Growth is coming; will it ever reach Chico?
One of my pet peeves is that people think Chico is growing faster than it is.
The urban area, which has about 102,000 people, is growing by about 1 percent a year. Chico itself, which has about 80,000 people, is growing by about the same amount, but the rate is consistently reported as about 2 percent. That’s because half of the increase is the result of annexation of urbanized areas. That’s not growth. That’s just a different way of counting people who are already here.
There’s also a perceptual problem. People think Chico is growing faster than it ever has. In fact, Chico’s and Butte County’s boom days were the 1970s and 1980s. Growth has slowed in the last 15 years.
We have a tendency to compare Chico’s experience with that of California as a whole. Yes, the state is growing fast, adding as many as 500,000 people every year. But neither Chico nor Butte County are taking part in that population boom right now. The county is growing by a modest 2,000 to 2,500 people a year.
A population projection released by the Butte County Association of Governments shows that Chico will continue to grow at its same moderate rate for the next 24 years. By 2030, its population is expected to be 127,212, or about 25,000 more than it is now. That means it will continue to add about 1,000 people a year. If current trends continue, I expect that by 2030 all of the urban area will have been annexed to the city, finally ending the confusion about which areas are part of Chico and which aren’t.
BCAG’s projections for the south county tell a much different story. Biggs, Oroville and Gridley are expected to more than double their respective populations by 2030, when the county’s total population will reach 321,000 — a 50 percent increase from what it is now. Chico will lose its dominance. Right now half of the people in Butte County live in Chico. By 2030, only 40 percent of the county’s population will be based in Chico.
We keep hearing that growth is coming, but will it ever reach Chico?