Nevada population growing quickly, in part thanks to outflow from California

Image by esudroff from Pixabay

(Noell Evans) – Nevada is one of the fastest-growing states in the nation in terms of population, topping three million people in 2018, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

A sizable source of that recent population growth has been people moving from California. From July 2017 through July 2018, more than 50,000 Californians crossed state lines to become residents of Nevada, about 40 percent of the total of all the new residents from any other state during that period.

Nevada’s boosters say the state is attractive to those looking for a certain way of life.

“It’s a really nice magnet for California,” Robert Lang, executive director of Brookings Mountain West at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas told The Salt Lake Tribune. “Master planned communities, similar climates, not that far away from relatives.”

As an example, the California Association of Realtors has estimated that a single-family home in October cost $1.54 million in San Francisco and “just” $663,000 in Los Angeles. That same home has an average cost of $307,000 in Las Vegas.

Those coming in from California did not pass many residents going the other way. During that 2017-18 period, only 22,400 Nevada residents left the state to start a new life in California. It’s the lowest number of people “transferring” residency from Nevada to California in the past five years. Other states that attracted people leaving Nevada were Texas, Arizona, Utah and Washington.

By

Noell Evans | The Center Square