The U.S. Census Bureau today released statistics showing the top 10 metropolitan areas in the country that have had the highest population growth between 2006 and 2007, and the Inland Empire was #5...



Note that no other region of California is growing faster than the IE.

Also worth noting is that three of the top 10 metro areas, Phoenix, Inland Empire, and Las Vegas, all depend on the Colorado River for its livelihood, and this growth chart perhaps serves to warn us that available water will continue to be an issue.

In addition, nine of the ten areas are in southern states, which continues the story of this country's political power base continuing to shift away from the north in favor of the south.

Labels: Population

Expanding freeways in Riverside County to address future population growth by 2030 is going to cost $14 billion. The North County Times reports that county officials don't have a clue where that money is going to come from.

The article goes on to say that the rapid growth of Chinese-made products arriving in Long Beach, and getting trucked out all over the west is largely why so many more trucks are clogging up freeways.

Interestingly, blame is being placed on retailers who receive goods from the Port of Los Angeles and then truck them through Riverside County on their way parts further east...

"I'm adamantly opposed to charging the people of this county for a problem that's caused out of Los Angeles," said Riverside City Councilman Steve Adams, who represents his city on the commission. "We are servicing the rest of the nation. We are being punished for getting their goods through."

It's definitely a valid point, but one which can't be resolved by levying fees on truckers and retailers. Any extra fees placed on commerce will ultimately get passed down to the consumer. The people always end up paying in the end.

The other idea is to levy higher fees new housing starts. The NC Times reported that $9,700 in fees is already being passed down to new home buyers, and that it might require another $5,000 per home to cover freeway expansion.

At this point, I'm ALL for passing the fee on to new home buyers. As a homeowner, making new homes more expensive is going to raise the resale value of my property.

But one of the problems of slowing down growth of new homes, is that it also slows down the growth of new retail and business centers. You gotta have the people first, in order to support shopping malls and movie theaters.

I think Menifee is at a point where we may not need more people. There's plenty of people in Hemet, Winchester, Perris, and Murrieta. We can suck them into buying stuff from our retail centers, and pump money into our community.

Labels: Population

The San Diego Tribune ran an article about college enrollment at Cal-State San Marcos booming, partly because of booming population in south Riverside County...

"We're one of the hottest campuses in the CSU," said Matthew Ceppi, chief of staff to Cal State San Marcos' president. The enrollment explosion has been partially spurred by the growth in home building in south Riverside County communities such as Murrieta and Menifee.

...

For fall, Cal State San Marcos received a record number of applicants – 14,000 for about 3,500 spots. Sixty-one percent of the applicants are from outside the county.

While we do have Mt San Jacinto College, it's not a four-year college. We're going to need a four-year college somewhere here between Perris and Temecula. Not only will that ease some of the freeway congestion, it'll bring some more jobs here.

Labels: Mt-San-Jacinto-College, Population

Steve Lopez, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, recently drove out to Menifee to see what all the "hub bub" was about.

That hub bub is of course, the recent news that Riverside County is poised to become California's second most populous county by the middle of this century, and the fact that Menifee is going to sit in the heart of it.

Lopez ended up writing a very interesting article that paints of picture of Menifee from the eyes of an outsider, from someone who's more used to looking at downtown highrises and high-density urban life. He visits new home developments in Menifee, the local school district, and talks to a local Realtor. But don't figure on Lopez seeing Menifee as a sight for sore eyes, he has a much different opinion...

I drive past several of them before entering a "master-planned community" called The Lakes, with nearly 1,000 homes built or under construction. Near the sales office I see workers landscaping the shores of one of three man-made lakes.

"Where's the water come from?" I ask two laborers, wondering if "The Dunes" would have been a smarter concept than "The Lakes," given the state's water shortage.

Read his entire article here...

http://www.latimes.com/....ul18,0,2590766.column

Labels: Population, Real-Estate

The State Department of Finance, yesterday, released new statistics that estimates California's population growth, and indiciates that Riverside County will more than double it's population by 2050, making it the State's second largest county.

A number of newspapers reported on this news, however the Los Angeles Times, interestingly, identified the Menifee Valley as being at the heart of this future population explosion...

Husing predicts that growth will be most dramatic beyond the city of Riverside as the patches of empty space around communities such as Palm Springs, Perris and Hemet begin to fill in with housing tracts.

Expect a lot of the new development in Riverside County to go up along the 215 Freeway between Perris and Murrieta, according to Riverside County Planning Director Ron Goldman. Thousands of homes have popped up in that area in the last decade, and Goldman said applications for that area indicate condominiums are next. The department is so busy that he's hiring 10 people who'll start in the next month.

Read the full LA Times article here...
http://www.latimes.com/....&vote31081504=1&ctrack=1&cset=true

This fits right in with an earlier blog post of ours, "Menifee to Become Future Industrial Center", where I noted that Menifee sits right in the middle of a very fast-growing region of the state.

Imagine what Menifee will look like 40 years from now.

Labels: Population