Extremely light traffic moves along the 110 Harbor Freeway toward downtown mid afternoon, March 20, 2020, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill)
(CN) — The rate of population growth in California slowed to its lowest point since 1900, according to a demographic analysis released by the California Department of Finance on Wednesday.
California’s population grew by 21,200 from July 1, 2019 to July 1, 2020, a growth rate of about 0.05 percent, even smaller than the previous lowest rate of 0.23 percent that occurred the year before.
“Those numbers are really startling,” said Mark Baldassare, president of the Public Policy Institute of California. “This isn’t the Golden State of the past, which was a place in which we saw people from other states and abroad coming to find their way to the California dream.”