That's the great conundrum, isn't it? If you cram a paradise full of people, is it still a paradise?
But I think we can stave off a lot of that trouble by moving on from these outdated 20th century growth plans and embrace 3D city design in order to combat urban sprawl. That means building up instead of out. Bellevue's got the right idea, albeit for the wrong reasons. Downtown Seattle is really taking off in the past two years, and I've been excited at this because I think it's possible the city center will research a critical residental mass, which will make us more like Vancouver B.C.
People themselves take up very little surface area! We need to move away from subdivisions and toward arcologies! On Crono's world, by 1999 it looked like people had finally smarted up and contained themselves--in a very literal sense! If we really wanted to, we could get away from all this damned sprawl and build in the cities only. The physical land we'd need to support our material quality of life would still be high, but it would pose no threat to the lush beauty of the Pacific Northwest in itself. The only reason we're running out of wild spaces is that we're building roads everywhere...not something we need to be doing. Except for the Seattle Metro itself, this entire region is substantially empty.
I personally came here as a refugee from the Mojave Desert. What an awful place to live! I was in Portland in 1992 for a brother's wedding, and I fell in love with the climate. I told myself I'd move up to the Pacific Northwest, and when college came around, dad gummit, that's what I did! Hopefully that qualifies me to stick around.
