Do you think people will ever greatly populate the western US besides the coast or will it stay mostly empty?

34 comments

1. A lot of it isn’t conducive to grand populations, so until the areas that are are maxed out…

2. It’ll stay empty.

3. Those areas are lower in population for a reason. The rocky mountains overtakes a huge chunk of the western US, which makes it hard for anyone to live there.

4. I don’t see it as realistic with current population estimates.

5. LOL, no.

6. Mostly empty, it’s not a place that is exactly suitable for human life, and there is a concerning water problem.

   Even with their growing populations for the states out West, all of them are so large, that even a state like California w 40 million people is still pretty empty for the most part, it’s not really that dense in the big picture of things. If you go down the list other populated states like Washington, Arizona, and Colorado are also sparsely populated despite having larger than average populations for a state and will continue to be for the future.

7. It will stay empty. Not enough water.

8. A huge part of the west is National Park land. So it can’t be turned into housing.

9. Wyoming will stay empty because we don’t want you here. Seriously. Stay out. Go to Colorado.

10. There’s no water in most of it. It’s fine just the way it is.

11. Mostly empty. Between deserts and the Rockies, much of it isn’t particularly conducive to habitation by humans.

12. [675px-Map_of_all_U.S._Federal_Land.jpg (675×519) (wikimedia.org)](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1f/Map_of_all_U.S._Federal_Land.jpg/675px-Map_of_all_U.S._Federal_Land.jpg)

    Setting aside water rights, mountains, resource extraction, local politics, etc…

    Most of that land is owned by the federal government and not available for settlement. A lot of it isn’t connected to traditional infrastructure either.

    So, probably not. Our trend in recent years has been returning land to the wild rather than expanding settlements.

13. There’s a lot of land that’s not habitable. Either desert or mountains without enough water supply to sustain humans.

14. They will once I develop my patient pending water extraction and relocation technology. It pulls water right out of the ocean, and floats in in a more pure form across vast expanses of land, before releasing it piecemeal onto the ground to distribute. I haven’t worked out the mountain bug yet.

15. It is not underpopulated when you look at the amount of potable water available. And it is getting worse so I expect more people to leave the area.

    These states are expected to have a high risk of water sustainability causing limitations on use by 2050

    Arizona
    Arkansas
    California
    Colorado
    Florida
    Idaho
    Kansas
    Mississippi
    Montana
    Nebraska
    Nevada
    New Mexico
    Oklahoma
    Texas

    Notice that all but one are west of Mississippi River.

16. We’re pretty damn populated here as it is. It’s hard to put cities into something like the Rockies, though.

    Areas populate if they are conducive to and provide what cities need (water, especially, and power supply to support that number of people); otherwise they remain sparsely populated.

17. Even most of the West Coast is pretty empty. There’s not mich between Santa Barbara and San Francisco except for Monterey, and then no city greater than 25,000 people until you reach the suburbs of Seattle. Seriously. Northern California’s coast has almost no people, and same for Oregon and Washington

18. Western states generally have large population growth at the moment, and contrary to the weird opinions posted in this thread, the land is generally habitable. However, it’s not going to fill in like the East Coast, because having tons of smaller cities and towns everywhere isn’t how humans are going to live in the future.

    The increasing prevalence of remote work in a country like the USA means that people will be consolidating into smaller numbers of cities – these will grow in size, and others will shrink or be abandoned. The West is currently the prime candidate for growth from this process, as Western cities are newer, have lower crime, have strong state governments implementing infrastructure and tax benefits, and also have better access to natural recreation compared to the east.

    But it will probably never be as saturated as the northeast. Those places have been inhabited for centuries longer than in the west, and the main reason most businesses operate in a certain area is simply because there are people already living in that area. In other words, there is a denser concentration of *opportunity* in the denser areas, and so while they will grow at a slower rate (or shrink) overall, the eventual equilibrium will still certainly see the western USA being more sparsely populated.

19. No water, no people. Large populations just aren’t sustainable in inland areas of the western US because of the lack of water.

20. The problem is water availability, as is the case with all civilization. Also the fact that its a whole lot of mountainous terrain. There hasnt been a whole lot of water in the Rockies and Great Basin for thousands of years and likely thousands more. So no, it’ll likely stay mostly unpopulated.

21. So, the thing is, a lot of the “empty” part of the west is either very mountainous or desert or both.

22. I disregard most of the theory around the Great Lakes region having a second population boom due to easy access to potable water, but it is fair to wonder how much more the big western metros can grow because of the water situation.

23. The parts that aren’t already heavily populated are either inhospitable, protected forest, or part of a reservation (which is also probably pretty inhospitable).

    I suppose that with the ways things are going, the fertile and beautiful protected forests might soon become on the market. That would be a shame.

24. The western US will become more populated when other parts of the country become so populous that the cost of living exceeds the expense of developing the desert.

25. I lived in New Mexico and it is simply not possible to populate it beyond its current state. There is simply not enough water, or much anything, to sustain larger populations.

    Arizona has a somewhat large population in Phoenix because is right wing California, or the Florida of the west, but again, they are having issues with water due to overpopulation.

26. The west of the US outside the coast will likely remain mostly empty because of how the modern economy functions. The issue is not water or even necessarily geography. The primary issue is we do not found new cities anymore, we only grow existing ones. When we were an agricultural economy, we settled in the areas with a lot of water and founded cities every few miles. Because the west has little easily accessable water, we did not found that many in the West and those we did were some of the last settled in the whole country. Now that we have shifted from an agricultural economy to an extremely complex industrial and service based economy, settling new cities just does not make economic sense. Instead, new industries attach to currenly existing cities, turning tiny townes into massive mega-cities over the course of decades or centuries.

    The west has only a handful of million+ cities (Denver, SLC, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Albuquerque… maybe I’m missing one?) so there just is no real avenue for the west to catch up to the rest of the country which is currently far more densley populated. Even if western cities were to grow at unprecedented speeds, it would take decades if not centuries to get anywhere close to catching up with other parts of the country. The west actually has been generally growing faster than the rest of the country for a long time and it is still very far. Even if they did grow that fast for that long, there are still tons of places that have literally no human habitation for dozens of hundreds of miles that would remain mostly empty.

    Also, the issue is not a lack of water. We spend a majority of our water on farming which is an extremely small portion of our economy. We could slightly downsize our agricultural water usage and greatly increase the number of people who could sustainbly life on our native water supply. Any water shortages are a policy choice of our government, not a true geographic limitation. Just look at Phoenix. It is possible that if our economy changes so that empty land becomes more valuable for one reason or another, it is possible that in the distant future the West could become more populated in the East, except our mountainous or desert areas. It’s just unlikely and very far away.

27. Eventually, after all natural resources have been extracted lol

28. It’ll stay empty. Most of us will live to see the peak US population, and those under 40 or so will see the peak human population on Earth. There won’t be a need to fill in all that extra space.

29. The fact that phones in the fastest growing city in the country baffles me

30. It desert

31. Possibly. We really ought to do something with all that fucking land but the geography of the place isn’t exactly cooperating with getting infrastructure out there (seriously, any given long drive down the highway will make you realize just how much “middle of fucking nowhere” there is in this country)

32. Not on any large scale. The western U.S. has a lot of rocky, mountainous terrain, vast, arid deserts, or places that get tons of annual snowfall. Most of the terrain isn’t conducive to any sizable populations.

33. coast is destined to be disappeared or affected by earthquakes. there’s a lot of desert (lack of water) in the south west.

    🤷🏼‍♀️ i’m like whatever – civilization is gna collapse soon anyway

34. Based on current demographics and fertility rates, the population is still increasing, but it’s going to plateau and then drop. So, unlikely.