editor

For more than a century, California has been the state where people flocked for a better life — 164,000 square miles of mountains, farmland and coastline, shimmering with ambition and dreams, money and beauty. It was the cutting-edge symbol of possibility: Hollywood, Silicon Valley, aerospace, agriculture and vineyards.

But now a punishing drought — and the unprecedented measures the state announced last week to compel people to reduce water consumption — is forcing a reconsideration of whether the aspiration of untrammeled growth that has for so long been this state’s driving engine has run against the limits of nature.

– The New York Times April 4, 2015

Recent travails with the 7-train and school-gate lead me to ask: should everyone be living here?  In a reversal of the entropic forces that overcome an abandoned jungle city, have we instead built over every square inch and then gone, and continue to go, too far upwards?  Most importantly, does densification diminish the quality of life for all?

Probably not if you’re taking the seaplane to your 20-acre spread in the Hamptons every weekend and living in a 5,000 square foot apartment or townhouse Monday to Friday.  As for the rest of us, I will posit that the answer is ‘yes.’  Because as exciting as it is to live in a city that never sleeps, at some point the reality of [Read more…] about GROWTH AT WHAT PRICE?