The L.A. Times has an interesting article on population projections for my native state, California. (Any shocked Texans reading this will be relieved to know that though I was born in San Francisco, shortly before my birth my grandmother sent my parents a jar of dirt from her backyard in Dallas to place under the delivery bed so I could be born over Texas soil.)
In the article, Jack Kyser, the chief economist for the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation, refers to California as “a country masquerading as a state.” By 2050 the state is expected to have 60 million people, the majority of whom will be Latinos. I’m sure the xenophobes are already panicking about the incomprehensible idea of people of Hispanic descent forming a majority in cities like San Diego, Santa Barbara, and Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles.
When I was in high school in Northern California in the late 1980s, it was obvious that the infrastructure of highways and the education system in the state were crumbling. I haven’t lived there since then, though I visit fairly often, and I’ve seen some improvement, but the challenges the state will face in coping with that kind of growth are formidable. The Los Angeles area in particular will have to figure out a way to encourage greater density and redo the strip mall and parking lot model that prevails in most of the area. Perhaps they can learn something from San Francisco, which after New York is the most densely populated city in the country.
California has, at least since the mid-twentieth century, been the state to look to for the earliest manifestations of trends that eventually hit the rest of the country, and I bet the way the state addresses this population boom will not prove an exception. I hope I am still alive in 2050 to see what happens.
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