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“The flight from the nation’s major metropolitan area core counties increased 60 percent between 2015 and 2016, according to just-released estimates from the US Census Bureau (Note). A total of 321,000 more residents left the core counties than moved in, up from 199,000 in 2015. This is ten times the decade’s smallest domestic migration loss of 32,000 for the same counties which occurred in 2012. Suburban counties continued to attract net domestic migrants, at a somewhat higher rate than in recent years and much higher than in the early part of the decade. The suburban counties gained 235,000 domestic migrants in 2016, compared to 224,000 in 2014 and more than double the low point of 113,000 in 2011 (Figure 1). “

After years of being overrun by new residents drawn by a red-hot economy, the number of people moving out has begun to catch up with the number moving in, new census data show. In fact, in some parts of the Bay Area — including Santa Clara, San Mateo and Marin counties — already more people are leaving than arriving, according to the estimates released Thursday, which cover the period from July 1, 2015, to June 30, 2016. The same would be true in San Francisco if it weren’t for the high number moving in from abroad.

Nowhere is this dynamic more evident than in California, where the state government has all but declared war on single-family homes by banning new peripheral development, driving up house prices throughout metropolitan areas. Regulatory fees typically add upward of $50,000, two-and-a-half times the national average; new demands for “zero emissions” homes promise to boost this by an additional $25,000.

The speech, at a meeting of the California Latino Economic Institute, served as a counter-step to Gov. Jerry Brown’s indictment of Trump in his State of the State address last week. While echoing Brown’s characterization of California as a “beacon of hope” for other states and countries, Villaraigosa lamented rising home prices, stagnant wages and a state poverty rate that ranks highest in the nation when adjusted for the cost of living. . . .“So we can’t be truly progressive unless all of us in California are progressing together … Economic inequality has grown because our policies have not kept pace with our changing economy.”

Several recent theories emphasize the negative effects of an aging population on economic growth, either because of the lower labor force participation and productivity of older workers or because aging will create an excess of savings over desired investment, leading to secular stagnation. We show that there is no such negative relationship in the data. If anything, countries experiencing more rapid aging have grown more in recent decades. We suggest that this counterintuitive finding might reflect the more rapid adoption of automation technologies in countries undergoing more pronounced demographic changes, and provide evidence and theoretical underpinnings for this argument.

The paper, by Daron Acemoglu of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Pascual Restrepo of Boston University, argues aging populations have not had a negative effect on the growth of per-capita gross domestic product. In fact, some aging countries have seen faster growth. . . The economists find that countries where the population over age 50 is growing faster than the 20- to 49-year-old population have been more likely to acquire robots to do a worker’s job. Those investments make it easier for firms to replace departing workers even when there are fewer younger workers to take the retirees’ place.

In sharp contrast to the 1960s California governed by Jerry Brown’s great father, Pat, upward mobility is not particularly promising for the state’s majority Latino next generation. Not only are housing prices out of reach for all but a few, but the state’s public education system ranks 40th in the nation, behind New York, Texas and South Carolina.  If California remains the technological leader, it is also becoming the harbinger of something else — a kind of feudal society divided by a rich elite and a larger poverty class, while the middle class either struggles or leaves town.

The evidence in this report suggests that Californian children have higher rates of income mobility because of their parents’ and their own characteristics, not because growing up in California results in more mobility. On average, growing up in California results in somewhat lower adult earnings for children compared to living elsewhere in the United States. . . According to the Chetty and Hendren estimates, had these children grown up somewhere else, they would have experienced slightly greater upward income mobility. . . While growing up in California results in lower future earnings for low–income children on average, there is a great deal of variation in these outcomes at a local level. Within California, growing up in a particular county can increase or decrease a child’s future annual income by a couple of thousand dollars.

Although Americans nationwide have been flooding south and west for years, the Golden State has become an exception. Nearly 62 percent of Americans lived in the two regions, Justin Fox observed from Census figures. “That’s up from 60.4 percent in the 2010 census, 58.1 percent in 2000, 55.6 percent in 1990 — and 44 percent in 1950. The big anomaly is California, which is very much in the West, yet has lost an estimated 383,344 residents to other states since 2010.”

The jobs that have been disappearing, like machine operator, are predominantly those that men do. The occupations that are growing, like health aide, employ mostly women. . . But while more than a fifth of American men aren’t working, they aren’t running to these new service-sector jobs. Why? They require very different skills, and pay a lot less.

Barely half of 30-year-olds earn more than their parents did at a similar age, a research team found, an enormous decline from the early 1970s when the incomes of nearly all offspring outpaced their parents. Even rapid economic growth won’t do much to reverse the trend.

The Bay Area’s black population experienced a dramatic migration into outer suburban parts of the region over a 14-year span, the result of the rising cost of living in inner regions, according to a new report by the Oakland nonprofit Urban Habitat.

We estimate rates of “absolute income mobility” – the fraction of children who earn more than their parents – by combining historical data from Census and CPS cross-sections with panel data for recent birth cohorts from de-identified tax records. Our approach overcomes the key data limitation that has hampered research on trends in intergenerational mobility: the lack of large panel datasets linking parents and children. We find that rates of absolute mobility have fallen from approximately 90%for children born in 1940 to 50% for children born in the 1980s. The result that absolute mobility has fallen sharply over the past half century is robust to the choice of price deflator, the definition of income, and accounting for taxes and transfers. In counterfactual simulations, we find that increasing GDP growth rates alone cannot restore absolute mobility to the rates experienced by children born in the 1940s. In contrast, changing the distribution of growth across income groups to the more equal distribution experienced by the 1940 birth cohort would reverse more than 70% of the decline in mobility. These results imply that reviving the “American Dream” of high rates of absolute mobility would require economic growth that is spread more broadly across the income distribution.     

As Bay Area cities scramble to find housing solutions to prevent displacement, a new report warns that the region is resegregating by race and class.

A report from the U.S. Census Bureau says millennials are leaving Los Angeles at one of the highest rates in the country, LA Weekly reports. The analysis found that residents between the ages of 18 and 35 decreased by 7.4 percent over the last 10 years, a decrease of 780,000 people, making it the third-worst city for millennial population loss.