Happy Anniversary CVEP! On November 19, we celebrate the 20th year of our Annual Economic Summit. For two decades, CVEP has hosted the preeminent economic event of the Coachella Valley. This year’s Summit will highlight twenty years of change in the Valley. Moreover, we will preview our new strategies and goals spearheaded by Laura James’s new leadership. It’s sure to be a not-to-be-missed event. Click here to register.
Not only are we celebrating the twentieth anniversary of our Economic Summit, but we are also celebrating 30 years since CVEP’s inception. As such, we’re having a lot of fun looking back. For our 2024 Greater Palm Springs Economic Report we will compare recent economic and sociodemographic with comparable data from 1994 and 2004.
Here’s a graph from our 2004 Economic report showing the valley’s nine-city population growth from 2000 to 2004.
And here is an updated graph showing growth from 2004 to 2024. In the early 2000’s Indio, La Quinta, and Cathedral City were seeing the highest growth. But twenty years later, Coachella and Desert Hot Springs have taken over the second and third growth spots.
In some cases, data for the 2004 report was only available from previous years. So here, we are comparing 2003 income variables with 2024 data. In 21 years, we have seen a 53% increase in Median household income. But taking into account the Consumer Price Index over 21 years, $46,099 would be $78,995 in today’s dollars. So the median household income in the valley actually buys less than in 2003. In 2003, the average household income in the valley was over $7,000 higher than in the Inland Empire. But this has reversed in 2024. Still, per capita income in the Coachella Valley remains significantly higher than in the Inland Empire as a whole.
In 1994, Coachella Valley businesses employed 71,226. Since then, the valley has seen a 154% increase in the number employed. By comparison, the overall population of the Coachella Valley has risen 72% since 1994.
