Think: Joel Kotkin

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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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