(California) Growth pains

[question everything]

UNION-TRIBUNE EDITORIAL

State must build for population wave

August 5, 2004

(snip)

By 2025, California's population is expected to soar to as high as 48 million – up from 35 million today. Accommodating these 13 million additional people is perhaps the most pressing obligation confronting California as the new century unfolds.

Not surprisingly, 59 percent of residents believe future growth "will be a bad thing for them and their families," according to the PPIC poll, which canvassed 2,506 Californians in five languages. Similarly, 49 percent of residents have a pessimistic view of the future, saying they think California will be a worse place to live in 2025. But the truth is, population expansion does not have to mean a degradation in quality of life. History has demonstrated this over and over again in California.

Consider that during the decades following World War II, the state's population more than tripled, from 7 million (1940) to 24 million (1980). Yet in order to accommodate the population surge of the post-war years, the state embarked on a massive building program – housing, schools, freeways, mass transit, aqueducts, airports, power plants, universities, prisons.

By the 1980s, however, the state's investment in its public infrastructure had plummeted dramatically, even as the economy continued to generate millions of new jobs, fueling inexorable population growth. The result today is gridlocked highways, overcrowded schools, astronomical housing costs, potential water shortfalls and congested prisons. Today's backlog in unfunded projects needed to catch up with California's rising population is measured in the tens of billions of dollars.

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Find this article at:
http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20040805/news_lz1ed5top.html

[pfitz59]

1. Is "The Gropinator" up to the task?

I think not.....