In American West, elbow room has vanished

[question everything]

Sunday, August 14, 2005

In American West, elbow room has vanished

By Blaine Harden
The Washington Post


(snip)

Odd as it may seem, density is the rule, not an exception, in the wide-open spaces of the West. Salt Lake City is more tightly packed than Philadelphia. So is Las Vegas in comparison to Chicago, and Denver compared to Detroit. Ten of the country's 15 most densely populated metro areas are in the West, where residents move to newly developed land at triple the per-acre density of any other part of the country. "If you want elbow room, move to Atlanta or Charlotte or the countrified suburbs of Washington," said Robert Lang, director of Virginia Tech's Metropolitan Institute in Alexandria. "You probably aren't going to get it in the West. There, if you and your neighbor lean out your windows, you can hold hands."

(snip)

Open space in the West has always seemed endless. But deserts, mountains, huge tracts of federally owned land and a pervasive lack of water make much of the region unlivable. As such, it has remained the most rural part of the country in terms of land use while becoming the most densely urban in terms of where people live.

Sometime around the early 1980s, greater Los Angeles collided with these unforgiving restraints. Still, newcomers kept pouring into the Los Angeles Basin, at a rate of about 2 million to 3 million a decade. They had to live somewhere, and many could not afford to settle in — or did not want to drive for hours to — suburbs way out in the desert or on the far side of the mountains. So sprawl sputtered to an unplanned and unheralded halt. Los Angeles began "densifying dramatically," even at its fringe, according to an analysis of federal population numbers by the Brookings Institution's Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy.

(snip)

Newport Coast is the final oceanfront piece in the largest private master-planned development in the United States. Begun in the early 1960s by the Irvine Co., it is eight times the size of Manhattan and covers a fifth of Orange County... Indeed, housing across Orange County is among the most unaffordable in the country. Just one out of 10 households earns the $165,000 a year needed to buy a median-priced house, which cost $702,000 in June, according to the California Association of Realtors. DeSantis bought her town house for $385,000 in 1996. Since then, she says, it has at least doubled in value. If she were buying now, she said, she could not afford Newport Coast.

(snip)

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002440170_density14.html

[getmeouttahere]

1. There's this unforgiving thing called the Pacific Ocean...

so you have to build "up" instead of "out" and if you're like me and want to live close to ocean so it will be cooler....