Notations From the Grid (Special Sunday Edition): On the Scene in California Courtesy the New York Times

 

Downtown Los Angeles during the coronavirus pandemic last year. Philip Cheung for The New York Times

By Jill Cowan

Good morning.

Want to start a lively — and possibly tense — conversation among Californians? Say something about how everyone’s leaving the state. You might hear about exhaustion from fleeing fire after fire, or frustration with high taxes and business regulations.

If you’re talking to Caitlyn Jenner, the former Olympian who is vying to replace Gov. Gavin Newsom in a recall election, you might hear about a fellow private plane owner “packing up his hangar” because he can no longer bear to see homeless people.

Inevitably, someone will talk about California’s astronomical housing costs: Do you know how much house you could get in Idaho for what you’re paying in Los Angeles? Can you imagine having a yard? And yet, for all the supposed downsides of living here, the price of a home seems only to ever be going up and up.

In recent weeks, new data about California’s population has at once confirmed and complicated those narratives.

First there came the news that while California did grow over the past decade, it didn’t grow fast enough according to the 2020 census to prevent the state from losing a seat in Congress for the first time. Then, as my colleague Shawn Hubler reported on Friday, the state released its own population estimates, which showed that for the first time in more than a century, California actually lost people last year.

The decline was small by share of the state’s nearly 40 million residents — just 0.46 percent — but in raw numbers, that is 182,083 people, or two Santa Barbaras, as Shawn noted.

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Both of those changes were major reversals for a state that has, since the Gold Rush, been defined by lots of people moving here from around the world. Neither was totally surprising, though. In recent years, California’s population growth has slowed to its lowest recorded rates since 1900.

Much of the slowdown is the result of forces that have reshaped the United States more broadly, like a declining birthrate and the Trump administration’s policies discouraging or limiting immigration.

A hospital in Los Angeles in January.Isadora Kosofsky for The New York Times

Demographers say that it was probably the coronavirus that tipped the state into population decline — and that once the pandemic has passed, there will be a rebound.

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Some 62,270 people have died of Covid-19 in California. Immigration policies that were already restrictive became even more so amid global lockdowns, resulting in what state officials estimated was a loss of 100,000 residents and roughly 53,000 fewer international students.

To be sure, migration to other states is a significant part of the story, as well. But as an analysis of census data by the Public Policy Institute of California found, the people who headed for another state largely haven’t been the wealthy, educated tech workers whose departures for Miami or Austin have been the cause of much hand-wringing.

Rather, the people moving into California tend to be more educated and wealthier than the people leaving, according to the analysis: From 2015 to 2019, California gained 74,500 working-age adults with a bachelor’s degree or more — and lost 465,500 working-age adults with less than a bachelor’s degree. Over the past decade, California actually gained almost 114,000 high-income (defined as making more than $138,750 a year) working-age adults.

And while some former Californians have loudly proclaimed that they’re taking their families and dollars elsewhere out of distaste for the state’s liberal politics, almost half of the adults who left California in the 2010s said they left primarily for jobs, and nearly a quarter said their primary reason for leaving was housing.

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Of course, a combination of many factors influences any given family’s decisions. And the net losses to other states should serve as a warning, experts say.

But determining what kind of action these signals should prompt is, as always, the challenge.

Which raises the eternal — if increasingly urgent — question: If California’s population is contracting because thousands of people can’t afford to live here, then what kind of communities will be left? Who is California for?

For more:

Read the full story about California’s population loss last year. Here’s what to know about the state’s loss of a House seat. The Inland Empire had the nation’s highest rent increases at the start of the year, The Orange County Register reports. See the real faces of Silicon Valley, different from the men idealized in the lore of a deeply divided place. Track California’s latest coronavirus numbers and pandemic restrictions.

Here’s what else to know today

Ana Paredes, from Guatemala, reunified with her daughter Melissa, 10, after seven years of not seeing her in person.Mark Abramson for The New York Times

Flush with a tsunami of cash from federal aid and a booming stock market, Gov. Gavin Newsom today will propose expanding the state’s direct stimulus program to include California’s middle class, my colleague Shawn Hubler reports. Part of a $100 billion revised budget plan which the governor releases this week, the plan would send one-time checks of $600 to $1,600 to households earning less than $75,000 annually that have not yet already received a stimulus check. “Will I recognize you?” Melissa, 10, asked her mother, after not seeing her for seven years. Her arrival in Los Angeles on April 2 was the end of a 2,500-mile journey from Guatemala. Thousands of migrant children like her have made a similar trek. Southern California air quality regulators adopted a landmark rule late on Friday that would force the thousands of warehouses that have exploded across the Inland Empire to clean up their emissions. The rule could spur the electrification of fleets of trucks rumbling through the region. A red flag wildfire warning for much of Northern California was extended through Tuesday after several small grass fires ignited over the weekend, The Sacramento Bee reports. Kaiser Health News examines how big tech companies like Salesforce, Google and Facebook have received no-bid government contracts to carry out critical public health activities, but have instead undermined California’s public health system. The fight over the SALT tax break, which tends to benefit wealthy people living in heavily Democratic areas, could hold up Biden’s infrastructure plan. The Los Angeles Times spoke to Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, California’s first surgeon general, about how she’s navigating the pandemic. Miriam Pawel argues in a guest essay that while the recall effort feels like a farce, Governor Newsom and the Democrats should treat it as such at their own peril. The music of Eddie Johns, a homeless musician in Los Angeles, was sampled by Daft Punk, but he was never paid or credited, The Los Angeles Times reports. Tawny Kitaen, the 1980s music video star who danced alongside bands like White Snake, died on Friday at her home in Newport Beach. She was 59.

And finally …

Phyllis Lyon, left, and Del Martin at their home in San Francisco in 2008.Marcio Jose Sanchez/Associated Press

The house, according to The San Francisco Chronicle, is a low-slung wooden cottage on a hilltop at the southern rim of Noe Valley with “P.L.” and “D.M.” scratched into the concrete.

For years, those initials were the only sign that the house played a key role in L.G.B.T.Q. history: It was the longtime home of Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin, the first same-sex couple to legally marry in California, and an integral gathering place for lesbian rights organizers.

Last week, though, the San Francisco board of supervisors decided it would officially become a historic landmark. Mayor London Breed said she planned to sign the measure after it was reviewed again this week.

“Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin were true champions of L.G.B.T.Q. rights, and San Francisco was incredibly lucky to have their leadership and activism,” she said in a statement.