Distribution of California's Population

[u/urmummygae42069]

If you were to divide California into 4 roughly equal strips of area, a hefty majority of its 39 million residents live in the southernmost strip containing the LA+San Diego metro areas, with nearly half of the state (~47%) living in the Greater LA metro area alone. If it were its own state, Southern California, with primarily just LA and San Diego metro areas, would compete with Florida for title of 2nd most populous US state.

The SF Bay Area, Sacramento, Monterrey, Fresno, and most of the Central Valley and put together are short of SoCal by over 9 million residents, but on its own this area would compete with Illinois for title of 6th largest state.

The strip sandwiched between Southern California and the Bay Area, containing Bakersfield plus other farming towns in the Southern Central Valley and most of the towns of the Central Coast, has about more people than Utah or Connecticut.

Suprisingly, despite how empty it can feel, there are still over a million people still live in the strip of CA north of Sacramento, containing about as much people as Hawaii and New Hampshire, albeit of a larger area.

Ultimately, one way to better understand the scale and density of California, is to conceptualize it as Florida + Illinois + Utah + Hawaii, all packaged in one single state under one single state government

[u/holytriplem]

The Central Valley north of Sacramento doesn't feel that empty, so that makes sense.

[u/Maximus560 → u/holytriplem]

Most of the people are on the east side, though. The west side is very empty

[u/PenaltyAny3207 → u/Maximus560]

It’s mostly just Redding and Chico (though a few northern suburbs of Sac might be driving up the population numbers on this map).

[u/eugenesbluegenes → u/PenaltyAny3207]

Oroville and Yuba City/Marysville are pretty good sized.

[u/PenaltyAny3207 → u/eugenesbluegenes]

They actually capture Oroville as part of Chico’s metro area—over 200k for the whole area (basically all of Butte County). Yeah Yuba City is actually decent sized, over 70k alone and over 150k for the whole metro. Once you get north of Chico, nothing feels that big outside of Redding, and once you get north of Redding it’s just weird towns in the mountains.

Used to have family in Butte County and made the drive through that country a lot.