"If you don't build it; they still will come."

[John Rackham]

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.latimes.com/features/printedition/magazine/la-tm-growth04jan25,1,5397335.story?coll=la-home-magazine

Infinite Ingress
A human wave is breaking over California, flooding freeways and
schools, bloating housing costs, disrupting power and water supplies.
Ignoring it hasn't worked.
By Lee Green
For the Times

January 25, 2004

By birth, by foot, by automobile, from other states and other
countries, legally and illegally, people have arrived in California
for decades in unrelenting swells, human surf breaking steadily on a
vast shore. Occasionally a big set rolls in and harasses state and
local officials trying to determine how many new classrooms to build
or where to bury the trash, but Californians take it in stride. You
can complain, but what good would it do? You can complain about
winter, too, but it comes anyway.

We tolerate endless strip malls, foul air, contaminated runoff,
window-rattling boom boxes and the weekend crush at Costco and Home
Depot. We remain composed in the face of runaway housing prices,
electricity shortages, crowded schools and—well, maybe not crowded
schools. That one rankles. But what we suffer even less well than
crowded schools, the thing that makes even the most tolerant
Californians notice that their cities have become overstuffed, is all
the endless, miserable, stinking, standing traffic. In Los Angeles, in
San Diego, in Sacramento, in the Bay Area, freeway traffic sits like
an automotive still life, then inches along as we fume in the fumes.
On a roadside in San Jose after a fender bender, a driver grabs
another driver's small dog, Leo, and throws the helpless animal into
oncoming traffic.

This is what it has come to in California. We live in the Age of Leo.

If projections through 2040 by demographers in the state Department of
Finance prove accurate, conditions will only get worse. Much worse.
New residents continue to wash over California's borders, but the
state is neither attempting to restrain growth nor building adequate
infrastructure to accommodate it. And the boat continues to fill.

During the last half of the last century—an epoch encompassing most of
the baby boom and, a generation later, all of the boom's echo—the
state's population grew by more than 24 million. The next 24
million—more than the population of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa and
Nebraska combined—will arrive more quickly, inflating the total to
nearly 60 million within 36 years. Barring the long-overdue mother of
all earthquakes, a tightening of federal immigration policy, or the
Rapture, California's population, currently at 36 million, likely will
double within the lifetime of today's schoolchildren. A close look at
the numbers suggests that the 1990s began a pattern in which
California receives more new residents each decade than it did the
previous one. The 2020s will witness the greatest 10-year increase in
state history, and the numbers in the 2030s will be greater still.

"Come to California," Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger urged the world more
than once in his State of the State address this month. But most
residents are not happy about this trend. In a 2001 statewide poll
conducted by the Public Policy Institute of California, half of the
respondents said they considered the previous decade's population
growth a "bad thing." More than four of five said that continued
growth would make the state a less desirable place to live.

U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein isn't happy about the numbers either. "I
find them very distressing and I'll tell you why. If the growth comes
before the ability to handle that growth, what you inevitably have is
a backlash. That's what drove Proposition 187," she says. That 1994
ballot measure, overwhelmingly approved by voters but later gutted by
the courts on constitutional grounds, sought to deprive illegal
immigrants of most state-funded social benefits. "I think growth is
California's No. 1 problem, and how that growth happens is critical to
the future of the state," the Democratic senator adds. "The problem is
that most of the growth is concentrated on the West Coast and in
cities."

One of the best remedies would be to improve north-south
transportation, Feinstein says, specifically by building "a rail spine
down the center of the state so that you would be better able to
diffuse population instead of having huge congested cities growing all
the time with more stress and more strain. I do a lot of flying over
California. There is a lot of space in California."

In other words, there's plenty of room at the Hotel California as long
as everyone doesn't keep checking into the same overused rooms.

The Eagles were right: This could be heaven or this could be hell. But
the more closely you examine California's plight, the more the heaven
part looks iffy. No other state has so many residents (Texas ranks
second, but with almost 40% fewer people), and no other state comes
close to matching California's annual net population increase. In Los
Angeles County and five surrounding counties—Orange, San Bernardino,
Riverside, Ventura and Imperial—the population now stands at more than
17 million. That's nearly 6% of the U.S. population, one in every 17
Americans, all within a four-hour drive—if you can find four hours
when the traffic isn't bad. At least 20% already live in crowded
housing, and poverty levels have increased steadily for three decades.
Yet during the next 25 years the region is projected to grow by 6
million.

This is not exactly a formula for a Golden State.

Most of the conversation about growth these days revolves around
principles of growth management—"smart growth" in planning-speak.
Schwarzenegger is heading down this road, rhetorically anyway. Smart
growth emphasizes increasing density in cities as an alternative to
sprawl, enabling people to live close to where they work, minimizing
environmental impact, preserving open space, and encouraging public
transit, bicycling, and walking rather than driving. But the
discussion is always about accommodating growth, never about slowing,
limiting, or stabilizing it. Mention the idea of somehow trying to
limit the population and politicians react as though you have
suggested that our society eat cats and dogs instead of cows and pigs.
Curb population growth? The very notion is unthinkable because—well,
this is America.

"How do you do it?" Feinstein asks. "Are you going to tell people not
to have children? I don't think so. I have never had a single county
official say, 'We have decided we want to slow growth in our county,
and here's how we want to do it, and we need the federal government's
help.' "

If, as Feinstein says, growth is California's no. 1 problem, the root
of that problem is immigration. It would be better if this were not
so, because it sets up an us-versus-them tension that debases everyone
within its reach, but the raw numbers leave little room for debate.
Demographic studies after the 2000 census revealed that from 1990 to
2000, immigrants and their children accounted not for just some, or
even most, of California's growth. They accounted for virtually all of
it. Of the increase of 4.2 million people during those 10 years, the
net gain generated by the native population was just 90,000, fewer
than attend each year's Rose Bowl game.

Immigrants—specifically Latinos, who constitute the majority of the
state's more than 9 million immigrants—inflate the population not just
by coming to California but by having children once they're here.
While the combined birthrate for California's U.S. citizens and
immigrants who are not Latino has dropped to replacement level, the
birthrate for Latino immigrants from Mexico and Central America
averages more than three children per mother.

Changes in federal policy since 1965 have elevated the number of
immigrants legally admitted to the U.S. annually from a few hundred
thousand to more than 1 million in recent years. California has long
received far more immigrants—legal and illegal—than has any other
state. This has worked out well in some respects (cheap labor supply,
ethnic diversity, Schwarzenegger), not so well in others (social
welfare costs, increasing poverty, Schwarzenegger). While the costs
are significant, the benefits are so vast and varied—from critical
high-tech expertise in Silicon Valley to breathtaking multicultural
richness—that anyone but an unrepentant xenophobe would agree that
they are incalculable. None of which alters the fact that immigration,
more than any other factor, will probably determine how crowded and
environmentally unsustainable California becomes in the years ahead.

Santa Barbara-based Californians for Population Stabilization (CAPS),
the most prominent of several population-control groups around the
state, wants the federal government to crack down on illegal
immigration (various estimates place California's illegal immigrant
population at more than 2 million) and reduce the number of immigrants
permitted to legally enter the United States. "We're just sick and
tired of the fact that nobody will address this issue," says CAPS
President Diana Hull. "I am simply baffled by the timidity of the
politicians on this."

Earlier this month, President Bush announced his plan to relax U.S.
immigration policy. The president said he wants to create legal status
for many of the estimated 8 million to 11 million illegal immigrants
who live and work in the U.S.—a proposal some feel rewards those who
have ignored the law and may encourage more illegal immigration.

And what of the current limits on legal immigration? Asked recently if
she is comfortable with those numbers, Feinstein, who serves on the
Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security and Citizenship,
hesitated. "Well, I have to take another look at that before I answer
that question," she said. "I don't want to answer it off the top of my
head."

This is a tricky issue for a senator representing a state where more
than one in four residents was born outside the United States.

Immigration directly and indirectly accounts for more than two-thirds
of population growth nationwide, but Feinstein says that trying to
stem the ever-rising count is not a topic of discussion in the U.S.
Senate. Though the earth's population doubled to 5 billion in a mere
37 years (1950 to 1987) and will more than double again in this
century, many countries, particularly in Europe, now have low
fertility rates, relatively low immigration levels and are losing
population. In sharp contrast, the U.S., at more than 292 million the
world's third-most populous country behind behemoths China and India,
will soon glide past 300 million en route to 400 million before
mid-century. In this respect, America stands alone in the developed
world. United Nations projections show just eight countries accounting
for half of the planet's population increase between now and 2050.
Seven of them come as no surprise: China, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh,
Ethiopia, Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The other
country is the United States, largely because of its generous
immigration policies.

California has not prepared itself for what's coming. "I think that we
bear a striking resemblance to Edward Gibbon's description of the last
generations of Rome," said state Sen. Tom McClintock, the conservative
Republican rhetorician from Thousand Oaks, not long after he lost his
bid last year for the governor's chair. "He called them 'decent, easy
men living from the gifts of the gifts of the founders.' " The
problem, he says, began in the mid 1970s with former Gov. Jerry Brown,
who, by McClintock's reckoning, lacked the wisdom of his predecessors.
"It was Earl Warren [governor from 1943 to 1953] who recognized that
California was poised for explosive economic growth and required an
infrastructure sufficient to accommodate and make possible that
prosperity," McClintock says.

By the time Gov. Edmund G. "Pat" Brown began his eight-year reign in
1959, most of the infrastructure for which he is now remembered was
already in the works. His gift was in taking the handoff and driving
the state downfield. He did so repeatedly, erecting college campuses,
building new highways and constructing the grand State Water Project.

"There was clearly a burst of infrastructure that hasn't been
replicated in the years since," says journalist Ethan Rarick, who
recently wrote a soon-to-be-published book on Brown. "When he was
governor, he would always say that he didn't necessarily believe that
all the growth was a good thing, but he believed that it was
unavoidable. There was no way to stop it, and whether it was good or
bad was irrelevant. The state had to plan for it, had to deal with
it."

Whatever Brown's private feelings may have been, publicly he touted
the state's population as a cause for pride. In late November 1962,
the governor held a news conference to announce that California's
population had finally surpassed that of New York, which had been
America's most populous state since the early 1800s. He declared Dec.
31, 1962, a state holiday and called for a four-day celebration touted
as California First Days.

Warren, by then Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, offered a
dissenting opinion. "Mere numbers do not mean happiness," he
cautioned.

But what did Warren know? Growth was glorious.

"It was kind of a triumph of the West and of California," says Rarick.
"California had always wanted to grow and get bigger ever since the
Gold Rush."

In retrospect, this was like residents of 1st century Pompeii
celebrating their good fortune to live at the foot of Mt. Vesuvius.
It's hard to imagine Californians celebrating 25 years from now when
the state's population hits 50 million.

By the time Pat Brown's son assumed the governorship 16 years later in
1975, the state had grown by more than 40%. The sociopolitical climate
had changed. Jerry Brown was 36, the youngest governor in modern state
history. The environmental movement had bloomed, and he identified
with it. In McClintock's view, Brown introduced "a radical and
retrograde ideology into California public policy" that has left the
state ill-equipped for what's to come.

Brown, of course, remembers it differently. "When my father was
governor, there were 15 million people," recalls the former governor,
now in his second term as Oakland's mayor. "You had a lot more open
space. You had a lot more water to move around. It was easier to do
things." Instead of building new freeways, Jerry Brown emphasized
maintaining the existing ones. He resisted pressure to build nuclear
power plants and guided California into what he termed the "era of
limits."

New-age nonsense, McClintock calls it. "It was essentially a policy
that said if we stop building things, people won't come. So we stopped
building highways, we stopped building dams, we stopped building power
plants, we stopped people from building houses. And people came
anyway. That's essentially the problem that California faces today. It
is a governing agenda that has survived two Republican and two
Democratic administrations. You cannot stop growth by refusing to meet
the needs caused by growth."

One might hope that in Sacramento the issue would be top of mind, or
at least somewhere in mind. For reassurance on that count, don't look
to your state legislators. Sen. Ross Johnson, a Republican from
Irvine, offers a terse reply when asked if the Legislature might be
looking at the numbers and trying to figure out how to deal with the
infinite ingress. "No. We look at the next election rather than the
next generation," he says. "It is disgraceful."

This isn't a case of lawmakers rearranging the deck chairs. That at
least would indicate a recognition of the worsening situation and the
need for action. Sure, California remains afloat and under its own
power, if listing, and has yet to strike anything immovable. But why
is no one focused on the ice?

"I think it just hasn't been a priority because it's so easy to move
it off the table because it appears that there's always one crisis
after another," says Assembly Speaker Herb Wesson (D-Culver City). Ten
minutes into a recent conversation about mounting population
pressures, Wesson stopped himself. "You have re-reminded me of
something that I knew was a problem that I have just moved off the
table myself. So I think that I will have some discussions and see if
we can't jump-start the creation of some commission, panel, task
force—something to try to highlight the seriousness of the situation."

Democratic Assemblywoman Patricia Wiggins of Santa Rosa heads a group
she started four years ago called the Smart Growth Caucus, which 47 of
the state's 120 lawmakers have joined. The name sounds promising, but
Wiggins laments how difficult it has been to accomplish anything
meaningful. California's continuing population growth, she says, will
constitute "a problem if we don't plan for it."

But we're planning for it, right?

"Not very well."

John Vasconcellos, Democratic state senator from San Jose, says the
Legislature's by-now renowned dysfunction ensures that "the government
isn't capable of looking long-term at anything. The state is truly in
dire straits. I'm not a pessimist and I'm not a doomsayer, but I've
never felt so frightened by the prospects of the state in all my 37
years of serving the Legislature."

Vasconcellos is nicely positioned to address those frightening
prospects as co-chair of a joint legislative committee called
Preparing California for the 21st Century. The perils of unending
population growth would be a fine place to start, but in its first
three years the group instead has examined the intricacies of racial
diversity and the implications of new technology. Fine subjects both,
but it's disconcerting to think that in a Legislature with a select
committee dedicated to professional sports and another focused
exclusively on the horse-racing industry, no committee exists to
examine a mounting population burden that threatens to degrade every
quality that makes California so ... California. The topic "would be
fitting for our agenda," Vasconcellos says, "but right now our agenda
and our staff are at capacity."

So, perhaps, is California. Overshadowed by the state's long-term
fiscal quagmire is the less publicized neglect of aging infrastructure
that wasn't designed to serve current population levels, let alone a
population projected to be nearly two-thirds larger within 36 years.
The state relies on a staggering array of dams, canals, pipelines,
pumping plants, levees, reservoirs, highways, bridges, parks, forest
fire stations, agriculture inspection facilities, prisons, crime labs,
mental hospitals, colleges and universities to maintain social and
economic order. One would hope that the state would protect this
investment of hundreds of billions of dollars, but the Legislative
Analyst's Office reported just over a year ago that "appropriate
maintenance ... has been a chronic problem," resulting in
"deterioration of facilities and an accumulation of 'deferred
maintenance.' " Not only does California have insufficient funds to
correct the situation, it can't afford to do what's necessary to keep
from falling still farther behind.

And that's just the stuff we already have. To handle the anticipated
yearly increase of 600,000 new residents—equal to three new cities the
size of Glendale—the state must engineer and build billions of dollars
of new infrastructure and facilities. Seemingly earnest efforts are
underway, including water desalination proposals, road-widening
projects, and new classrooms, but just catching up to current
population needs would require a Herculean effort—Sisyphean, actually,
given the task's uphill, never-ending nature. Los Angeles's ratio of
freeway space to cars ranks worst in the nation, one-third too small
to meet existing demand. Since the mid-1970s, the number of miles
driven by Californians has more than doubled while lane mileage has
increased by less than 10%. One study predicts that by 2020, Southern
California drivers will spend at least half their driving time making
exactly as much forward progress as they would sitting on the living
room sofa.

Water? The state should have no trouble keeping its head above
it—because there isn't much. For the past three decades, California's
population has severely outstripped the state's ability to store
water. Maurice Roos, chief hydrologist for the California Department
of Water Resources, claimed three years ago that the state lacked
sufficient storage capacity to get through two consecutive dry years.
Even with continuing conservation efforts and occasional wet Sierra
Nevada winters, experts agree that California will face chronic water
shortages in the near future unless something changes.

"The electricity crisis [of 2001] should be a wake-up call for all of
us with respect to water in California," Feinstein says, implying that
water rationing is no less plausible than power shortages. "We will
not have enough water unless we begin to build the necessary
infrastructure, the desalination, the recycling, the conservation
that's really necessary for 45 [million to] 50 million people."

The Assn. of California Water Agencies warns that as early as 2010,
yearly demand could exceed supply by 4 million acre-feet, an amount
equal to what 20 million residents use in a year. You won't be reduced
to drinking from your rain gauge, but your water bill may get your
attention, and green lawns, clean cars and full swimming pools could
become as rare as a Dodgers appearance in the post-season. And that's
in a good year. Even now the Colorado River, a prime source for
Southern California, is so thoroughly tapped by seven states and
Mexico that its waters rarely reach the sea.

Schools? In addition to his role with the Preparing California for the
21st Century joint legislative committee, Vasconcellos chairs the
state Senate Education Committee. "We're so far behind now that if we
build something like 100 schools a year for the next 10 years, we
wouldn't catch up," he says. (Actually, the state only looks five
years ahead. The California Department of Education calculates that
meeting anticipated enrollment will necessitate the construction of 19
new classrooms every day, seven days a week, for the next five years.
That's about 230 new schools per year. An additional 22 aging
classrooms per day will need modernizing.) "We know that we've got a
million more students coming to higher ed. We've known that for 10
years, and we've done almost nothing about it. The no-tax crew have
had their way, so we're turning away 170,000 community college
students this year alone."

Human proliferation touches everything. Air traffic is expected to
double in the next 25 years. Los Angeles currently can deal with its
garbage, but the county can foresee the day when it will have to ship
it elsewhere. Developers convert at least 50,000 acres of California's
farmland to home sites and other urban amenities every year, a
phenomenon with no end in sight. The state already has lost 90% of its
coastal wetlands. "To me the issue most fundamentally tied to
population growth is loss of habitat and endangered species," says
former CAPS President Ric Oberlink, who still consults for the
organization. "You can talk about air quality, and there may be
technological solutions for at least part of the problem—and in fact
we have improved air quality in most cities over the last several
decades. But when it comes to wildlife habitat, there's no turning
back."

Ben Zuckerman, a Harvard-educated UCLA professor of physics and
astronomy, serves on the board of directors for both CAPS and the
Sierra Club. "I have thought quantitatively through my whole career in
the sciences, and I just look at the numbers, the extrapolations of
the current trends, and they're just horrific both for the United
States and for California," he says. Zuckerman advocates immigration
reductions, but in doing so he takes pains to make clear that he
doesn't speak for the Sierra Club, which officially abandoned that
position in 1996. In the past decade, most other U.S. environmental
groups have backed away from the issue as well—the "deafening
silence," Zuckerman calls it. It's a paradoxical shift given that
human population growth underlies virtually every environmental
problem.

"Environmental groups are not talking about it anymore," says
Oberlink. "There's been a retreat from even identifying it as an
underlying issue. And if they're not talking about it, the legislators
are not going to delve into this issue if they're not being pressured.
It's what we call an unholy alliance of leftists concerned about human
rights considerations and right-wing libertarians who don't think
there should be any government interference in anything."

Moreover, any stance against immigration, no matter how well
articulated, guarantees cries of racism, elitism, all the old ad
hominems.

And then there is the pesky little matter of conventional economics.
"To create a sustainable and prosperous set of communities with zero
population growth requires a different economic system than we have,"
says urban planning analyst William Fulton, who has written
extensively on California growth and development. "Whether your
population is increasing or decreasing, it creates a set of problems.
I grew up in a depressed area where people didn't have jobs, where
there was hardly any demand for anything, and where the quality of
community life eroded day by day because population was stagnant and
the economy was in decline. The way I look at it, which set of
problems do you want?"

Can this be true, that to prosper we must increase population and
consumption indefinitely, a feat quite impossible no matter how clever
we think we are? The self-corrective, of course, is that as a place
becomes less livable, people leave. That has already happened in
California, though not in numbers great enough to matter. As long as
other places are worse, people will come to California.

The state has "a spending crisis," Schwarzenegger said in this month's
State of the State message. But the state also has an evolving crisis
of shifting demographics as immigration expands the underclass, which
pays a lesser share of the tax burden. The Southern California Assn.
of Governments' 2003 State of the Region Report found that the
region's position "is slipping in nearly every performance category
related to socio-economic well-being, including income and educational
attainment. Among 17 major metropolitan areas nationwide, the region
ranks 16th or worse in ... attainment of high school degrees, per
capita income, persons in poverty, and children in poverty."

Researchers at the Rand Corp. think tank spotted these troubling
trends in 1997 after studying 30 years of economic and immigration
data. Rand's review concluded that "the large-scale of immigration
flows, bigger families, and the concentration of low-income,
low-tax-paying immigrants making heavy use of public services are
straining state and local budgets."

The lifeboat keeps sitting lower, water spilling over the gunwales,
provisions stretching thin. Yet we keep taking on more passengers, and
nobody's doing much bailing. Is this any way to run paradise?

"All I can tell you," says Jerry Brown, "is that when you try to
retard growth, you have an immediate negative economic impact, and the
forces of the economy will resist those efforts. In the capitalist
system there is no alternative to unceasing growth."

But to what end? Shall we just paint ourselves into an overcrowded
corner and then see if we can figure a way out?

There is more at stake here than mere comfort and convenience. Apply
enough stress to any biological system and eventually it falters. Or
as Brown puts it: "The economy is inside an environment—the
environment is not inside an economy. Which is to say, the laws of
nature will ultimately prevail over the laws of economics."

But if the people entrusted to lead the state are not having this
discussion, if they're not grappling with these issues, then who is?
That's a fine thing to think about the next time you're stuck in
traffic. Which should be soon.

Lee Green lives in Ventura. He last wrote for the magazine about the
U.S. ban on hemp cultivation.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------