Huge Southland Population Rise by 2010 Forecast

In an uncharacteristically sobering economic forecast, the region’s major government planning group said Wednesday that about 6 million more people--nearly enough to fill two Los Angeles-size cities--are expected to be added to Southern California’s population by 2010.

Unless action is taken, officials of the Southern California Assn. of Governments warned, the growth could prove crippling.

David Stein, principal planner for SCAG, said the new numbers make cooperation more important than ever for the myriad cities and neighborhoods in the six-county megalopolis. In particular, Stein singled out Orange County, which he said, “has been very successful in bringing in jobs in the 1980s, but very resistant to bring in the housing for the low-income people who work in the county’s factories, auto shops and homes.”

Orange County, he said, has pushed its poorer and younger families east into the Inland Empire.

“We’re saying to Orange County now, ‘You’ve got to build low- and moderate-income housing. You can’t push it all off into Riverside and San Bernardino.’ ”

The SCAG officials acknowledged that the projection of a 21-million population by 2010--much higher than the agency’s previous forecasts of growth in the six-county Southern California area--in many ways represents a worst-case scenario. And several prominent economists questioned the forecast.

Although population forecasts by county were not available, it was estimated by one SCAG official that population growth originally pegged at 2.9 million between 1987 and 2010 in Orange County could be revised to more than 3.2 million.

SCAG planners noted that the numbers nonetheless carry broad implications for the region’s economy, employment prospects and housing needs.

For example, the planners said, unless investments in job training and education are made now--and unless job-seekers become discouraged and leave or avoid the area--Southern California could find itself with a persistent unemployment rate of nearly 13% by 2010.

Also, they said, the area’s already serious housing shortage could become critical by the turn of the century. Just to meet their projections of housing demand by 2000, about 1 million units would have to be built during the next eight years. That would require a building boom equivalent to the one during the no-holds-barred growth of the 1980s.

In the short term, the forecast portends an even greater need to cut down on traffic, the planners said. Hundreds of millions of dollars in federal transportation aid hinges on the region’s ability to comply with federal clean air standards. And more people, they noted, mean more pollution.

Perhaps most critical, the planners said, is the effect that population growth will have on the region’s socioeconomic structure if steps are not taken to slow a widening income gap.

“This is not intended as a planner’s doomsaying,” said Stein. “But unless the economic issues are addressed, those who are able to take their skills and move will be increasingly likely to do so, leaving behind a growing number of either the well-to-do or the poor and semi-skilled.”

The population numbers--made public in a briefing on a forthcoming comprehensive regional plan--are based on 1990 U.S. census figures for Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, Ventura and Imperial counties. Because the area’s population in 1990 was higher than SCAG had projected in its last round of forecasts, the group’s new projections of population growth have ratcheted upward.

Some economists and demographers questioned the dire predictions of SCAG planners Wednesday.

David G. Hensley, director of the UCLA Business Forecasting Project, argued that many factors could alter the pace of population growth over the next two decades.

Hensley’s group is revising its own long-term growth projections to account for new environmental regulations, high housing costs, worsening traffic congestion, crime, tight water supplies, troubled schools and the effects on foreign immigration of a proposed free-trade agreement with Mexico, among other things.

Similarly, Nancy Bolton, a demographer and consultant to UCLA, is revising downward her own long-term population forecasts for California. Based on her conclusion that migration to Southern California from other parts of the United States will fall off, she predicts a regional population of about 20 million by 2010, with most of the growth resulting from births.

Economists also questioned the forecast of persistent 13% unemployment.

“People chase jobs . . . and if the economy does not create jobs to keep unemployment within reasonable bounds . . . then people would not come,” said Ted Gibson, principal economist for the California Department of Finance. That would stem the demand for new housing, he added.

Using its population projections, Hensley’s UCLA group has forecast that Los Angeles County’s unemployment rate would hover around 6% to 6.5% by 2010. Those figures are now being revised.

Still, SCAG officials said they had taken most of these issues into account in making their projections. Urban historian Mike Davis, author of “City of Quartz,” a book on Los Angeles’ development, lauded the SCAG predictions, saying the figures were “probably the most substantive and comprehensive we are likely to have for a long time.”

But, he said, they are as gloomy as they are reliable. “This, I think, marks the end of a 50-year boom for Southern California,” said Davis, “and the beginning of a whole new epoch in which stagnation will be built into the economy.”

SCAG revised upward its population projections when 1990 census figures made it clear that the agency had underestimated birthrates and the number of illegal immigrants still moving into the area, SCAG demographer Vivian Doche said. An increase in the late 1980s in federal immigration quotas meant a corresponding increase in projections for legal immigration, she added.

Doche said work is being done to determine where in the region the new growth will occur. Only about 40% of the new Southern Californians will be immigrants and U.S. transplants, she said. The bulk will be children of current residents--most of them from Latino, Asian-American and other immigrant groups.

SCAG’s new numbers throw a monkey wrench into the region’s struggle to gear its growth to the federal Clean Air Act, said Ralph Cipriani, the agency’s transportation planner.

Cipriani noted that regional goals for curbing traffic and encouraging car-pooling already were considered overly ambitious under the earlier, lower, population estimates. Now, with millions more expected to move to the region, the goals appear all but hopeless, he said.

But compliance is crucial, Cipriani added, since hundreds of millions of federal dollars for transportation projects hinge on meeting standards for pollution control.

The Los Angeles County Transportation Commission’s proposed 30-year, $183-billion program to improve residents’ mobility--a plan that includes new rail lines, buses, freeways and other programs--also is based on SCAG’s original population estimates.

Still, LACTC spokesmen downplayed the impact of the new figures. And officials of the South Coast Air Quality Management District noted that any increase in the number of potential polluters would be at least partially offset by the introduction of cleaner-burning fuels for factories and cars.

Nonetheless, if SCAG’s projections play out, it could mean a drastic shift in the quality of life for Southern California residents, said labor and industrial economist Goetz Wolff.

A shortage of conventional jobs would accelerate what he described as the existing trend toward a Third World-style economy in the region--an economy defined by swap meet-style retailing, off-the-books auto repair and construction jobs and sweatshop industry. Similarly, a shortage of conventional housing could force people to live more densely, Wolff said.