California "in denial" about population growth

Excerpt from Dan Water’s column in the Sacramento Bee entitled: “California can’t avoid expansion”:

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.

Those demands fuel political conflicts — over water and housing development, to cite but two examples — that are made even more contentious by the fact that California’s population growth is almost entirely immigration-driven, both directly and through births to immigrant mothers. Environmental groups, for instance, often oppose housing developments, water projects, highway construction and retail complexes to serve population growth, while ignoring immigration issues out of fear of alienating Latino political figures…

Arnold Schwarzenegger, to his credit, has been more willing than any recent governor to acknowledge that population growth generates political conflicts that should not be ignored. He often cites the state’s relentless push toward 50 million people in urging other politicians and voters to invest in the infrastructure that was shamefully neglected for decades because of political denial and ideological gridlock.

Schwarzenegger doesn’t see growth as a cause for celebration, as Pat Brown and others of his era did, nor as something to be ignored, as Brown’s son and his successors often did, but simply as an inescapable fact of California life.

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