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Visualizing Density The CounT Every 10 years the U.S. Census counts Americans. In 2000 the count was 281 million. The Census also keeps track of many other details of our lives—where we live, how big our families are, what types of houses we occupy, what our ethnic back- grounds are, and how much money we make. To anyone even remotely interested in how we shelter ourselves and how we use land, the U.S. Census of 2000 revealed a startling fact: After dipping slightly in the past 50 years, our population growth rate has turned sharply upward. Between 1960 and 1989 it ranged from 22 to 24 million people added per decade. In the 1990s, however, we grew by 33 million. Each year we add about 4.7 million people. At this rate, by 2030 we will be a nation of roughly 350 million. While the pace of population growth has accelerated, another fact remains constant—we have, and always will have, ■the same amount of land. Whether this reality is problematic or not depends on our appetite for land. Census 2000 revealed that lately it has been voracious. In the past few decades we have combined steady population growth with unprecedented land consumption. Urbanized land, or land that is used for residen- tial, commercial, industrial, or institutional purposes, increased by 47 percent in the 1990s while population expanded by only 17 percent (Fulton et al. 2001). In essence, we’re taking up more space per capita than we used to. Across the United States, suburbs grow faster than central cities, and jobs continue to migrate out of cities. As of 2000, more than half of the population in 46 metropolitan areas lived more than 10 miles from the city center; in 1970, this was the case in only 13 metropolitan areas. Boston, with its tradition- ally dense urban fabric, is a good example of this recent trend. Unlike in earlier years of settlement, one-third of Boston-area Tualatin, Oregon 050629-0447