Sixty million Californians?

Even people who think far into the future haven't given that one much thought. Demographers are pretty accustomed to thinking that there might be 50 million Californians one day. But last week the state's demographers came out with the prediction that there would be 60 million Californians in 2050 – a little over 40 years from now.

It's a prediction that does make sense on one level. After all, California has been adding about a half-million people per year for almost 70 years. The latest state forecast assumes that this trend will continue well into the future. If the forecasts are right, California's population will have increased tenfold in a century – a rate of sustained growth rarely seen in the industrialized world.

Which raises two important questions:

What if it happens?

And

What if it doesn't happen?

Most people are focusing on the first. So let me focus on the second: slow population growth. It's something so unlikely that most people in California have never even thought about it.

Population growth occurs when one or both of two things is going on:

1. Births outnumber deaths ("natural increase")
2. In-migration outweighs out-migration

From the Gold Rush to the 1970s, California's population grew primarily because of #2. During the late '70s, believe it or not, California's population growth completely stopped because out-migration to other states began to outweigh in-migration from other states. Since then, domestic out-migration has continued to exceed in-migration, but population growth has remained strong because of international immigration (both legal and illegal) and high fertility rates among the immigrant population.

But immigration and fertility rates have been slowing down during the last few years. So it's possible to imagine a time when California's population growth also slows.

What would that mean?

It would mean a rethinking of our landscape and our economy in a way that most Californians can't conceive. I grew up in New York State during the 1960s and ‘70s, at a time when a slowing of both population and prosperity in the Empire State was impossible to imagine. Yet it happened.

New York's population hasn't changed in 40 years, and it's largely because people who grew up there (like me) tend to move away. (This has been mitigated some by international immigration, especially in New York City.) And both downstate and upstate have been up and down economically – mostly down – ever since. New York is still one of the most populous and wealthiest states. But it is not what it once was.

This has required a huge adjustment in the way people think and approach public policy. Even a generation ago, everybody assumed that New York's population would still grow dramatically. It's been a particular problem Upstate, where both the population and the economy have been stagnant for 40 years.

Rolf Pendall, a Cornell planning professor and former housing director at the Bay Area Council, and his colleagues once analyzed the sewer system in the Rochester area. They concluded that it was devised as a countywide system – basically, the entire county was sewered – on the assumption that the entire county would be urbanized because of population growth. What happened instead, of course, was that the county sewer system facilitated a kind of large-lot sprawl we never see in California. The population of Rochester has essentially been redistributed throughout the entire county.

In Buffalo, we see a slightly different problem. There are so many local government jurisdictions and agencies that they can no longer be supported by either the population or the tax base. So leaders in the region have to think about shrinking or consolidating – which would save a lot of money and probably serve the taxpayers well, but would reduce the political base of operations of practically everybody who has to buy into the decision, which is why it hasn't happened.

Can you imagine what would happen if we had to start consolidating some of our thousands of special districts here in California?

Recently, a few of the smarter states and metropolitan areas in the Rust Belt – I'm thinking especially of Cleveland and Pittsburgh – have come to realize that population growth and prosperity don't necessarily go together. They are pursuing a "growth without growth" strategy. They are focusing on creating wealth even as they lose population.

This, of course, is a dream that many no-growth Californians have – let's be richer but have fewer people. Like Downstate New York, California has so much wealth that it will probably be economically powerful forever, even if the population slows. But we'd have to make some difficult choices — much more difficult than today's — about how to manage our remaining prosperity and how to govern ourselves.

Whenever no-growthers start talking about rampant population growth, they usually place the blame on international immigration and the high fertility rates among the immigrants. But let's not forget one thing about "natural increase." It's not simply the number of births. It's the ratio of births over deaths. And we're living longer than ever. Part of the reason that California's population is growing is that, even as babies are born, older folks are, essentially, delaying death much longer than ever before. So California will be populous in the future partly because a lot of really old people will still be alive.

That is fine with me. I'll be only 95 in 2050. I'm looking forward to being waited on in restaurants by those spry 80-year-olds.

- Bill Fulton