Appreciable Growth In South
Forecast For Next 15 Years
By BARBARA S. MOFFET
National Geographic New* Service
When New York architect Donna Goodman thinks
of 21st-century America, she sees cities afloat on
the oceans.
Designed like oil rigs, extending from the sea
floor to several stories above the surface, the cities
she envisions house 20,000 to 30,000 people. "There
would be whole complexes with industries, uni
versities, even resorts, all connected by bridges and
equipped with ports," says Goodman, whose study
of philosophy guides her designs for the future.
But her vision of floating cities is based more on
practicality than philosophy. By the first half of the
next century, some futurists predict, the sea's raw
materials will be in heavy demand, and economics
will require on-the-spot facilities for extracting
minerals, manufacturing drugs, refining energy,
and cultivating fish.
Onward To Space
Houston architect Larry Bell foresees steady
movement of Americans to deserts, the Arctic and
Antarctic regions, and outer space. "As Earth's ac
cessible resources are depleted, there will be more
interest in hostile environments," Bell says.
Most experts agree that american settlements in
space are only a question of time. The goal of the L-5
Society of Tucson, Ariz., for example, is to hold a
meeting up there someday.
Other projections are more earthbound. One of
them envisions housing for thousands, perched on
gigantic, bridgelike structures spanning water
ways or overcrowded cities and accessible by
super-elevators.
The majority of americans, however, will con
tinue to dwell on the ground level of mainland
U.S.A. But several trends are pushing populations
in new directions and scrambling traditional settle
ment patterns.
During the 1970s, for the first time in more than a
century, the rural areas of the United States grew
faster than metropolitan areas. Today, for the first
time in history, more than half of the U. S. popula
tion lives in the South and West.
Divorces are at an all-time high, household sizes
hovering at an all-time low. And the age distribu
tion is odd—a bulge of people born during the post
World-War-II baby boom sandwiched between
smaller numbers of older and younger people. Aged
baby-boomers will help raise the median age to 41 in
the year 2030, compared with 28 in 1970.
But just when demographers thought they had
established the country's new direction for the
future—away from cities and toward rural areas—
an old trend reappeared. Census Bureau figures for
the early 1980s show metropolitan areas gaining
faster than rural areas.
Country Or City?
"I suspect the move-to-the-country phenomenon
was short-lived," says Richard A. Engels, assistant
chief of the population division of the Census
Bureau.
But other demographers say rural areas will con
tinue to draw people at the expense of cities, for a
variety of reasons. ,
"If you ask in surveys where people would prefer
to live, they express a much greater preference for
rural lifestyles than for big cities," says Dr. Larry
Long of the Census Bureau's Center for Demo
graphic Studies. Rising affluence, he says, will free
some future Americans from the congestion, pollu
tion, and crime that lower the quality of life in many
big cities.
The U. S. economy, in metamorphosis from an in
dustry-based system to a service-oriented one, is
altering workers' living patterns. Densely packed
Northern cities are less appropriate for today's
society, in which more than half the jobs require no
regular supply of raw materials.
"Today's workers don't have to gather around
resources like coal, iron, railroads, or shipping
lanes," Long says. "You can manufacture silicon
chips almost anywhere."
Sophisticated communications systems are
helping spread people even more widely apart, just
as transportation developments, chiefly superhigh
ways, helped create urban sprawl after World War
II.
"The information revolution is continuing what
the car and electricity did to spread the population
out," says Dr. William Alonso of Harvard Univer
sity's Center for Population Studies. "For exam
ple, call a company's 800 phone number, and the
operator may be anywhere."
Honeywell Inc. is typical of the fragmentation.
Fewer than one-fifth of its 94,000 employees live and
work in Minneapolis, the company's headquarters
city. Its products—computers, automated control
systems, and weapons—are made at plants scat
tered around the globe, and employees communi
cate by phone, electronic mail, and teleconference.
'Telecommuter' Living
"Telecommuters," people who work mostly at
home, using telephone-linked computers, may take
some of the sting out of future rush hours. They may
live in "intelligent" houses whose computer
"brains" automatically control the interior en
vironment, from thermostats to stove burners.
Today's family room may be tomorrow's "media
room," where the family will gather to use
telecommunications and electronic-entertainment
devices, suggests Washington architect Roy Mason.
As the room's walls change color — the computer's
response to the residents' changing moods —
another part of the house brain might be scanning
computerized lists of repairmen to fix a newly
detected leak in the roof.
Americans who leave the house for work or enter
tainment won't have far to go, according to the
scenario outlined by Dr. Charles L. Leven, director
of Washington University's Institute for Urban and
Regional Studies in St. Louis.
Future metropolises, he says, will likely consist of
chains of small, compact residential and employ
ment centers. Some of the chains will be several
hundred miles long. Much of the land between cen
ters will be dedicated to rural uses such as tann
ing.
It's not so much that people are returning to rural
life, Leven believes, but that the metropolises are
displacing the countryside. Nearly all of the next
century's farmers will live in these "urban" areas,
and by 2020 the concept of suburbs will be obsolete,
he predicts.
Some cities in the Southwest, the nation's fastest
growing region, already have the sprawling look of
the future. Long of the Census Bureau sees hope for
some of today's withering cities, but believes the
disparity between declining Northern cities and
boom towns of the South and West will continue into
the 21st century.
Burgeoning Sun Belt
The Census Bureau forecasts that the West will
still lead in population growth, followed by the
South. Expansion of the Northeast and North Cen
tral regions is expected to be negligible.
California will still be the most populous state in
2000, the bureau says, but Texas and Florida are
expected to push New York from second down to
fourth place. Alaska will lose the distinction of
having the nation's tiniest population; Vermont is
projected to be at the bottom in 2000.
In terms of percentage growth, Nevada will ex
pand fastest between now and 2000, followed by
Wyoming, Arizona, and Utah, according to census
projections.
Is Nevada ready? "We welcome new industry,
but we want to preserve Nevada's unique lifestyle
and not end up with huge metropolitan areas and
their accompanying traffic an-i smog," says Karen
Galatz, executive aide to Nevada Gov. Richard
Bryan.
Population growth is already taxing some city
services to the limit. Phoenix, for example, swelled
by more than 1,000 percent between 1940 and 1980,
from 65,414 to 789,704. Pima County, Ariz., which in
cludes Tucson, is expected to triple in population in
the next 50 years.
No area can grow in the manner of many
Southern and Western cities without taking on the
disadvantages of the North and East," says Calvin
L. Beale, head of the population section of the U. S.
Agriculture Department's Economic Research
Service.
Beale says the glow of the Sun Belt won't totally
obliterate the North. "Indiana and Ohio aren't going
straight to hell," he says. "They're already working
hard to develop alternate sources of employment
and deal with their disadvantages."
Even in Texas, one of the top three states in
population growth, some residents are question
ing the value of bigness. "People in Houston are
saying that if they had wanted to live in L.A., they
would have moved there in the first place," says
Long of the Census Bureau. And the three-county
area encompassing Austin, Texas, a longtime
resister of growth, is expected to double in
population by 2000, reaching more than 1 million.
On To New Mexico
New Mexico might be near the top of the next cen
tury's growth list, when its wide-open spaces inherit
the disenchanted overflow from neighboring Texas
and Arizona, Long predicts.
Water shortages are already casting doubt on the
future growth of some Sun Belt states, especially
Florida. But Long discounts forecasts that depleted
water supplies will drive the population out of the
region in the next century.
"I don't adopt the gloomy scenario that one day in
2020, people in Arizona will turn on the water faucet,
nothing will come out, and everyone will leave," he
says. New management techniques will ensure a
steady, if expensive, water supply for the next cen
tury, he believes.
New Mexico, Georgia and the Carolinas will be
destinations for the elderly, a growing segment of
migratory Americans, says Dr. Jeanne Biggar, an
associate professor of sociology at the University of
Virginia who follows the living patterns of the
aging. The four states are among those making
special efforts to build recreational communities
for retired Americans.
Elderly widows and other single people might
make homes in "mingles" units, says Bruce Stokes,
who made a global study of housing for World
watch Institute. These dwellings, built for non
related people who can't afford houses or condo
miniums of their own, would have two or more
master bedrooms and a shared living room and kit
chen.
Condominiums still will be popular, but high-rise
apartment buildings—the intended answer to a
population crunch that never came—will become
almost extinct, Stokes says.
He and other housing specialists believe the 20th
century's "dream home," with several bedrooms
and multi-car garage, will be the 21st century's
dinosaur.
High prices of land, building materials, labor, and
energy, they say, will make those new homes as un
desirable as a gas-guzzler in an energy crisis. And
falling birth rates may mean a dearth of buyers for
the large homes already in existence.
Some population directions will scarcely budge.
The nation's population center is expected to be in
eastern Missouri in 2000, only 40 miles west of where
it is today.
Home Is Destroyed
(Continued from page 1)
Fire Department also
responded to a chimney
fire at 5:05 o'clock on
Monday afternoon at the
home of Marty Allen on
Ridgecrest Drive. The
fire was out upon the
response of nine firemen
with a pumper. No
damage resulted.
A fire caused by a
malfunctioning oil stove
was responsible for a
fire at the home of
James Jones across the
road from the Armory
on Tuesday morning at
7:40 a. m. The fire was
caused by too much oil,
it was reported. No
damage resulted.
Nine Rural Warrenton
Firemen with a pumper
responded to the fire.
At 1:15 p. m. on Thurs
day of last week a
Pargas truck overturn
ed on a road about a
mile from 1625 road.
Twelve Warrenton
Rural firemen respond
ed to a call for aid with a
pumper and crash
wagon. There was no
fire but the firemen put
out foam on the road.
Nine Warrenton Rural
Fire Company members
responded to a call to an
automobile Are 3.5 miles
out on the Baltimore
Road at 7:15 p. m. Tues
day. Alphonzo Cheek
was the owner of the
1978 Chrysler, which
was totally destroyed by
fire.
The firemen drove a
crash wagon to the
scene, and extinguished
the flames with water.
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Correction,
A deed transfer in last
week's issue of The War
ren Record incorrectly
listed the number of
acres involved. It should
have read as follows:
Graver L Shearin to
George Alston and wife,
.85 acres, Judklns
Township. ,