Why or why not?

27 comments

  2. No. Well… Maybe if a nuke hits the East coast.

    Lots of land… Not enough water. Even if there’s a magic desalination process in the future that uses little energy. Not enough.

  5. Not any time soon. There isn’t enough water and just demographic inertia. I suspect the south and Midwest will continue to gain population and maybe, maybe, start to ribs the northeast in population density in my lifetime but even then I doubt it.

  6. No, there’s not enough water for that and there are very, very few water resources that aren’t already pushed to their limits.

  7. No. The west coast is going to slip into the ocean after the next big earthquake.

  8. No, the west coast is essentially trapped from growth and resources by a massive mountain range, an aird desert or both.

  9. No. Topography and weather. Look at a topographic map of the west coast, it’s almost entirely mountains from San Diego to Port Angeles. The coast is a really narrow strip of land. There are no places to put cities on the coast. The interior is agricultural land. No one’s flocking to Stockton or Medford.

  10. Perhaps, because over-population will become a major problem at some point in history. I don’t think it’ll happen during my life span though. Right now the West Coast has a lot of issues the East Coast does not not share.

  11. Probably not, for a whole bunch of reasons.

    Just off the top of my head before reading any other responses:

    1. Cost of living in a lot of the west coast is becoming a real problem for for anyone who isn’t an extremely high earner.
    2. Water issues are already a problem, It’s uncertain if the area can even support it’s current population long term.
    3. Much of the land is owned by the federal government.
    4. Much of the land isn’t really usable. It’s a lot of deserts and very in-hospital areas.
    5. The best land (the strip right down the coast between the ocean and mountains) is already pretty much built up. For the most part anyway.
    6. Lots of people don’t want to live in a place that has a fire season.

  13. No, I think it’s too dry and blocked off by mountains.

    Plus EST and the east coast is the “default” here. Unless that changes, which it won’t, the east coast will always be king.

    Also our major cities are all located here. Boston, DC, New York, Philly, and that entire Northeast corridor is way too important for government/business.

  15. Only if they figured out the irrigation problem and develop technology to flatten mountains

  16. People talking about the water issue here don’t understand the water issue here. Most of the “land” is farmland, which is where that water goes. If people lived there instead of crops the water demand would be smaller.

    The topological geography of the west coast isn’t super amenable to super dense housing, or really housing of any kind. A lot of San Diego is way more diverse and “hilly” than most people realize, especially people who vacation here and don’t go more than 2 miles inland.

    The Los Angelas basin is bottlenecking because of the mountains and geography for their area, and the SF bay is the same. Around the SF peninsula the majority of the land is actually forested between Silicon Valley and the pacific, there’s a bunch of mountains that you could build rich people houses on with big winding driveways, but you are pretty limited in actually building significant structures there.

    That topographical shit goes all the way down, theres a small range between the coast and central valley that would be difficult to build on. Also, in terms of natural harbors and bays which are the real reasons people typically live on the coast we kinda don’t have a lot. San Diego, Long Beach/LA, SF bay, Monterey and then up near crescent city/Humboldt/Eureka.

    The Pacific is colder than the atlantic here, so the temperatures are much cooler in general. We don’t really get snow on the coast here at all, but the water doesn’t really warm up north of the point of conception, so the majority of the landmass of the state has very cold and wild pacific water. We don’t have hurricanes, true, but the marine layers here are more dramatic than they tend to be on the east coast.

  17. lots of folks saying lack of water… are you the same ones who ask about how it always rains in Portland and Seattle?

  18. Not without water it won’t. There are two ways to do that too, either we can hope climate change makes the area less arid or we can develop cheap and efficient desalinization. I don’t see either of those things working out.

  19. Probably not. As an American who has lived on both the east and west coast the environment is very different on each end.

    People have been living on the east coast since before Columbus so all of those people on the east coast today have really old roots. Also, the Mississippi River provides a lot of water and nutrients as well as farming opportunities to the east that the west simply doesn’t have.

    The west coast only became populated after the United States got its independence and they started traveling towards California, Nevada etc. As of the past few decades, the west coast has been struggling with water and global warming so there’s a carrying capacity in the west coast. But due to all the water of the Mississippi and the natural environment of the east coast, the east coast is bound to keep growing on population whereas eventually, the west coast might stop growing.

  20. I think west coast has too many environmental factors to have even the current population. The leading issue being water, followed by earthquakes. IMO areas are more/less habitable based on environmental factors, and I think West Coast has it worse than East Coast.

  21. I hope not. The east feels like every square mile is populated. It’s depressing

  22. I don’t disagree with the reasons of water and geography that have been given here but something people are overlooking is the head start the east coast got with settlement. NYC, Philly, Boston, etc were all settled in the 1600s and this have been attracting people for hundreds of years. Meanwhile most of the west coast didn’t start being settled in any appreciable way until the mid 19th century. There’s no way the west coast would ever catch up to the east coast just based on how much of a head start the east coast has had.

  23. I don’t think it’s likely to happen, especially not within the foreseeable future. But it’s not unimaginable. [According to the US Census Bureau](https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/visualizations/2019/demo/coastline-america.pdf), the population of the Atlantic coast region is 44.4 million and the Pacific coast region is 34.4 million. It’s not all *that* different. I think the major factor preventing the Pacific coast region from overtaking the Atlantic coast region in the foreseeable future is population growth trends. The Pacific coast region’s population is growing slightly faster than the Atlantic coast region, but I don’t think it’s enough to have a meaningful impact in the foreseeable future. However, if something happened to slow down population growth along the Atlantic and/or speed up population growth along the Pacific it could definitely happen. I just don’t know what that might be.

    I’d have to look it up to be sure, but I’d be willing to bet the Atlantic coast region (especially towards the south) will lost more land to sea levels rising from climate change. So maybe that will push people away from the Atlantic coast?

  24. No; there’s insufficient water.

    I’m amused at how folks talk about ‘suburban sprawl’ in the West–but in most places in the West you can’t live outside of a planned suburban development because otherwise you can’t have water or sewer.

    Unlike where I live, where water is as “easy” as drilling a well, and sewer is as “easy” as installing a septic tank. (“Easy” in quotes, because I find both a pain in the ass to maintain–but none of them require any city or county infrastructure to work.)

    Yes, there is a lot of land out in the west, but most of it is, in practice, unusable; the only reason why the Federal Government can own large swaths of land in the West for “preservation” purposes is because it’s impractical to build on that land. (If it were practical, I guarantee you people out west would have put extensive pressure on the Federal Government to allow massive housing developments to be built there. Notice federal lands in some areas in Southern California are in fact being chipped away at for housing.)

  26. Maybe if the environmentalist wackos would let them build some desalinization plants.

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