CITY POISED TO HIT 4 MILLION SLOWING FOREIGN IMMIGRATION AFFECTING GROWTH.

Byline: Harrison Sheppard Sacramento Bureau

Los Angeles' population grew by more than 44,000 people last year, putting the city on track to top 4 million by the end of 2005, statistics released Monday show.

The city's population was 3,957,875 as of Jan. 1, according to the state Department of Finance, a 1.1 percent increase from the previous year, but less than the average California city's growth of 1.7 percent. Los Angeles County continued to be the nation's largest, growing by 1.2 percent to reach 10,226,506 people.

But both the city and the county have experienced declining rates of growth in recent years, mostly a reflection of the increasing cost of living and declining foreign immigration in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, experts say.

``One reason we're seeing L.A. decline somewhat is that since 9-11, foreign immigration has slowed down somewhat,'' said Linda Gage, senior demographer for the Department of Finance. ``L.A. would be one of the first counties affected by that.''

The city's overall growth rate has been slowing in recent years, dropping from 1.45 percent between 2000 and 2001 to 1.1 percent between 2004 and 2005.

In fact, more people move from Los Angeles to other states than move in from other states, according to demographers. The city's main growth is fueled mainly by international immigrants, who move to Los Angeles from other countries, then often move out to other regions within California or the West Coast after a few years.

``The Los Angeles region is distributing a lot of people to other states in the West,'' said Eugene Turner, a demographic expert at California State University, Northridge.

``If you look at the net flows, people are coming in greater numbers from the Northeast - places like Chicago, New York and other major metropolitan areas in the East and Northeast - and then they're leaving and being redistributed throughout the West, like Phoenix, Las Vegas, Seattle and Oregon.''

Much of that is driven by the cost of housing and availability of open space for new development, he said.

The fastest-growing regions of the state continued to be inland, where real estate prices tend to be lower than in the more densely populated coastal regions. The fastest-growing county in California was Riverside, which grew 3.8 percent to 1,877,000 people.

The fastest-growing cities in the state were also among the smallest, with the tiny Bay Area city of Colma growing by 21 percent to reach 1,567 people.

The state's overall population is now more than 36.8 million, meaning about one out of every eight U.S. residents is a Californian.

New figures for the San Fernando Valley's population are expected to be available later this week. The most recent estimate was that the population of the Valley within the city of Los Angeles stood at 1,438,469 as of Jan. 1, 2004.

Harrison Sheppard, [phone]

harrison.sheppard(at)dailynews.com

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SOURCE: State Department of Finance

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