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THE FOUNTAIN RIVER FLOOD PROBLEM Page 7 Underlying this anomaly is, of course, the much discussed tendency, evidenced throughout the nation, for urban devel- opment to gravitate into flood plains at a faster rate than protective measures can be worked out (Reference 14). The accomp~nying map "Population Distributio~ and Trends" indi- cates the remarkable extent to which this tendency has been at work within the basin over the past thirty years. While there has been a fair growth of some of the resort type communities in the mountainous northwestern and northern parts of the basin, the bulk of what may be termed "economic urbani- zation" outside the immediate vicinity of Colorado Springs and the Air Force Academy has been drawn along the river bottom- lands downstream, where residential communities may take advan- tage of moderate terrain and climate, accessible subsurface water, the convenience of high-speed freeway travel to new employment centers along the valley axis~ and the general oasis_like greenness of the river coUrse in the midst of a semi-arid landscape. At the same time there has been a notice- able contraction of the scattered farm and ranch population throughout the basin, which was characteristic of the nineteen-thirties. The two pie-9raphs describing population area-types for 1930 and 1960, based on census data, show the marked inttease in the new suburban and "exurban" classifi- cations over both rural-farm and traditional urban. A glance ,at the graph of current growth projections for the basin, included with the map, indicates an acceleration of this trend over the next fifteen or twenty years, and con- sequent further extension of interurban settlement in and along the valley bottom and the parallel artery of highway travel linking the two" major cities. This tendency has received a good deal of publicity in the past several years in terms of the probable emergence of a "frontal range" strip or ribbon city in eastern Colorado during the last decades of this century.