By 1975 the population of the New York metropolitan region will have risen from the present 15 million persons to more than 19 million, and the number will still be increasing rapidly. This is the central finding of the population forecast presented in the following pages.
Ever since the Great Depression of the 1930s and indeed as recently as the hearings before the Metropolitan Rapid Transit commissions of New Jersey and New York late in 1953, it was widely assumed that the growth of the New Jersey-New York-Connecticut Metropolitan Region would approach a standstill by about 1970 at a level of approximately 15.5 million persons. This viewpoint was in line with the predominant thinking about national population trends. It was commonly held that the national population was “leveling-off” and that the birth rates of the 1930s would be characteristic of the U. S. population of the future.
The present Regional Plan Association forecasts in no sense represent merely a swing of the pendulum from pessimism to optimism. Indeed, the estimates assume (perhaps somewhat conservatively) that the current high birth rates will decline to the 1940 levels by 1975.
The impressive regional population gains contained in the new forecasts do embody the vision that this metropolitan area will continue into the foreseeable future to be a focal region in the affairs of the nation and the world and that its thriving and pre-eminent growth will strongly attract and hold people for many years to come.
