UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN
To: Dr. Marc Doussard From: Mr. Prahallad Badami cc: Ms. Chieh Yang Date: March 27, 2019 Subject: Demographic and Economic Analysis of Santa Cruz County, California, and its surrounding region Santa Cruz County, CA: Prolonged insulation from growth Introduction Santa Cruz County is one of the original counties of California (Figure 01), established at the time the state of California was born. The namesake city of Santa Cruz is the largest city in the county. Capitola, Scotts Valley and Watsonville are the other major cities in the county. The county sits near the cities of San Francisco, San Jose and Oakland. It is bound by the Pacific Coast on the West. Region Santa Cruz County is immediately surrounded by the counties of Santa Clara, San Mateo and Monterey. This was considered as the Region for the study. Furthermore, an Extended Region with additional counties of Alameda, Merced, San Francisco, San Benito and Stanislaus was also considered in certain instances.
Figure 01: Santa Cruz County is in California
The county draws in about 15% of its work class from neighboring counties of Monterey, Santa Clara and others. Studying the commuter flow data, it is observed that the number of workers residing in Santa Cruz County has increased from 114,935 from 1990 to 124,550 in 2013. At the same time, the total number of people working in the confines of the county has gone up from 102,764 in 1990 to 113,598 in 2013. This is in account of surrounding counties of Santa Clara and San Francisco drawing in the workers. According to Table 01, while the percentage of the residents of Santa Cruz County working within the county has gone down, Figure 03 shows that the numbers have gone up. This can be inferred as Santa Cruz County attracting more businesses and workers from the neighboring regions. Santa Cruz has a population of 266,500 and is seen to have higher poverty rates than its northern and north-eastern counterparts of San Francisco and Santa Clara (Figure 02). According to the data available, Santa Cruz falls into the category of having a poverty rate of 17.3-23.3 percent of the population. The counties of San Francisco and Santa Clara have lower poverty rates of 7.3-8.6 percent. It seems that