California Population
California’s current population is about 40 million. According to the latest projections from the California Department of Finance, the state’s population will be 44.2 million in 2060. This works out to a growth rate of 0.26% per year, essentially zero.
This is an ideal state of affairs from an environmental perspective because it is sustainable. Any sort of exponential growth-any percentage annual increase- is unsustainable. But zero population growth is bad for business. More people means more customers and more business. And some businesses, such as homebuilding, depend on adding people. With no new people, we won’t have to build new houses. We can just maintain and perhaps replace some of our existing housing stock.
Growth in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) can be broken down into two components: population growth and productivity growth. When the population stops growing, GDP growth will come exclusively from the increase in workers’ productivity. This must happen in the long run, since the population can’t continue increasing forever.
Zero or negative population growth is happening in many developed countries. Fertility rates in such countries tend to be below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman. In California, official projections are that the number of deaths per year will become larger than the number of births in the state by 2037. Immigration from other states and countries will sustain the population.
Fertility rates in many developing countries are still high, and will continue to drive the growth in world population, which the UN projects will level off at around 10.4 billion in 2100, up from its current 8 billion. It’s very good news for the environment that world population growth is projected to stop by the end of this century.
California housing
California’s official position is that there is an acute housing shortage in the state. This shortage results in high housing prices, which in turn cause overcrowding and homelessness. There are economic impacts as well, such as reduced spending on housing construction and reduced consumer spending because money spent for housing isn’t part of discretionary disposable income. The high housing prices also reduce the number of people wanting to move to California.
It’s difficult to determine the degree to which homelessness in California is caused by high housing prices. California has one of the highest rates of homelessness: 402 per 100,000 residents, or about one person in 250. Only New York and Hawaii have higher rates. New York might top the list because, unlike in California, 95% of the homeless live in shelters, compared with 30% in California. And the other states with the highest rates of homelessness, Hawaii, Oregon, and Washington, have, like California, climates and government policies favorable to the homeless. About 25% of homeless adults in Los Angeles County have severe mental illnesses and 27% have long-term substance-use disorders. With all these other factors, increasing the supply of housing generally would have only a small impact on homelessness. Studies have shown that the increase in supply of market-rate housing doesn’t “trickle down” to increase the availability of affordable housing. To do that requires construction of low-cost housing, including housing for the homeless with government subsidies and other incentives, which are available.
Except for the homeless, people living in California are housed; they have places to live. So the housing shortage doesn’t mean that people can’t find housing. But the high cost of housing is an important contributor to overcrowding. Los Angeles County has been the most housing-overcrowded large county in the US for the last three decades. 11% of homes in the County are overcrowded, as defined by the federal government: more than one person per room, excluding bathrooms.
Another consequence of higher housing prices is longer commutes. When housing near one’s job is prohibitively expensive, one finds cheaper housing in a more distant location. This results in long commutes, which degrade one’s quality of life and have significant environmental impacts, such as increasing GHG emissions from more driving.
More people are moving out of California than are moving into it. High housing prices are an important factor, but not the only factor causing this exodus. California has high rates for income and sales taxes. We also have disasters: wildfires, droughts, and floods. And of course people move for jobs.
How do we balance these negative consequences of high housing prices with the positive ones? For me, the positive ones win out; I’m in favor of what’s sometimes called “smart growth.” Let’s manage the planning of our cities so that we don’t keep sprawling them out. We can gradually remake them so they are denser, and walkable, with transportation options other than cars.
In Oregon, cities are required to designate urban growth boundaries - planning lines which prevent cities from expanding out onto farm and forest lands. Urban development is allowed only within the boundary. Boundaries are reviewed every six years, to make sure they keep pace with population and employment growth. It would be great if we could adopt a similar system in California.
Allowing housing prices to stay high will help keep California’s population stable, but the high prices have a larger effect on those at the lower end of the economic spectrum. This means that the high prices disproportionately affect people of color. As mentioned above, studies have shown that building more market-rate housing is an ineffective way to increase the availability of affordable housing--the “trickle down” in prices is very limited. A better alternative, which the State and certain cities are implementing in California, is to directly incentivize the production of affordable housing through subsidies and reduced regulation.
Limiting the supply of housing helps keep the state’s population in check. It’s more important to stabilize the state’s population than it is to reduce overcrowding and long commutes, and to obtain extra GDP growth from an expanding population. We have a great opportunity to do this now that the population of California is projected to remain stable for the next few decades.
Talking about population
The Sierra Club recently produced an Equity Language Guide, whose purpose is to remind Sierra Clubbers to “demonstrate our commitment to equity, justice, and inclusion...by using respectful, thoughtful language in all of our communications.” The Guide does not prohibit outright any discussion of population, but it indicates a strong preference in that direction, based on the statement that “environmental groups, including many members and leaders of the Sierra Club, have used concern about ‘overpopulation’ as a pseudo-scientific justification for racist and xenophobic policies to limit both immigration and reproductive freedom.” The Guide goes on to say that the “Sierra Club has made an intentional shift away from this legacy with our current focus on gender equity and rights.”
The intent of this section of the Guide is to suppress discussions of population as a contributor to environmental harm. But it’s important to have those discussions, and a language guide is not the right place to prohibit them. Adding more population, especially in the US, where the average person uses environmental resources at a rate several times the world average, has huge environmental impacts. Whether or not to have a child is one of the most consequential environmental decisions most couples will ever make. We should be free to point out that one result of the US Supreme Court’s recent dismantling of Roe v. Wade will be to increase population by limiting the availability of abortions. There are policy options available to limit population that are neither racist nor xenophobic, such as educating women and providing access to contraception and abortions.
A stable population
It’s very good news for the environment that the California population has stabilized, and is not projected to grow significantly in the future. California has an opportunity to be a world leader in developing a sustainable economy, an economy that continues to grow and prosper without population growth.
For more information about population and the environment, especially climate change, see Chapter 3 of my book Earthling, available from Ethics Press.