where the growth transforms orange groves and sagebrush into housing tracts, the new population is made up mostly of middle-class Anglos heading inland from the coast in search of affordable housing.

The Census Bureau estimates the combined population of the two counties at about 2.3 million, almost 720,000 more people than lived there in 1980.

“It’s the third wave of population growth in Southern California after L.A. County in the 1940s and Orange County in the 1950s and ‘60s,” said John Oshimo, a senior planner for the Southern California Assn. of Governments. Nonetheless, Oshimo pointed out that what is happening in San Bernardino-Riverside does not begin to rival the Orange County growth rate of 226% during the 1950s.

The Census Bureau’s latest report underscores a migration pattern away from rural communities toward metropolitan areas.

Since 1980, according to the report, the population of metropolitan America has grown by 16.8 million, or nearly 10%, significantly higher than the nationwide growth of 8.5%. In smaller cities and towns, by contrast, the growth rate is only 4.5%, representing an increase of only 2.4 million people.

The bureau estimates that 77% of the nation’s 246 million people live in metropolitan areas and that close to 50% of the population live in areas of 1 million or more people.

The New York City-Northern New Jersey-Long Island region, with an estimated 18.1 million population, continues to have the largest concentration of people in the country. Its growth rate during the last decade, however, is only 3.3%.

The Census Bureau’s report says the fastest growth rate in the country is being felt by metropolitan areas of less than 500,000, many of them in Florida. With a population of 138,000, Naples, Fla., leads the nation with a 61.1% growth rate. The runners-up are also Florida cities: Ocala with a population of 190,000 and a growth rate of 55% and Ft. Pierce with 232,000 people and a 53% rate of growth.

The Sunbelt continues to be the fastest growing section of the country, while the Midwest had the largest number of metropolitan areas losing population. Pittsburgh experienced the biggest population decline, 139,000, followed by Detroit with a loss of 133,000.

In California, percentage growth leaders include the metropolitan areas surrounding Stockton, 31.2%; Bakersfield, 29%; Modesto, 28.3%; San Diego, 27.3%, and Sacramento, 25.9%

In San Bernardino and Riverside, the population boom has engendered new towns, along with warnings about deteriorating air quality and dwindling water supplies, especially in newly settled mountain and desert areas.

Although land and housing prices were the draws for most people moving to the Inland Empire, the appeal has begun to wear off in towns like Corona in Riverside County, where some houses cost as much as $300,000.

Officials in Riverside County say growth has been most conspicuous in the bedroom community of Moreno Valley, where the population increased from 15,000 to 20,000 in 1980 to more than 100,000 today, and in the communities of Temecula and Rancho California, where a 1980 population of about 10,000 has quadrupled.