- By: Sean Coffey
- Category:
Berkeley, CA, April 14, 2022 — The number of people leaving California for other states appears to have slowed during the last quarter of 2021, while the number of people moving into the state appears to be rebounding, according to new estimates released today by the nonpartisan California Policy Lab (CPL) using credit-bureau data through the end of 2021. These trends are especially pronounced in the Bay Area counties that originally saw the largest pandemic-era shifts in domestic migration, like San Francisco. CPL also released a corrected version of its December 2021 Pandemic Patterns report, which corrects an error that led CPL to significantly undercount the number of people moving into California since 2020.
"The changes in domestic migration we've seen since the pandemic began appear to be slowing and perhaps even reversing," explains co-author Natalie Holmes, a Research Fellow at the California Policy Lab and a PhD student at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley. "In the Bay Area, in particular, exits are down and entrances are up during the last quarter of 2021 - though they remain significantly different than before the pandemic - which suggests that pandemic migration shifts may be weakening."
The updated brief that CPL released today corrects earlier estimates of entrances. Exits were not affected. CPL's errata provides more background on the error and a table summarizing the main corrections.
"We are glad to correct the record and release these updated estimates of how many people moved into California since the start of the pandemic," explains co-author Evan White, Executive Director of the California Policy Lab's UC Berkeley site. "One of the biggest takeaways from our corrected research is that while domestic migration into California did decrease between the start of the pandemic in 2020, and the end of the third quarter of 2021, it was only an 8% decrease, not the 38% decrease that we had originally estimated."
Additional Background
CPL's analysis uses the University of California Consumer Credit Panel (UC-CCP)
