William Fulton, growth expert, addressed forum.

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"The residents of Tucson want their friends to move here. They want everybody else to leave."

That's the conclusion William Fulton drew from the results of an online questionnaire run in the Arizona Daily Star in advance of Friday's forum, "Tucson Growth: Decision at the Crossroads." More than 3,300 Southern Arizonans answered the questions.

Fulton, a California planner and member of the Ventura City Council, said the results didn't surprise him. His constituents hold similar opinions, based on the fear that, with growth, "the future is the same as the past, just bigger."

That doesn't have to be the case, said Fulton, president of Solimar Research Group and one of three experts in growth who addressed the community forum. He urged the audience to envision a future that doesn't embrace every Westerner's worst fear — "becoming Los Angeles."

"I live in L.A. It's not that bad," said Christopher Thornberg, an economic forecaster who is principal and founder of Beacon Economics.

"Growth is like getting older. When you actually get there it's not nearly as bad as you thought it would be," Thornberg said.

Thornberg, who described himself as a "policy skeptic," said most regulations aimed at slowing or stopping growth don't work. "Politics trumps common sense," said Thornberg. "Economics should be playing the leading role."

Thornberg said we should also stop thinking of growth as "good" or "bad." It's all pretty much the same thing.

Arizona is midrange in indicators of "good" growth, he said, things such as household income, income growth and unemployment rate.

It is second only to Nevada in two indicators of "bad" growth — population and net immigration. The reasons are simple, he said, and the trends pretty much unstoppable.

You can't change the climate, the demographics of our aging population or our proximity to the border and historical ties with Mexico.

"Growth happens," he said. "The choice is whether you work with it or against it."

Education is a good example of that, he said.

"The best way of expanding the tax base," Thornberg said, is to provide a good education to every illegal-immigrant child. Those young people will be needed as our native population ages. If you turn the child of immigrants into a brain surgeon, he said, "you can tax the living hell out of him."

John Landis, the Crossways professor of city and regional planning at the University of Pennsylvania, called attempts to deny services to those here illegally "beating up the very people who are going to be the future of your community."

Landis said attempts to limit the rate and the composition of growth always backfire, but he said growth can be directed.

"We can create better and more sustainable places," he said, and not settle for what he called "placeless sprawl" and "monotype boomburgs."

Current planning models aren't doing the trick, he said. Arizona pretty much follows the California model of individual comprehensive plans for each jurisdiction, he said.

He recommended a metropolitan-wide "visioning" process that was used successfully in Sacramento, Calif., and elsewhere.

Landis and Fulton both urged greater density in the urban core and along transportation corridors, traded for the benefits of less traffic congestion and more preserved open space.

His idea of an ideal town, Fulton said, is one in which the people who work there can afford to live there.

That's easier said than done in Ventura, he said, where his own neighbors have opposed his espousal of denser condos and mixed-use development along main streets.

When he asks whether they'd prefer that, or greater density in the interior streets of his bungalow neighborhood, they answer: "Neither."

Fulton, too, recommended the "visioning" process. It enables you to see the future you think you're headed for — and avoid it.

"Make as many maps as you can of what the future is going to look like if you don't do anything," he said.