WHEN GROWTH GRINDS TO A HALT.

• Author: Welch, Matt
• Position: POLITICS

I WAS BORN inside a growth machine.

California in 1968 had a population of 19.4 million, double what it was at the end of World War II, which was itself triple what it had been at the end of World War I. My north Long Beach neighborhood was mostly alfalfa fields in the late 1940s; by the end of the '50s, it was part of the biggest suburban subdivision west of Levit-town. The numbers confound the modern mind: 50 tract houses built per day, 107 homes purchased in a single hour, a city that went from zero to 70,000 residents in just three years.

Relentless, exuberant expansion, along with the salesmanship it requires, was baked into everything: sports, politics, real estate, art. Our baseball home team was the Angels, the first Major League Baseball expansion club in 60 years, owned by the "singing cowboy" Gene Autry, a serial media entrepreneur. We lived three miles from the car dealership of Cal Worthington, whose "Go See Call" late-night commercials--in which he'd stand on his head until his ears turned red, usually next to his "dog" Spot, who was often a tiger--were so famous that he became a regular on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show. Worthington, too, had made a separate fortune in radio broadcasting, helping midwife the region's country-western music scene.

Dynasties were built selling Southern California as the healthy, horizontal, autonomous alternative to the tubercular, vertical, anonymous cramp back east. Places of dubious aesthetic appeal were prettied up with fanciful names like Garden Grove and the Inland Empire. Here was a broad middle class living the dream of homeownership, good-paying aerospace jobs, stylish automotive personalization, and year-round recreation.

Cultural critics may have scoffed at the "booster" class of local ribbon cutters, and Hollywood may have developed an entire lucrative subgenre of films about the noir behind the sunshine, but there was no denying the pervasiveness of the Gold Rush mentality. From its 1848 incorporation, the Golden State grew at a rate at least 2.5 times faster than the rest of the country, right up until 1990. What happened then?

The 1970s and '80s saw the rise of "slow growth" policies up and down the West Coast. In Santa Barbara, where I first started reporting in the late 1980s, these shackles on new development had predictable results: The local population was cemented at 90,000, tent cities sprang up wherever they were tolerated, and the median home price vaulted toward $1...