The great flight from Silicon Valley is over.
Battered by the dot-com bust and stratospheric housing prices, 75,000 more people
migrated out of Santa Clara County for other parts of the United States than moved in from 2001 to 2005. (US census figures show county population from 2000 to 2005 was +16,467
people.) But in the past year, that outflow ground to a near halt. Meanwhile, the rate of foreign
immigration to the South Bay surpassed Los Angeles County this year, allowing Santa Clara County to notch its largest percentage
population growth since 1997.
Only three California counties added more people than Santa Clara County's 29,900
additional residents, according to new population estimates released Wednesday by the state Department of Finance.
"We've had a turnaround in job growth and job prospects, and people are talking
about the valley again as a place to be, as opposed to the rest of the state, that had out-migration," said Stephen Levy,
director of the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy in Palo Alto.
(Have you noticed that when they say something like "turnaround in job growth" they never give a hard number? The statistics we track show "Residents Employed" in Santa Clara County represent:
+2.1Ku YTD-2007
+16.7Ku y-o-y (since October,
2006)
+17.1Ku y-o-2y (net since October,
2005) or
+8.2Ku y-o-3Y (net since October,
2004).
That job turnaround dates to mid-2005,
(Sliced this way, since July, 2005 (28 months), the net gain is +18.6Ku. (i.e., ~1% in a county of
~1.8M people...)) about the same time the state population figures show a reversal in the outflow
of people between Santa Clara County and the rest of the country. From 2004 to 2005, about 13,600 more
people departed the South Bay for another U.S. address than the number who arrived from somewhere else in the country. (This seems an "odd" way to express the change.
Unless the goal is to obscure "the number who arrived from somewhere outside the country?")
From 2006 to 2007, the flow in nearly matched the flow out, with only 856 more people leaving Santa
Clara County than moving in. (Expressed this
way, -856 includes the net from foreign immigration. This seems to be a different statistic, with different ramifications,
than the earlier "from somewhere else in the country.")
Based on these
descriptions, we assume the 29,900 claim applies to the first eleven months of 2007.
Also note the terms
of how each change was measured are undefined and/or different from one another.
...having exhausted
their ability to provide (or invent) "useful" facts, this piece devolves into "entertainment" (at least for
the real estate industry):
"The net flows are all about two things - jobs and housing," said Hans Johnson,
a demographer with the Public Policy Institute of California. (But they never gave actual "net flows," except for
2006-to-2007--where the figure was negative!.) "A few years ago, you were still feeling the effects
of the dot-com bust," and in the past year the increase in housing prices has slowed or stopped, he said. (You're telling us the flattening of house prices is now inciting in-migration?
Do you walk to school or carry your lunch?)
"It's not the case that Santa Clara is all of sudden affordable, but
it certainly hasn't gotten much worse than it was," he said. "A few years ago we were seeing those phenomenal increases year
after year after year that undoubtedly were driving people out." (In case you missed it the first time, they
again claim a combination of "stratospheric" house prices but "less-than-phenomenal increases year after year" is now attracting people to move here?!?! Puh-leeze!)
Natural increase
The South Bay's latest baby boom also continued, as natural increase - the number
by which births outnumber deaths - accounted for the majority of the county's population growth. But at the same time, more
than 40 percent of Santa Clara County's population growth came from foreign immigration. (Let's see: If 50%+ of population growth is births and 40%+ is immigration,
this leaves less than 10% of the alleged population increase, or 2,990, as newly-relocated US residents.)
Immigrants "are a large percentage of our buyers," said Craig LeMessurier, a
spokesman for KB Home, the largest home-builder in Santa Clara County.
(Yet November, 2007 sales are down -40% y-o-y.)
With KB Home now hiring multilingual agents and advertising in the Chinese, Latino
and Indian media, "it's definitely had an impact in how we market" housing, he said.
Santa Clara County now has about 1.82 million residents, up 1.67 percent (Finally! The actual population number.) from
last year. The county's growth led the Bay Area by a significant margin - although San Francisco grew by a healthy 1.4 percent.
Riverside County in Southern California was the state's fastest-growing county,
growing by 3.3 percent, or about 66,000 people. The Department of Finance estimates are for the one-year period ending July
1. (At last, a source for the data. BTW, isn't
Riverside County ground zero in the sub-prime housing debacle? How does a county show up among the league leaders in
foreclosures and also in population growth?)
'Challenges'
While growth can mean more traffic, longer lines and bigger environmental problems,
Levy said it beats the alternative.
"There are challenges from growth, but an economist would tell you that, at
least in California, the only time we don't grow is when the economy is terrible," Levy
said. "It's hard to think of the Silicon Valley economy thriving and it not resulting in people coming here." (Except this seems to directly contradict the earlier assertion, "856 more people
leaving Santa Clara County than moving in" from 2006 to 2007. Unless the economy was
"terrible" in 2006?)
California's population grew by 1.17 percent during the past year, with the
state adding about 438,000 people to reach a population of 37.8 million. The five counties that added the most new residents
- Riverside, Los Angeles, San Diego, Santa Clara and San Bernardino - accounted for nearly half of the state's growth. (Aren't four of these five counties leading the
league in foreclosures? And illegal immigration?)
While San Francisco held its historic position as a key gateway for immigrants, people
are moving out into the rest of the Bay Area, particularly to Santa Clara County, said Linda Gage, senior demographer with
the Department of Finance.
A 'gateway'
Santa Clara County has joined San Francisco as "one of the gateways into
the country for many, many people, and certainly a gateway into California," Gage said.
Vivian Wang, an agent with Coldwell Banker in Cupertino, said she believes that
engineers or other tech workers from China, India and Europe are a big part of what's keeping the housing market strong in
cities like Cupertino, Los Altos, Mountain View, Saratoga and Palo Alto.
(At least anecdotally, this has been true for decades. Why is this "news" now?)
"Very few people I work with are native Californians," Wang said. "If not for
those immigrants, I think the housing market in those specific neighborhoods would be the same as other areas, which is very,
very down - 30 to 40 percent off." (If this was supposed
to be an article about population growth, why are we hearing from a real estate agent?)
* * * * * End of article * * * * *
Conclusion:
This piece has a lot of
numbers and seems to present hard facts. However, close examination shows the numbers are poorly-sourced and/or inconsistent.
If it's not "useful," it's at least "entertaining"
--for the real estate industry.
We submit the most-useful way to use population
data vs. housing prices is the percent participation participation in the labor force. If we're gaining jobs faster
than people, this tends to bode well for higher housing prices. Gaining people with jobs should be expected
to have the opposite effect.
Holding our nose and accepting this article's top-line
population figures as valid, we find:
Year Population Employed*
%-Participation
1990 1,497,577 818.900 54.68%
2000 1,682,585 911,100 54.15%
2001 1,591,118** 891,800 56.05%
2004 1,685,452** 776,000 46.04%
2005 1,699,052 781,200 45.98%
2006 1,789,606** 797,100 44.54%
2007 1,820,000** 809,891 44.44%
* = "Residents
Employed Annual Average" as reported by California EDD
**= figures
stated or implied from this article
Not only is employment participation down nearly
10% since 2000 -2001, it's down 10%+ since 1990.
Pertinent to today's rant, the labor participation
rate fell in each of the three year's since the so-called "job turnaround" allegedly started in 2005.
When the participation rate starts going back up,
THEN call and "inform" us about how well the economy and housing prices are performing. Until then, stick to "entertainment"...
