“Especially robust” growth in Hemet and the San Jacinto Valley will power the inland region’s role as one of California's fastest-growing areas, according to a just-released study.

The Hemet area will grow at a rate of 4.5 percent per year over the next decade, states the April 2008 report from the Public Policy Institute of California. In fact, Hemet and the San Jacinto Valley will be the fast-growing standout in California’s high growth area.

The Public Policy Institute is a nonprofit group working to improve California policy by providing nonpartisan research. The comprehensive report, entitled “The Inland Empire in 2015,” was authored by two top economists and a demographer and was funded by the James Irvine Foundation.

The report concludes that the area will buck national housing downturn trends, with continuing growth powered by affordable housing and healthy job creation. In fact, Hemet and the overall San Jacinto Valley, by far the most economically vibrant of the study’s 10 sub-areas, will climb from an estimated 232,000 residents to 361,000 by 2015—the fastest growth rate in the Inland Empire.

The inland study area will grow by nearly one million people by 2015, the result of people continuing to leave coastal Southern California counties, reports the study. Despite the housing slowdown, the area will “continue to be the locus of growth in Southern California.”

Hemet will run counter to another statewide demographic trend. Even as California’s population ages, Hemet and the San Jacinto Valley will become younger and more educated, states the report. “Growth in the young adult population is expected to be particularly strong” as the area “increasingly attracts younger migrants in their twenties and thirties.” The new residents are being pulled from other areas of Southern California and will be very ethnically diverse, including a substantial rise in the Asian population, the report finds.

Jobs will follow the growth. “Projections for the next decade suggest that job growth in the Inland Empire will continue to outpace that of the state as a whole. By 2015, the Inland Empire is expected to have almost 1.5 million nonfarm, civilian jobs—up about 28 percent from fewer than 1.2 million such jobs in 2004.”

The new report underscores Hemet’s importance as a key engine powering fast-growing Riverside County. More than 54,500 new homes are approved or in the tentative map phase within Hemet’s 10-mile trade area—well above 2013 projections. Meanwhile, Hemet’s 15-mile $2.8 billion market is seriously underserved in several categories, most notably Clothing/Clothing Accessories, Electronics, and Furniture/Home Furnishings.