Finally!

The I-5/I-805 interchange will open for business this week. As someone who has had to endure this terror for years, all I can say is... It's about time.

My Thoughts on County Population Growth

Throughout my urban planning education at UCSD, much of the discussion on urban growth in the San Diego region focused on the premise that population growth would continue to expand. SANDAG demographers would come in as guest lecturers to speak on the challenges of accommodating the increasing number of county residents, professors would challenge us to be forward thinking in our approaches, and my fellow students would worry that the increasing burden placed on infrastructure would erode the region's quality of life.

Although it's absolutely true that people are attracted to San Diego because it has cultural and lifestyle amenities unique to the region (weather, weather, weather... oh, and the sun, too), the rising number of county residents has indeed strained infrastructure to a tangible degree. Roads and freeways are so congested SANDAG extended the TransNet sales tax to address the issue. It seems almost weekly that a water pipe bursts or sewage spills into the ocean. A majority of my fellow aspiring planners at UCSD concerned themselves with the affordable housing crisis and despite record county foreclosure rates, it seems housing will remain as unaffordable as ever.

It appears now that these detriments to quality of life issues are finally catching up to county growth projections. An article from the Union Tribune highlights San Diego's eighth place ranking in net loss through domestic migration:

It's clear from recent census surveys that a lack of affordable housing is increasingly driving the migration out of California counties, said Hans Johnson, a research fellow with the San Francisco-based Public Policy Institute of California.

“We're also starting to see that (the shortage of affordable housing) is important not just for lower income households but also for college graduates,” he said. “Some people will be quite pleased and feel that controlling population growth is a good thing and that there may be less congestion and fewer environmental effects, but you have to remember that it really means San Diego is pushing growth to other places.”

A few things that I found interesting in this article:

• We weren't too far behind St. Bernard Parish, a region victimized by Hurricane Katrina.
• L.A. and Orange County ranked second and seventh according to the U.S. Census figures, suggesting that this is a much larger southern California-wide regional problem and not just restricted to San Diego.
• SANDAG demographers have known for years that population growth would occur through internal growth (more births than deaths) rather than external migration into the county. Although it's good to bring this issue to the forefront of the public, the fact that the U-T highlights this story with the sub-headline "Region sees more leave here than move here; housing costs blamed" strikes me as an oversimplification at best and pseudo-alarmist at worst.

"That explains why Riverside County, where the median home price last month was $70,000 less than in San Diego County, had the third-largest population gain last year among all counties, the census estimates show."

• Recent trends and anecdotal evidence suggests that bordering inland counties are the main regions absorbing San Diego's outward migration.

Overall, if the pace of population growth declines, I'm not so sure that it's a bad thing for the region. If, as a result, housing prices begin to stabilize and infrastructure functions again at its intended capacity would those of us left behind really have a reason to complain?