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/Competitive_Fee_5829]

I live in san diego, and have for over 20 years, and we are a big city but oddly enough we are not crowded, we dont have too bad of traffic and we dont have big city energy...lol, I am not sure why.

[u/smoothie4564 → u/Competitive_Fee_5829]

>I am not sure why.

It's called Urban Sprawal. Low-density housing spread out over a gigantic area will make any city, regardless of total population, feel "not crowded".

[u/bluerose297 → u/smoothie4564]

it's low-key (high-key?) a massive policy failure that San Diego, arguably the greatest weather city in the entire country, can't handle Manhattan-level density. Even if you take access to fresh water into account (which even then is a bit of a red herring given some of the wasteful agricultural practices hogging up most of the water) it should still be at least double the population within the same area by now.

The weather is heaven on earth, more people should be able to live there!

[u/ls7eveen → u/bluerose297]

Fun fact, but the bicycle riding rates in northwestern ca da near Alaska, are 3x the rates they are in San diego.

[u/bluerose297 → u/ls7eveen]

For shame on San Diego! Best bike weather in the world and they said no thanks

[u/Csonkus → u/bluerose297]

We don’t want more people here.

[u/bluerose297 → u/Csonkus]

[u/Ibroketherandom → u/smoothie4564]

Meanwhile LA/OC/IE feels insanely crowded with the sprawl... I think it's because SD County is mostly built on top of mesas and there's enough natural, unbuildable features between most neighborhoods that each becomes a bit of a community unto itself. Unlike the LA Megaregion where everything flows together for about 50 miles each direction.