SACRAMENTO — California is growing as its economy booms, but the fastest-growing cities are far from where the jobs are, according to new data released Monday by the state’s Department of Finance.

With one notable exception — Menlo Park — the Bay Area cities that grew the most last year were suburbs where housing tends to be more plentiful and more affordable, a trend that helps to explain the perennially jammed roads and freeways. East Bay cities such as Dublin, Brentwood and Hercules; Rio Vista in Solano County; and Gilroy in southernmost Santa Clara County were among the cities with the greatest growth in 2016.

“I think that it really underscores how central housing is to these times,” said Jordan Levine, a senior economist for the California Association of Realtors. “Folks want to be able to maintain access to those good jobs in San Francisco and Santa Clara and San Mateo, but can’t afford to live there.”

Last year, steady growth pushed the Golden State’s population up 335,000 to about 39.5 million.

San Jose added nearly 10,000 residents — more than any city except for Los Angeles, San Diego and Irvine — between January 2016 and January 2017, but the increase was less than 1 percent, just slightly above the state average. In Oakland, where housing prices have also soared, the population grew by just 0.68 percent, lower than the state average.

Economists and urban planners note that Menlo Park, population 35,670, is one of few cities at the center of the tech boom adding housing in earnest to meet the demand. Its new 1,900 residents marked a population increase of 5.5 percent for the small Silicon Valley city last year — the second-highest percentage increase in the state behind the Amador County town of Ione.

The reason is straightforward: Menlo Park offered workers — at least, well-compensated ones — somewhere to live.

“Neighboring cities haven’t built much of anything,” said Jeff Bellisario, vice president of the Bay Area Council’s Economic Institute. If you wanted to move to Silicon Valley, he said, “Menlo Park was the place to be in 2016.”

After it became clear about five years ago that Menlo Park’s housing plan was out of date, the city changed its land-use and zoning regulations to allow for the construction of 4,500 new homes, including multifamily dwellings, said Jim Cogan, Menlo Park’s housing and economic development manager. The city is building or has recently completed 1,000 new units, he said.

“It’s really exciting to see that work coming to fruition,” Cogan said. The latest population estimates, he said, are “great validation for the work that we did.”

The state Department of Finance releases population estimates each spring for funding purposes. The data include only population estimates and housing data; they don’t show whether higher birthrates, immigration or domestic migration are driving the changes.

California’s population has grown at a steady clip since at least 2010, according to the department’s data. The growth in 2016 was similar to that of previous years, about 0.85 percent.

The finance department found growth to be distributed fairly evenly throughout the state, but nine northern and eastern counties, including Alpine, Calaveras and Tuolomne, continued to see declines. The department also noted that prison expansion made Amador County, east of Sacramento, the fastest-growing county in the state. Its population grew by nearly 2 percent, compared to about 1 percent in Alameda and Contra Costa counties and 0.8 percent in Santa Clara County.

Lawmakers are now scrambling to address a housing-affordability crisis in parts of the state, particularly in the Bay Area, that was long in the making. A Legislative Analyst’s Report from 2015 found that California’s coastal counties needed to build three times as much housing as they did between 1980 to 2010 to keep costs from soaring.

Roughly 130 bills to address the problem by encouraging affordable-housing development or giving new tax breaks to home-buyers are pending in the state Legislature.

Bellisario said the latest data underscore the need for state and local governments to invest in public transit and build new homes. “If we’re going to be growing our population,” he said, “we need to have places to put people.”