newjerseynewsroom.com

BY ADRIENNE VOGT

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

If you think Manhattan is crowded now, just wait. In 2030, be prepared to have 220,000 to 290,000 more people jostling for a place in line at lunch, rushing to a seat on the subway or snagging a cab.

That amounts to roughly one new neighbor for every six residents, according to The New York Times. The Department of City Planning’s Population Division also forecasts the population to be older, as more New Yorkers stay put in the city as they age.

New skyscrapers and apartment buildings continue to sprout up, forcing one New Yorker to grouse, “How many years does New York have before it starts to look like ‘Blade Runner?’ ”

Even though the boost in numbers sounds rough, it could be much worse. Imagine if New York had no roads, sidewalks or parks — just buildings pancaked on top of each other. If that was the case, the city’s population could theoretically balloon to 65 million people, city planners and infrastructure experts said.

The calculations were based on numbers from Kowloon Walled City, the highest-density spot ever measured on Earth. The illegal no-man’s land in Hong Kong had a population of 50,000 on a .01-square-mile tract in the ’80s, according to a German documentary posted on Gothamist. One-room caged houses were built on top of each other, with subterranean pathways connecting shops and cheap production facilities. Unsanitary conditions, where people lived and worked alongside roaches and rats, forced the city to be completely demolished in 1994, according to The New York Times.

It is highly unlikely that New York would ever get that extreme. New York City has a population of about 8 million, with 1.6 million in Manhattan, according to Census figures. However, the population swells during the day to 3.9 million because of commuters.

Vishaan Chakrabarti, the director of the Center for Urban Real Estate at Columbia University, recognizes the space crunch. “We have to create more Manhattan,” he said. But his plan for alleviating it is to create the regrettably-named “LoLo” — or “Lower-Lower Manhattan” — a one-square-mile area made out of harbor landfill that could house office buildings, apartments and new subway lines.

Across the river, we in New Jersey are going strong with a population of 8.8 million. Doesn’t feel like it, does it? Well, unless you live in Hoboken or West New York, which have nearly 40,000 and 50,000 people crammed per square mile, respectively.

Matthew Yglesias at Slate said if California were as dense as New Jersey, more than 188 million people would live there. Interestingly, despite that fact, the Golden State “would have even lower per capita CO2 emissions since many car trips would be shorter distances and a larger share of the population would be walking/biking/transiting around some of the time.”

If all this data about our megalopolis makes you want to jump on a plane and move to Montana like my Manhattan-born father wants to, don’t be too hasty. Take a deep breath and weigh the positives and negatives. As The New York Times points out: “From energy-efficiency to life expectancy to finding a date or something to do on a Saturday night, (Harvard economist Ed Glaeser) argues that denser places have the edge.”