California holds an incredibly strong grip on the imagination of the world, and it is not just a superb climate, wondrous natural amenities, and vibrant urban areas, but much of it has to do with our culture; but all of it means people will continue to flow here and enhancing our infrastructure to greet them is an example of good leadership with a deep appreciation of history.
Dan Walters: California can't avoid expansion
By Dan Walters - Bee Columnist
Published 12:00 am PDT Sunday, May 6, 2007
When California surged past New York in the early 1960s to become the nation's most populous state, the state's political and civic leaders, including Gov. Pat Brown, hailed it as a proud milestone. The state's population at the time: about 17 million.
When Pat Brown's son, Jerry, became governor in 1975, he proclaimed an "era of limits," implicitly assuming that the era of high population growth, driven by a strong flow of post-World War II migration of workers from other states and an even stronger postwar baby boom, had ended. The state's population at the time: about 23 million.
The state Department of Finance released its annual population estimates the other day, having calculated that California expanded by 470,000 human souls in 2006 to reach 37.7 million, more than twice what it was when Pat Brown celebrated and two-thirds more than when Jerry Brown assumed that the state's need for highways and other forms of infrastructure would diminish.
Migration -- from other nations, not other states -- and a second baby boom that began in the late 1970s and generates more than a half- million newborns a year continue to push California's population upward by hundreds of thousands each year and millions each decade. We'll probably end this decade with more than 39 million Californians, although there's about a million- person gap between what the state's demographers count and what those at the federal Census Bureau calculate, thanks to differences over whether there's been an outflow of population to other states.
The exact dimensions of growth are less important than the fact that it continues, and as it does, it will remain the most important factor in the state's social, economic and political evolution. A half-million more Californians every year -- more in some years -- translates into a demand for about 200,000 additional units of housing, a quarter-million jobs and space on the roads for several hundred thousand more cars and trucks, for instance, as well as more water, more desks in schools and so forth.
