To find the 50 U.S. metropolitan areas that have had the largest net decline in population as a result of migration between 2010 and 2017, 24/7 Wall Street reviewed population figures from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Population Estimates Program.What struck me immediately was the extent to which cities in California’s great Central Valley are featured on the list. These include the well-known Fresno and Bakersfield, as well as the lesser-known Visalia-Porterville and Hanford-Corcoran regions.
While not strictly speaking in the “Central Valley,” you could add El Centro to that list of inland CA agriculture-oriented cities. These were places to which the so-called "okies" of the Dustbowl came in their thousands.
The outmigration is likely a result of the malaise historian Victor Davis Hanson has documented in writing about the region. His ancestral farm is located in the southern Central Valley where four of these five are found.
