People are leaving Los Angeles, and it could ‘haunt us for decades’
Long the epicenter of population growth in the United States, Los Angeles is slowly losing its people because of a series of demographic shifts that experts say could have profound implications for the county if trends continue. High housing prices have led a growing number of residents to leave the region for more affordable parts of the country. Immigration — long a pipeline for population growth — has ebbed significantly under a federal crackdown. A rapidly aging population is adding to the concern over how these declines will affect the local economy. “We’ve been depending on immigrants all along to sort of backfill our losses. As people move outward, they’re replaced by newcomers,” said Dowell Myers, a professor of urban planning and demography at USC. “If we had a continued drop in immigration for five years, it would be a major crisis. You can handle one or two years, but as long as the domestic migration is going out, you kind of need to replace those workers with somebody.” New data from the Census Bureau …
