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This trend has likely helped hold back U.S. economic growth. Cities with the strongest job markets, such as New York and San Francisco, would grow even faster if more people could afford to live there, noted Jed Kolko, chief economist at the online real estate firm Trulia. The additional population would help spur further job growth, which, in turn, would strengthen the local economy and foster more of the middle-class jobs that the nation lacks.

Millennials tend to gravitate to certain cities. They’re more likely to live in San Diego than Newark, in Austin than Cleveland, in Washington than Tampa. But these geographic patterns bode poorly for their homeownership prospects: Millennials make up a larger share of the population in many metropolitan areas where they’re least likely to afford the housing.

Southern California, like the rest of America and, indeed, the higher-income world, is getting older, rapidly. Even as the region’s population is growing slowly, its ranks of seniors – people age 65 and older – is exploding. Since 2000, the Los Angeles metropolitan area population has grown by 6 percent, but its senior population swelled by 31 percent.

Small business owners are often left in the dark about the energy cost increases from environmental and climate change mandates. Latino-owned businesses are disproportionately impacted because many operate on a smaller profit margin, many don’t have as much access to financing and many businesses are less established. For minority-owned or family businesses, absorbing new environmental costs could mean being forced to reduce hours or lay off workers.

Full-time, permanent employment is getting closer to pre-recession levels, but part-time workers are still struggling to find full-time jobs, according to a new survey from CareerBuilder.

The study found 32 percent of part-time workers say they want to work full time but haven’t been able to land a full-time job.

Of those, 31 percent say they are the sole breadwinner in their household, and 39 percent say they struggle to make ends meet financially. One in four part-time workers who want full-time jobs said they currently work two or more jobs.

This report provides an overview of the demographic, social, and economic characteristics of California’s population. Topics include income, poverty, education, health insurance coverage, language, place of birth, migration, and more. The tabulations in this report are based on special data runs from the American Community Survey (ACS) Public Use Microdata Sample 1-year file. 

New figures highlight the growing gap between owners and renters in the Southland: Many homeowners are capitalizing on low interest rates to push down their monthly payment while renters are shelling out larger shares of their income to stay afloat.

A report released Wednesday by researchers at USC found that immigrants who are in California illegally make up nearly 10% of the state’s workforce and contribute $130 billion annually to its gross domestic product..

A new report by San Jose labor think tank Working Partnerships USA highlights an “invisible workforce” of janitors, landscapers and security guards keeping companies like Google Inc., Apple Inc. and Facebook Inc. up and running.

This spring, payroll employment in the US reached an all-time high, finally surpassing the pre-recession peak of 138.4 million jobs in the first quarter of 2008. At that time many said that the 8.7 million jobs lost in the Great Recession had at last been re-gained. However, they are not the same jobs that were lost, nor will unemployment have returned to a level less than the 5% of 2008. Much press reporting during this long economic recovery has expressed worry that low wage jobs dominate the labor market rebound, that the middle income household has not advanced economically, and that most of the income gains of the US have gone to those with high incomes, skewing the distribution of income in the US towards the wealthy or high-income earners.

Nowhere is that trend more pronounced than in Silicon Valley where the economic divide is widening between highly educated and skilled high-tech workers and low-paid workers who are trying to piece together a living in one of the country’s most expensive places.

California has experienced rapid population growth for most of its history, but that trend has come to an end. California’s population grew by 2.9 percent over the last three years, only slightly above the nation’s 2.4 percent increase. Over the last few decades, millions of Californians have left the Golden State for opportunities elsewhere.

The study (PDF), prepared by the economic consulting company IHS Global Insight (IHS), also compares which metro areas have the most households in the top, bottom, and middle thirds of the country’s income distribution. The areas with the fewest middle-income households are mostly coastal: Out of the 357 metro areas, San Jose has the lowest percentage of households making more than $35,000 and less than $75,000, followed by the areas around Bridgeport, Conn.; Washington, D.C.; San Francisco and Oakland; Boston; and New York. The Washington-Arlington-Alexandria and San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara metro areas have the highest percentage of households making more than $75,000 and the lowest percentage making less than $35,000.

The topic of income inequality and its effects has been the subject of countless analysis stretching back generations and crossing geopolitical boundaries. Despite the tendency to speak about this issue in moral terms, the central questions are economic ones: Would the U.S. economy be better off with a narrower income gap? And, if an unequal distribution of income hinders growth, which solutions could do more harm than good, and which could make the economic pie bigger for all?

Four in 10 U.S. households are straining financially five years after the Great Recession — many struggling with tight credit, soaring education debt and profound issues related to savings and retirement, according to a new Federal Reserve survey.