Growing our city

is "essential" according to a report in yesterday's paper. There are calls for it to reach two million people by the end of the decade. 

Now two million people is, in world terms, not a lot. Our entire country has a population about the size of California. It is often said we need more people.

Or do we?  

The city I live in is built along the coastline and into the hills behind it. Most of the city runs north-south. It has stretched further and further in either direction.  Most housing is still built on individual blocks of land although "duplexes" have become more common in inner city areas as houses on old "quarter acre" blocks get knocked down. There are two sets of duplexes in this short street alone - and associated parking problems. Both families own two cars but the duplexes are built with only space to park one car. It's an increasing problem all over the inner city area. 

We need more housing and it will have to be a very different sort of housing from the sort we have now. This need is for the population we have now and the natural growth of it. Adding even more people to the mix is just going to exacerbate the present problems. 

Transport is an issue too. Downunderites are attached to their cars. There are some who use public transport to go to work but public transport is a messy business. For many years getting to many places has involved a trip to somewhere else first, often the city. The railway system runs in and out of the city, not across suburbs. The buses are much the same. Cross suburb services tend to be few and infrequent. There would need to be major changes if the city was going to grow - but the government has put money into building car friendly freeways instead.

And where do we employ these proposed new people? Manufacturing is not increasing and not likely to increase to the level where it will employ the proposed increased either directly or indirectly.

All this, and much more, is not the real problem however. The real problem will be water. We are going to need a lot more water than we have now. It isn't going to come from the river system that rises in the eastern states. They are going to need that water for themselves. As we do now we may keep a little of that but there won't be any more. 

Our reservoirs depend on rainfall we may not get, indeed are increasingly unlikely to get. They won't fill our needs even if they were filled to capacity each year.  

Desalination plants won't help either. There are environmental issues with those that have yet to be overcome. 

Someone has to come up with a way to provide all the water we are likely to need. They need to do it in an environmentally responsible way and do it at a reasonable cost. Until someone can do that we cannot "grow" our city even if we can overcome our other problems.