POPULATION : California's Residents Are Now Outwardly Mobile : Report shows more people are leaving the Golden State than are immigrating. Nationally, there is a trend toward staying put.

By COLLEEN KRUEGER

Oct. 11, 1995 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

WASHINGTON —

From the Forty-Niners of the Gold Rush to the Depression-era farm workers of John Steinbeck’s novels, California has seen most of the nation’s great migratory races from the finish line.

But a new Census Bureau report shows that, as American migration slows from a run to a crawl, more people are moving out of the Golden State than are moving in.

According to the report, Geographic Mobility: March 1993 to March 1994, a smaller percentage of Americans moved from one state to another during that year than at any time since 1950.

The figures also show a decline in the percentage of Americans moving anywhere--from across the street to across the country--with 16.7% of those people over the age of 1 moving. In the 1950s and 1960s, mobility hovered around 20%.

Economists and other academics have credited the trend to an aging population, continued economic insecurity, the growth of two-income families and a falling national birth rate.

But while the rest of the nation is staying put, Californians are picking up and getting out. “People are just pouring out of California,” said Kristin A. Hansen, who produced the report. “The state is losing people like crazy.”

The census numbers show that 635,000 people left California for other states, while just 399,000 people moved in--a net loss of 236,000 people in a state of 31 million. The figures do not include international migration.

Of the departing Californians, about half remained in the West, almost a quarter moved to the South and smaller numbers headed to the Midwest and Northeast.

Hansen said that another set of figures called census estimates are even more accurate, as they combine traditional census interview information with statistics on births, deaths, immigration, emigration and the size of the armed forces while adjusting for undercounting in the 1990 census. These estimates--not included in the study--show the net loss of population in California even higher, at 426,000. Those estimates do include international migration, which is a net gain to the state of 272,000.

Within the state, the region described in the study as the large metropolitan area of Los Angeles, or Los Angeles-Anaheim-Riverside, showed the greatest decline. For every person who came to the region, three left--resulting in a net loss of 351,000 people.

Since the study area included both metropolitan and suburban regions, the census did not examine the migration patterns between inner-city Los Angeles and the suburbs, which demographers have watched with keen interest since the 1992 riots. In the San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose area, roughly the same number of people moved in and out in 1993-94, according to estimates.

The migration from California reflects a downturn in the state’s job market that can be linked to massive defense cutbacks and government regulations that made California unattractive to industry, said Michael J. Boskin, a member of a California government task force studying the state’s economy.

But state leaders have, to some extent, seen what has occurred and California’s job market is improving, Boskin said, citing a recent prediction in the quarterly report, UCLA Economic Forecast, that jobs in California will soon be created about twice as fast as jobs in other states. Daniel J. B. Mitchell, a UCLA public policy and management professor who helped produce that report, agreed that the fall of the aerospace industry in Southern California has affected emigration significantly.

Declining jobs and subsequent emigration also have hurt California’s real estate industry, bursting the industry’s “L.A. bubble economy,” Mitchell said. The fallout is cyclical: Fewer real estate buyers mean fewer jobs in construction, which means fewer people come for jobs and therefore produce fewer real estate buyers. “There was all this construction in the 1980s--some would say over-construction--and when there weren’t tenants and there weren’t tourists to fill the hotels, the market went bust,” Mitchell said.

That phenomenon is not limited to industrial construction, as many California homeowners have learned the hard way, he added.

“No one wants to buy an expensive home and watch its value decline every year,” Mitchell said. “People thought they were wealthy and found out year by year that they were not.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Moving On

UNITED STATES

Total population: 255,774,000

Nonmovers: 212,939,000

Movers: 41,590,000

Movers were 16.7% of the population. Those who went to a different state numbered 6,726,000.

****

CALIFORNIA

Moved in: 399,000

Moved out: 635,000

Net migration: -236,000