A ZIP code that until recently was best known for cows and carrots just became the hottest piece of real estate in the entire United States. Chino, California — yes, that Chino, the one in San Bernardino County that smells vaguely of dairy farm depending on the wind direction — grew its housing stock by 1,318% between 2014 and 2023. For context, that is not a typo.
1,318%. Read That Again.
A RentCafe analysis found that Chino's 91708 ZIP code didn't just grow fast. It lapped every other ZIP code in the country, posting 1,318% housing growth over nine years and a 402% population surge to go with it. That's not a boom. That's a detonation.
To understand what that actually looks like on the ground, you have to understand what Chino used to be. This is a city in the Inland Empire, east of Los Angeles, that built its identity on agriculture and dairy farming. The kind of place people from LA would drive through and roll up their windows. And now it is, statistically, the fastest-growing community in America.
A Former Dairy Farm Is Doing the Heavy Lifting
The engine behind all of this is The Preserve at Chino, a massive housing development that the Orange County Register has been tracking for years. The development sits on 5,435 acres of former farm and dairy land, with roughly half carved up into residential, commercial, industrial, and airport-related uses. Someone looked at thousands of acres of cow pasture and said "yes, this is where we build a city," and apparently they were right.
The people moving in aren't retirees or tech millionaires. According to US Census data, the median age of 91708 residents is 33. Household incomes average $109,000. Seventy-three percent of households are married couples, with an average household size of 3.3 people. This is, in the most literal demographic sense, a place where young families go when they can't afford anything closer to the coast but still need to be within striking distance of Southern California jobs.
California Is Actually Good at Growing, Apparently
Two other Southern California ZIP codes also cracked the national fastest-growing list, which is a little inconvenient for anyone who has spent the last decade insisting California is dying and everyone is leaving. Irvine's 92618 came in 20th nationally, with 172% housing growth over nine years. It's a wealthier scene than Chino, with average household incomes of $146,000 and home values sitting around $1.24 million, and it draws the tech-hub, good-schools crowd.
Then there's Los Angeles's 90094, which covers Playa Vista, the former site of Hughes Aircraft Company. That area has been under construction since 2002 and showed 115% housing growth over the same nine-year period, with its population roughly doubling. Residents there skew a bit older at a median age of 38, with household incomes also around $146,000. Three SoCal ZIP codes in the national top 50. California came in third among all states on that list, behind Texas with 17 entries and Colorado with seven.
What This Actually Tells Us About the Housing Crisis
Here's what's quietly devastating about the Chino story: the reason a former dairy farm 40 miles east of Los Angeles is exploding with young families is not because Chino is anyone's dream destination. It's because they couldn't afford anything else. A $109,000 household income sounds solid until you try to buy a house anywhere near the California coast, at which point it is approximately nothing.
Fresno County also made the list, with its 93626 ZIP code in the Friant area posting 144% housing growth and 274% population growth. The pattern repeats itself. People are not flooding into agricultural exurbs because they love long commutes. They're doing it because the alternative is never owning a home at all. The fastest-growing places in California are not the desirable ones. They're the ones where houses are actually obtainable.
The Dingo Take
The story the right wants to tell about California is that it's collapsing, emptying out, dying under the weight of its own liberal governance. And look, California has real problems. The housing affordability crisis is a genuine catastrophe, largely self-inflicted through decades of zoning cowardice and NIMBYism at every level of government. None of that is fake.
But the fastest-growing ZIP code in America is in California. Three of the top 50 are in California. People are not fleeing the state. They are flooding into it, right up until the point where they literally cannot afford to, and then they drive 40 miles inland and build a city on a dairy farm instead. The crisis isn't that California is unpopular. The crisis is that California is so popular it has completely broken its own housing market and is now growing in the agricultural hinterlands because that's the only place left with room.
Chino's 1,318% housing growth is not a success story so much as a pressure valve. It tells you how much demand is out there, and how comprehensively the state has failed to meet it anywhere people actually wanted to live. But hey, The Preserve at Chino is apparently lovely. Bring a jacket. And maybe don't check which direction the wind is coming from.
