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For California, I'd say 7-10 million is perfect, 15 million max, in order to maintain an excellent quality of life for the most people, while maintaining the human capital needed to build the economy.
I just think we are woefully overcrowded in LA and the Bay Area, not that we don't have land to build, we have tons of open space, but how does accommodating tens of millions more people make us any better as far as quality of life, in fact, I think it's a detriment to quality of life, not to mention a drain on natural resources like water which we don't have.
We have 24 million extra. Thankfully, a lot of them are leaving right now
Maybe I'm being regressive? I don't know, but I was reading another thread and got to thinking about why our problems seem to have snowballed, and I keep thinking it comes down to having too many people to think about.
I could be wrong, and will probably change my mind later, but this is how I feel now.
Population isn't the problem for me, it's how the population lives, we have far too many suburbs. Too much car dependable, too many huge useless lawns, too many highways, and too much development of natural areas when we could do infill in every city.
For my home state of Louisiana I would go up to about 10 million. For Colorado, we are ok where we're at, just need to force government to enforce denser and more sustainable development.
Location: East of Seattle since 1992, originally from SF Bay Area
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I don't see any kind of ideal population for our state (Washington) because of the many differences within. We have a high concentration of population in some desirable western Washington counties such as King, Pierce, and Snohomish (2,326,040, 891,862, and 811,572) that are already over crowded, with really high cost of living due to the demand for everything. A few others are at about half of that (400-500,000) but most of the counties east of the Cascade Mountains are much less populated, Garfield County has only 2,300 people, Columbia 3,950, Skamania 11,900. Many counties could handle a lot more people if there were jobs for them, so statewide we could use much more population. The problem is getting those additional
people to the counties that need them, not continuing to overload the others.
That would put California back to WW2 era population. That’s a lot of wealth that would disappear, so the infrastructure wouldn’t be as extensive as it is now. Unless this was simply a Thanos snap situation where the people disappeared but everything else stayed the same.
I’m not sure about ideal populations. However I do think if I was sim citying North Carolina, I’d make cities and development mostly away from the Blue Ridge and the coastline. National park large swaths of the state and have most of the people living in the Piedmont. Gets the big cities denser, and allows nature to do its thing.
Practically, the US would be better off with a smaller population at least in the near-term, due to water use and farmland requirements until we can develop better technologies in those areas.
Aesthetically, it'd be super rad if the Seattle area were an endless canyon of cyberpunk high-rises and commuter rail lines along the whole eastern Sound.
It'd also be cool to turn the Tri-Cities into like a 3 million MSA (with real downtowns and light rail, not just a sea of sprawl like it is now). We don't have a lot of genuinely tri-focal large metros in this country, and it'd be cool to see how a large metro would look in the dry, hilly, treeless landscape of the Palouse.
Then maybe grow the Spokane-CDA area up to like 2 million --- just because I'd like to see a real city on a prominent (swimmable) lake that isn't Madison or a Great Lakes city, and because the sprawl in between Spokane and the lake is super ugly and would look better as just one continuous dense city.
So total for this alternate-universe WA would be like 20m?
I think New York state is just right with its population today.
New York City is super crowded, but it is pretty dang efficient. It's the suburban areas that are sort of a mess, traffic and congestion-wise, and also more importantly, resource-wise. Lots of wasted space and lots of unnecessary highways and roads everywhere.
Since the large majority of people in the state live in NYC (8.6 million-ish) and the surrounding metro area of Long Island (2.5 million-ish) and Westchester/Orange/Putnam/Rockland counties (1.5-ish million), upstate only has about 7 million people. Not too bad for such a good-sized state like New York.
My home state of Tennessee is just about right as well--at right under 7 million. It would be able to comfortably hold 8 - 9 million. Any more than roughly 9 million, and it will start to be too congested in many parts, and too populated. Since the highest growth is in the Nashville metro region, suburbs and sprawl rules there, so more people will eat up tons of forests and nature that could otherwise be left alone.
I think New York state is just right with its population today.
New York City is super crowded, but it is pretty dang efficient. It's the suburban areas that are sort of a mess, traffic and congestion-wise, and also more importantly, resource-wise. Lots of wasted space and lots of unnecessary highways and roads everywhere.
Since the large majority of people in the state live in NYC (8.6 million-ish) and the surrounding metro area of Long Island (2.5 million-ish) and Westchester/Orange/Putnam/Rockland counties (1.5-ish million), upstate only has about 7 million people. Not too bad for such a good-sized state like New York.
My home state of Tennessee is just about right as well--at right under 7 million. It would be able to comfortably hold 8 - 9 million. Any more than roughly 9 million, and it will start to be too congested in many parts, and too populated. Since the highest growth is in the Nashville metro region, suburbs and sprawl rules there, so more people will eat up tons of forests and nature that could otherwise be left alone.
Are you talking about if Tennessee kept building suburbs? Because it seems like Tennessee could hold twice as many people if Nashville, Memphis,Knoxville, etc weren't building so many sprawling suburbs.
I think New York state is just right with its population today.
New York City is super crowded, but it is pretty dang efficient. It's the suburban areas that are sort of a mess, traffic and congestion-wise, and also more importantly, resource-wise. Lots of wasted space and lots of unnecessary highways and roads everywhere.
Since the large majority of people in the state live in NYC (8.6 million-ish) and the surrounding metro area of Long Island (2.5 million-ish) and Westchester/Orange/Putnam/Rockland counties (1.5-ish million), upstate only has about 7 million people. Not too bad for such a good-sized state like New York...
I think the biggest population problem is upstate New York, where the population has been stagnant or declining for a while now and young people typically leave. Deindustrialization hit the cities upstate pretty hard--with maybe the exception of Albany. So another 1-2 million folks spread out around the metro areas of Syracuse, Buffalo, Rochester, Binghamton, Utica, etc. would probably make for big improvements in those areas and a healthier state.
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