Prosper Magazine - June, 2007

 

Think: Joel Kotkin
The Third California

Joel Kotkin is an author, lecturer and academic with a wide range of expertise on global demographic and economic trends. His work ranges from a book on the evolution of cities throughout history to a study on the future of transporation mobility in the United States.

By Harrison Sheppard

One of his latest analyses is on what he and coauthor William Frey term “The Third California.”

Vast inland stretches of the state from the Inland Empire to Sacramento and the North Valley are growing at a rapid clip, as Californians living in the First and Second Californias — the Bay Area and the greater Los Angeles area, respectively — becoming increasingly frustrated with congestion and high cost of living. Kotkin believes these inland areas are the future of the state, both in terms of its economic success and its increasingly moderate political mindset.

A native New Yorker, Kotkin attended the University of California, Berkeley, and has lived in California since 1971. He currently lives in the San Fernando Valley with his wife and two daughters.

Prosper: What is the Third California?

Basically we’re talking about the interior parts of California — the Central Valley, up toward the northern suburbs of Sacramento, all the way down to Riverside and San Bernardino. We didn’t include the far north, the Sierra, and we didn’t cover Imperial (county).

Prosper: What are the commonalities that led to these areas being grouped together in your view?

They’ve all had rapid growth in the last 20, 30 years. Basically these were the backwaters of California 30 or 40 years ago. They have all gone through this growth spurt.

First, you had working-class migrations. Then you started getting more of an educated migration over time. At the same time you started to get immigration, so these places are much more diverse than they had been.

Sacramento is an exception in that it always had a relatively well-educated population, because it’s the state capital.

Prosper: What about the politics of this area? You have said it was closely linked to the success of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

There’s no question. If you had not had the growth in the interior of California in the last 10, 15 years, Arnold Schwarzenegger would not have been elected governor. It’s the one thing that’s provided a balance from California going way off on the Left Coast.

Prosper: Is Schwarzenegger’s centrist mode of governing — and his wife Maria Shriver’s moderating influence on his Republican politics — reflective of the mindset of the Third California?

To some extent. They like the directness that he projects. And also there is a kind of anti-tax, back-to-basics mentality. Not as much the “Let’s run the state so people can cross-dress with impunity” — that kind of politics of the coast.

There is the social liberalism, but not social activist liberalism, if you will. It’s not “Let’s go on a jihad for this fringe cause or that fringe cause.” It’s basically just not accepting the right-wing social agenda of parts of the Republican Party. That just doesn’t have much currency in California.

Prosper: Do you also believe that people’s politics change with their geography?

I think people who move to the Inland Empire from L.A. might be making the Inland Empire more liberal in some ways. But they also may become more conservative as they live there. People tend to react to their environments.

Let’s say you’re a young person and you’ve lived in L.A. or the Bay Area, and then you move to a suburb of Sacramento. You buy a house and start sending your kids to public schools and join a church. You might not go from radical left to radical right. But you might go from very liberal to a little more circumspect liberal, because your circumstances have changed, your neighbors have changed.

Prosper: Are communities of the Third California eventually going to face the same problems as Los Angeles and the Bay Area in terms of traffic and urban congestion? And how can they avoid that plight?

Certainly in certain places the distinctions will blur.

On the other hand, these places have a chance to plan better and develop in a way that makes more sense.

Places like the San Fernando Valley or the San Gabriel Valley (both in Los Angeles County) grew so quickly that nobody ever thought about how you can plan for growth intelligently. When people moved to the San Fernando Valley in 1955, there was no consciousness that you could run out of land, that every empty hillside could be filled.

Now they know these places can disappear.

Joel Kotkin Writing About The Third California:

"Most importantly, the Third California remains perhaps the greatest untapped outlet for upward mobility in the Golden State. In some senses, this reflects as well the difficulty of wealthier areas — such as First California’s San Francisco Bay Area and, to a lesser extent, coastal Second California in the south — to provide new jobs and opportunities, especially opportunities for homeownership.

The Third California extends from the outer suburbs of greater Los Angeles to the foothills of the high mountains of Northern California.

It covers a vast and diverse series of places, from urbanized areas like Sacramento to great suburban regions to some of the most fertile agricultural regions in the world.

To a large extent, what defines the Third California is how it contrasts with the increasingly congested, expensive, and physically hemmed in coastal region. Virtually all the fast-growing regions of the state, from Riverside-San Bernardino to the south to the burgeoning suburbs around Sacramento are located in this area.

To capitalize on this growth, and to secure its place as a font of opportunity in the state, the Third California must appeal to skilled workers and industries, address the needs of undereducated, primarily Hispanic workers, and build on the optimism that has led many newcomers to the region.

Since the late 1990s, the population growth rates in interior California began to outstrip those of the coastal regions by increasingly large margins. Once a backwater, large parts of the Third California appear to be coming of age.

Perhaps the most intriguing of all, Third California also experienced nearly a 40 percent growth in its ranks of people with graduate degrees, a rate of increase larger than the Second California and close to that of the First California.

Taken together, housing costs and a weaker coastal economy, particularly in the Bay Area, have produced an ever widening gap between growth rates in the Third California and the rest of the state. In fact, between 2000 and 2005 the Third California growth rate has reached over 14 percent, four times the rate of the rest of state.

The greater Sacramento region, with roughly 2.7 million people, entered the 21st century with arguably the healthiest trajectory of any part of the Third California. Five years into the decade, it has solidified its position.

“Most important of all, many people in the Third California believe that the future can be better. A recent poll of Central Valley residents found that 75 percent of all adults rated their community as excellent or good. Far more saw it as getting better than worse.

The Third California represents not so much a break with the California ‘dream’ but its new homeland, the state of opportunity for a new generation. "

March 2007: The Brookings Institution. Research Brief

 

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