Michael Coronado
An unrelenting housing shortage and an increasing statewide
population is like a locomotive steaming toward a stone wall, land experts said at a Wednesday meeting of the Urban Land Institute Inland Chapter.
Ten people per hour add to the Inland area's approximately 3.5 million residents. In Southern California, about 6 million people will need somewhere to live in California by 2020, Donald H. Brackenbush told about 400 planners, architects, builders and land-use experts at the first luncheon of the Urban Land Institute's newly formed Inland Chapter.
The Urban Land Institute is a nonprofit education and research organization that studies land-use and development issues worldwide. The goal of Wednesday's meeting was to highlight the Inland area's explosive population growth and offer solutions that will provide places for people to live, work and play.
Brackenbush explained that several small cities in California would need to grow nearly tenfold to accommodate a burgeoning population.
In one study convened by the USC Lusk Center for Real Estatecolor> and Urban Land Institute of Los Angeles, land-use experts gathered in a room to figure out where they would put 6 million people.
Their solutions and concepts would rattle many in small towns, whose size would grow exponentially.
One concept stated that Hemet and Calimesa would need to expand to the size of Tucson, Ariz. -- to nearly 490,000 people --to accommodate the expected population growth.
Those radical changes are a preview of what needs to be explored now, experts said.
"It is up to groups like the ULI to find solutions," said
Brackenbush, a principal in a real estate advisory firm.
A housing supply shortage, a lack of affordable housing and
community infrastructure improvements will prove the major
challenges, said Jeffrey Gault, president of Empire Companies, an Inland-area based real estate business.
To alleviate the housing crunch, land-use experts said creative thinking and re-evaluating how land is developed and homes are built will be imperative. Density, how homes are clustered and how many people are allowed to live in a specific area, for example, must be rethought for each city and community.
Rick Bishop, executive director of the Western Riverside Council of Governments, said growth cannot be stopped in the Inland area and cities need smart planning to find ways to accommodate that growth.
He offered as an example the city of Santa Ana in Orange County that saw thousands more move in during the past decade while the number of housing units built decreased.
"The density issue will occur whether we like it or not," he explained. "The growth is coming and it's coming quickly. We need
to plan for it."
Part of the solutions in managing growth is getting elected
officials to recognize that the problem is their own and needs addressing now, rather than later, he said.
Panel member Randall Lewis characterized solutions in three
ways: understand how best to define mixed uses in each
community; how best to address density issues; and how best to build a healthy community.