California, long associated with youth, is getting old — and twice as quickly as the national average. The walker seems likely to replace the surfboard as the state’s defining feature.

California’s over-65 population, the Stanford Center on Longevity notes, will double in 20 years, while  the nationwide population this will take 30 years to double.

By 2060, the state’s median age is projected to be over 45. In 1970, it was nearly 28.

The aging of California is made more difficult by the steady loss of working-age people, particularly in middle-aged families. Since 2000, more than 4 million net domestic migrants have moved to other parts of the nation from California, a pace that has accelerated in recent years.

Even immigrants seem to have stopped coming, and not only because of President Donald Trump’s policies.

LA’s foreign-born population actually declined in the 2010s, as immigrants looked elsewhere for work. In the deindustrializing economy that is California outside of the high-tech sector, immigrants are propelling a poverty rate that is the highest of any state. 

California has stopped building schools and factories. Instead, we build hospitals to accommodate the old.

Rapid aging is also a natural byproduct of extremely high house prices. These lead young people, particularly those with children, to leave the state.

The gap between California homeownership rates and those in the nation at large is now at a record high, notes Berkeley’s Terner Center. Between 1980 and 2020, the share of 25-to-35-year-olds in California who owned their homes declined from 39.4% to just 15.5%.

So it is no surprise that people in their 30s and early 40s, according to IRS numbers, are precisely the group deserting the state most rapidly, including in Silicon Valley. 

Perhaps most revealing, California now ranks last in per capita terms of attracting new residents, a stunning reversal from its traditional role as a beacon to the rest of the country and the world.

The precipitous decline in state’s total fertility rate is therefore no surprise. Long above the national average, California’s fertility rate is now the nation’s 10th lowest, far below that in key competitor states like Texas. 

In LA County and Orange County, birth rates have plunged over 15% in the past decade. In LA County, the nation’s most populous, the under-25 population shrank by nearly three-quarters of a million. That’s three-quarters of a million people who would have joined the prime-age workforce over the next 25 years.

In contrast, Texas, Utah, Idaho and Arizona have enjoyed double digit growth in this same cohort over  the past two decades. 

Given this worrisome trend we might consider some serious policy changes. Regulations make it  extraordinarily difficult to build the single-family homes preferred by the vast majority of Californians. Dense, expensive urban areas are not ideal places to raise a family, except for the very affluent. 

Rather than urban “infill” housing, we need more lower-density developments. Less-dense regions also tend to produce more children than larger, dense areas. 

The impact on California schools is obvious. California’s schools have seen enrollment declines higher than in the rest of nation. Enrollment fell by 325,000 students (5%)  between 2019 and 2023. By 2031, this loss could widen to one million. In LAUSD, the state’s largest district, total enrollment has decreased by 27% over the last decade, and 44% over 20 years.

Reforms in housing policy are necessary to remain competitive with the rest of the country. But those reforms would require changes in California’s land use patterns, energy policy, taxes, and regulations .  

Reform of tax policies, for example, could allow seniors to sell their houses without crushing capital gains liabilities, something now being proposed in Washington. We could also encourage the building of senior housing, as was recently proposed by LA Mayor Karen Bass, which could open opportunities for young people to buy the houses they leave.

Restoring hope to the younger generation should be an imperative, even for the Boomers. If not, young people will find their desperate offspring roused to generational war against what The Atlantic describes as  a corrupt  gerontocracy that has  “amassed disproportionate wealth and power.”    

We have already seen this script play out in  New York, where underpaid and often overeducated  young people opt for radical leftism, embracing redistribution of wealth. In reality, that means taking money not just from billionaires but from any Boomer with a decent income and some property. This will supposedly pay for free buses and daycare; rent control; and government-owned groceries. The primary victims? People like small landlords — largely first and second-generation immigrants — and bodega owners, the vast majority Latino. 

Socialism is not the answer to the aging crisis in California. But if we fail to address the housing crisis, and start creating better jobs, we may experience the dystopian future staring at us.

Joel Kotkin is the presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University and senior research fellow at the Civitas Institute of the University of Texas at Austin.

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