An incredible long-term arc
The two-county Inland Empire will swell to nearly 5 million inhabitants by 2015, a growth equivalent to adding the population of the city of San Bernardino five times over.
Click below for a few more highlights.
Click here for the entire 141 page Public Policy Institute of California report.
In the largely rural San Jacinto Valley, the population will balloon by 50 percent.
The growth will continue to be principally composed of migrants from lower
socioeconomic strata - new residents without high school diplomas will continue to outnumber those with college degrees.
And by 2015, Latinos will constitute the majority of the Inland Empire. Whites and blacks will continue to decline as a proportion of the population.
And all the projections from the Public Policy Institute of California imply fresh challenges, particularly in education, housing and employment sectors.
All in all, it's a vision fraught with pitfalls and potential. The heavy lifting and data crunching resulted in a 141-page report titled "The Inland Empire in 2015."
Published earlier this year, the oft-cited report is not without prescriptions for how to cope with all the change.
Among the most crucial moves local leaders need to make include increasing education and training prospects for lower-skilled workers, improving high school graduation rates and increasing rates of democratic participation.
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