Is California running out of land? At first glance, this may seem to be a preposterous question. After all, California has something like 150,000 square miles of land – and the vast majority of it is not urbanized. The federal government owns half of it for parks, national forests, and the like, and most of the rest of it is used to grow food. Even with the rapid urban growth we've experienced during the past half-century, how can we be running out of land? Well, that's exactly the point. We're not running out of non-urbanized land. But we are running out of land that is not permanently "spoken for" in some way or another – especially around the large coastal metropolitan areas where most Californians live and where, believe it or not, most of our future urban growth is going to occur. By "spoken for," I don't mean developed. Rather, I simply mean that the land has been more or less permanently locked up for some particular use – urban growth, agriculture, open space, national parks and forests, endangered species protection, and so forth. When you use that definition, it becomes clear how tight our coastal land situation has become – especially when you realize that most of California is made up not of wide open spaces, but of valleys, mountains, and coastal plains that create a particular boxed-in structure to land resources. The nine-county San Francisco Bay Area is almost completely built out. There is abundant open space in Marin County, but that has been permanently set aside for dairy farming. There is abundant undeveloped land in the East and South Bays, but mostly that property is in the hands of land trusts for open space. The few places where it is possible to place more urban growth – eastern Alameda and Contra Costa Counties in particular – are battlegrounds where most remaining land will undoubtedly be set aside for open space, no matter who wins the battle. No wonder suburbanization is oozing south and east to the Central Valley and the Salinas Valley. Given its traditional reputation as the nation's capital of sprawl, it is even more surprising that the five-county metropolitan Los Angeles area is in pretty much the same situation. A vast central area has been urbanized during the last 50 years. The entire coastal plain (including northern Orange County), and a ring of valleys (San Gabriel, San Bernardino, San Fernando, Santa Clarita, Conejo) — separated by mountains from the coastal plain — all have been consumed for The American Dream since the end of World War II. Much of the remaining land (desert and mountains mostly) is in the hands of the federal government. Thus, there are a few places left to go, but, as in the Bay Area, these are the familiar "growth battlegrounds" you read about in these pages each month. In Ventura County, voters have knocked 100,000 acres of agricultural and open space land out of the development game. In Orange and Riverside Counties, the Endangered Species Act will do the same for a half-million acres more – land that probably would have been available for development as recently as the 1980s. The areas unaffected by these constraints are subject to political battles, such as the Newhall Ranch property in northern Los Angeles County – where the eventual project, assuming it is approved, will certainly accommodate far less growth than would have been the case in the past. In fact, the only part of the region that seems to have a vast amount of unconstrained land for growth is the "high desert" – specifically the Antelope and Victor Valleys. These areas have been growing fast for the last 20 years, but they remain far from job centers, located in harsh climates, and their growth has not been without social and economic stress. The fact that we are running out of land does not mean that our overall urban growth will slow. Every projection suggests that California in general and metropolitan Los Angeles in particular will continue to add population at a brisk pace during the next 20 years. In the five-county Los Angeles region, the phrase most frequently bandied about is "two Chicagos." The assumption is that the region will have to accommodate 6 million more people (about a 40% increase over the current 16 million) during the next 20 years. How could this be? How could it be that we must accommodate millions more people even if we don't have anywhere to put them? The answer is that the future of California looks very different than the past; therefore, the future of planning and development in California must look very different as well. First of all, most of our population growth is inevitable, not optional. That is, it will come as a result of natural increase – births over deaths – rather than migration from other states or immigration from other countries. This is a huge change from the past, and it is the first time we have ever faced the population question from this perspective. In the economic downturn of the late 1970s, the state's population growth almost came to halt – thanks in large part to the fact that middle-class folks from other states stopped moving to California, and middle-class folks who lived here started moving to other states. By contrast, during the recession of the mid '90s, our state's population growth never dropped below around 400,000 per year. A second, related point is that a great deal of this population growth is occurring in existing urban areas – especially older suburbs – and that is a phenomenon we in California have never faced before either. Since 1980, for example, metro Los Angeles has added about 5 million people. Surprisingly, however, 2 million of them have been added in areas that would have been regarded as "built out" in 1980 – the City of Los Angeles, the San Gabriel Valley, southeastern Los Angeles County, and northern Orange County. As the map below suggests, during the 1990s the mature communities of northern Orange County added more people than the developing communities of southern Orange County. And partly for that reason, Orange County added more people during the 1990s than did Riverside County, which is often seen as Southern California's fastest growing area. (This map was prepared by our sister organization, Solimar Research Group, for "Sprawl Hits The Wall," a report released last month by the Southern California Studies Center at the University of Southern California. The report is available on our website, www.cp-dr.com) All this means that the future of accommodating California's growth is not about building new suburbs, but, rather, about rendering older ones as better places to live even as they become more dense. Urban activists in California often resist density as damaging to their quality of life, and understandably so. But the fact of the matter is that in our older suburbs the human density is rising considerably even as the building density does not change much. Local residents throughout California may oppose the construction of more apartment buildings or condominiums. But does such opposition make sense when, in those same communities, two or even three families are living in one single-family home?