Can Manhattan hold its growing population?

Economists and urban theorists debate the what-if-scenarios that would make the skyline unrecognizable, The New York Times reports. Planners at City Hall constantly weigh population projection, subway capacity and building heights. Can Manhattan hold the growing population, and is it sustainable?

By 2030, urban planners expect Manhattan to add 220,000 to 290,000 new residents-- roughly one new neighbor for every six current residents. Present-day Manhattan resides 1.6 million people, but those numbers measure Manhattan at the sleepiest as census figures only count residents and neglect logistics such as the tourists, day-trippers and commuters. At day time, the city almost double to 3.9 million people, as shown in a new report by the Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management.

Sarah Kaufman told the New York Times that the system is at capacity at all times, except at night. She is a transportation and data expert who recently left the Metropolitan Transit Authority  to conduct research at N.Y.U. "Unless the authority builds more train lines, all it can do is run trains closer together by installing new computer systems."

But however crowded the city sometimes feels, it is nowhere near what it once was. In 1910, 2.3 million people lived in the borough. This was a time before zoning and roughly 90,000 windowless rooms were available for rent. At that time, the Lower East Side was one of the most crowded places on the planet, according to demographers. Even in 1950, at the time of the "West Side Story," New York was denser than today with a population of 2 million people.

Because people think that New York is always fully grown, so many people don't want to see changes in the building heights in their neighborhoods, Vishaan Chakrabarti said, the director of the Center for Urban Real Estate at Columbia University. He says  that it is necessary to create more Manhattan and has a plan called "LoLo", or "Lower-Lower Manhattan", where he proposes a brand new neighborhood built from landfill in the harbor connecting Lower Manhattan to Governors Island and beyond--a similar idea to what happened to the water where Battery Park City is today.

As much as determining Manhattan's capacity is about the art and science of urban planning, the question is also about psychology. With all the tradeoffs and rewards of living in the city, there is no final accounting or projection--when it makes sense for our lives, we make do for less space, The New York Times reports.

This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com