I read in an article about how in the late 60s they predicted LA’s population to peak around 7,000,000 by 2010. Obviously that never happend. And in a San Jose paper they predicted the city population would overtake San Diego by 2010.
Just wondering if there are any “half-reliable” sites that can predict city limt population peaks.
I tried Googling around but everything comes up with the metro population peak growth. And very few metro ares stop growing as opposed to cities which eventually stop or become somewhat stable while the metro area grows.
The growth of cities is hopelessly tied up with the overall future trends in many social issues which are difficult to predict. I think there’s no way to accurately predict any significant demographic trends even as little as thirty years in the future. Which areas of the country will be increasing fastest in population, whether cities, suburbs, or rural areas will be growing fastest, whether cities, suburbs, or rural areas will be relatively increasing or decreasing in average income, what areas various ethnic groups will be moving into - these are all difficult to predict. They’re also all tied up with international issues that are even harder to predict.
Even metro area growth tends to be self-limiting. After a certain point the hassles of dealing with the crowding, lack of services, difficulties in obtaining food and water, and increasing slum areas with fewer opportunities for good jobs force even the poorest to seek other places to move to. There were any number of predictions in the 60s and 70s that a dozen or so third world cities would grow to 30 million population by 2000. None of them did so or got anywhere close.
In the U.S. the automobile has made the distinction between cities and their metro areas effectively meaningless, except in increasingly obsolete old political boundaries. Even those can be erased, as in Indianapolis and Jacksonville, which effectively merged the city with the surrounding county. San Jose has a larger population than San Francisco, although SF is still the hub of the metro area and San Jose looks like a suburb with practically no downtown area. Some other southwestern cities have the ability to annex surrounding areas so that the city itself can keep growing in size and population without any underlying changes.
I’m sure city officials would love to know how population will grow and what limits will be so they can plan for building schools, roads, sewers, police, and other services. But they’ve been so consistently wrong for so long because peoples’ behaviors change so rapidly that I don’t know of any good way to do it or anybody that is seriously trying.
Maybe elmwood, our resident city planner, has some insider knowledge that I lack, having been out of city government for so long now.
In the 1950s and 1960s, population projections for just about every part of the country was wildly optimistic. Demographers saw the baby boom and the large families of the area, and didn’t anticipate future trends such as dropping family sizes, delayed marriages, legalized abortion, and the economic decline of the Rust Belt and small Great Plains towns. Buildout projections of the time assumed that future development would take place at the same density as existing development; instead, in many parts of the country, lot sizes increased, the density of new development dropped, and buildout capacities plunged.
If projections made in the 1960s by various agencies panned out, the Buffalo metro area would have about 2,000,000 residents; today it’s just over a million. I’m writing a new comprehensive plan for a small village of about 3,000 residents. The village’s last comprehensive plan, written in 1960, projected that the population today would be over 50,000.
From a recent article in Planning magazine, from the American Planning Association:
To answer the OP’s question about a Web site with population projections; there’s no one site that has numbers for the entire country, but there are hundreds of state agencies, local and regional economic development agencies, and academic research centers that include population projections for a given area. You might have to search around for the appropriate agency in your area. This is a link to projections for entire states from the US Census Bureau.
Some communities perform buildout studies, but they can be wildly inaccurate. Buildout studies are based on existing zoning, and usually looks at the theoretical maximum permitted development density of land in the city. Reality is much different. A zoning code may have a maximum of … oh, six houses per acre in an R-1 district, but not all development will be at the maximum. In the region where I work, where land is inexpensive and the housing market is flat, there is little financial incentive to develop property to the maximum permitted density. Land is subdivided very inefficiently; instead of building new roads into a parcel and opening up land for development, land is subdivided into deep, narrow strips fronting an existing road to reduce (or eliminate!) site development costs. In economically depressed areas, it may actually be more profitable for a developer to build at a lower density than a higher density!
Buildout studies also don’t consider zoning changes for increased or decreased density, future agricultural preservation and transfer of development rights programs that render land undevelopable, reallocation of residential land for commercial or industrial use, and updated comprehensive plans that may change the course and character of a community.
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