A Demographic Lesson : Warnings about state population explosion miss the mark

California has learned the lesson that demographics is as imperfect a science as economics. As recently as 1991, unbridled growth seemed as much a part of the landscape here as fan palms and bougainvillea. That year one leading demographer, Leon F. Bouvier, projected a nearly doubled state population of 50 million by 2011 and an alarmed Gov. Pete Wilson, proclaiming that “rapid growth will continue,” launched a now forgotten project to manage this growth. All the world, it seemed, wanted to come to sunny, booming California.

A new state report shows how wrong all of this was. It documents that recession has slowed the state’s population growth dramatically, to only 1.4% last year, about half the rate during the last decade. A dozen years ago, at the height of the Texas oil boom, some predicted that Houston would be the world’s largest city by the turn of the century. That will not be, nor, surely, will California’s population double in two decades.

That may be something of a blow to state pride, not to mention real estate developers. But it represents an opportunity, a pause, to realize that perception often lags reality. Even as Gov. Wilson was mounting his growth-management study, growth was slowing; even as politicians of left and right today crusade against illegal immigration, the evidence is that the pace is slowing.

It is worth asking whether these trends will help solve some of our problems. Will we really need so many costly schools, toll roads, airports and rail lines? To be sure, the public infrastructure is badly in need of repair. And the overall population trend masks some troubling undercurrents in a state that is experiencing a net loss of better-paid, middle-class households to other states even as growth from foreign immigration and births continues. That raises the question of whether we will have a long-term tax base that can pay for even reduced expectations.

The population slowdown offers us an opportunity to ponder the fact that demographic forces are powerful in shaping our lives, and are often as unpredictable as the natural ones that have shaken us of late.