This California beach town had one of the nation's largest population drops
The city of Santa Cruz, popular with surfers and known for its classic beach boardwalk, recently saw one of the largest population decreases in the country, according to newly released figures from the U.S. Census.
The population of the coastal destination of roughly 62,000 dropped by 1.3% between July 2024 and July 2025, according to the Census - the ninth largest decline in the country of cities with more than 50,000 people.
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The dip is affecting the wider county as well. All together, Santa Cruz County, which includes Watsonville as well as smaller towns like Capitola and Davenport, saw a 1% overall decrease between 2024 and 2025, the biggest slump of any California county with more than 100,000 people.
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And the population change does not appear to be driven by changes at the university. Enrollment at UC Santa Cruz increased in both fall 2024 and 2025.
City officials and researchers have pointed to the area's affordability crisis as the driver behind the decline.
A recent report by the Santa Cruz County Workforce Development Board noted that, while employment in the county remained steady, its population still declined. More than half of jobs available were in low-paying sectors, which, "when coupled with the county's above-average housing costs, creates sizable affordability challenges for residents," the report said.
"This gap between job quality and cost of living is likely a key factor driving the county's population decline, as residents relocate to more affordable regions," the authors wrote, highlighting that housing affordability is particularly challenging for people of prime working age, which they defined as between 25 and 54.
On top of that, the Santa Cruz-Watsonville area was named the most expensive in the state by the National Low Income Housing Coalition based on the wages needed to afford market rate rent in the area for the third year in a row. Zillow estimated that it would take more than two decades for a middle-income household to save enough to buy a home, the Chronicle previously reported - the second-longest amount of time of any metro area in the United States.
Santa Cruz was far from the only California city to see a population decline in 2025. Delano, a largely agricultural town of 52,000 just north of Bakersfield, had a slightly larger decline than Santa Cruz at 1.4%. Escondido in San Diego County also saw a similarly sized dip at 1.2%. Several cities in Southern California saw declines of at least 1% as well.
And while Santa Cruz has seen a notable drop since April 2020 - 3.8% - that's far from the largest drop in either the state or the country, the data shows. Several Bay Area cities have had larger population decreases since then, including San Francisco, which still had nearly 6% fewer residents in 2025 compared to April 2020, as well as Union City (down 6.9%), Pleasanton (down 6.6%) and San Leandro (down 6.2%).
The California Department of Finance, which also publishes yearly population estimates, also found that Santa Cruz saw a dip in population between 2024 and 2025, though the city was not as much of an outlier in their estimates as it was in the Census. Walter Schwarm, the chief of demographic research at the department, explained that its counts are on a slightly different timeline than the Census: the state measures population each January, while the Census publishes counts as of each year's July.
The Department of Finance also found that Santa Cruz saw an increase in population as of January 2026, but Schwarm explained that nearly all of that increase came from people living in "group quarters," or dorms. Schwarm said that, because the state surveys higher education twice a year, it likely has more current estimates of the dorm population than the Census.
Still, he said, unaffordability likely contributed to the 2024-25 decrease.
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