Portland’s Growth In Context
This is just a short sweet blog post because Portland’s City Council is going to review a Housing Needs Assessment tomorrow. There’s lots of great information in there and we are glad these reports exist but we felt there were two graphs in particular that were not wrong but painted a somewhat incomplete picture of Portland’s growth and it’s growth compared to Cumberland County. We wanted to offer our own versions to put some of these graphs in the context of wider trends.
The top graph above is from the Housing Needs Assessment and the bottom graph is a version with a bit more context. By starting the axis at 66,000 instead of 0 and only including the last 10 years it makes appear like there has been a large, sudden spike in population in Portland between 2020 and 2021. There certainly is a jump there but zooming out and including data from 2024 the spike seems much less dramatic. You will also notice that since 1990 there has been a spike every ten years. That is because the census is carried out every ten years. The historical data is showing data points from only the census but after 1990 our graph includes annual estimates from the Census’ Population Estimates Program (PEP). These estimates can diverge from reality until the census is taken and the population counts are updated. You might notice these numbers are slightly different from the numbers in the Housing Needs Assessment, this is because the PEP numbers were easier for us to find so we used them while the report gets annual numbers from the American Community Survey (ACS) which uses a slightly different methodology.
With this context it looks like you could draw a trend line from the early 2000s and end up more or less where we are today. We have seen fairly consistent population growth since 2000. This is part of a larger trend where Portland went through a significant population decline from 1950 to 1980 and has been slowly growing since then.
The top graph above is from the Housing Needs Assessment and the bottom graph is a version with a bit more context. While the top graph does demonstrate that Cumberland county is growing faster than Portland it misses a few key things. By using percentages from 2012 and starting both at 0 it makes the difference in population growth appear much smaller than it really is. Cumberland county isn’t just growing a bit faster than Portland, it is dwarfing Portland and it has been for a long time. Since around 1940, around when suburbanization was in full swing, Cumberland county has been outpacing Portland in population growth. If Portland had kept pace with the rest of the county since 1940 we would have a population of 250,000 (larger than Richmond Virginia).
Graphing the percent change rather than the absolute numbers also makes it a bit harder to visually see how much growth this represents. 7.5% growth is 7.5% of a number that is already larger because Cumberland County has grown an average of 8.8% per decade since 1950.
The divergence between Portland and the rest of Cumberland County is even larger than it appears on the top graph because these Cumberland County growth percentages include Portland. That 8.8% average growth for the county includes 4 decades where Portland shrunk in population. Even in the Housing Needs Assessment the 7.5% is weighed down because it includes Portland’s 3.1%. The rest of Cumberland County must be growing by even more than 7.5%.
Why does this matter?
This context is important because the last 10 years of Portland’s housing story are continuations of decades long trends in our region and across the country. People largely left Portland, Cumberland County sprawled, and it continues to sprawl. While there has been renewed population growth in Portland it is much less than the growth in the rest of the county. There seems to be a perception that Portland has grown a lot recently, but this is not really true. Portland has grown more slowly than its own region.
Our read of this is that people are clearly interested in living near Portland but an increasing majority of people who are coming to our region are not living in Portland. We are not building enough housing for these people to live here if they want to. Portland has made some great recent progress on zoning, but increasingly the kinds of housing that gets built in our region will be decided by the rest of Cumberland County. More people in our region are living further and further away from Portland. These new homes are away from our existing transit and downtown so they will put more and more cars on the road for longer. This is nothing new but it is a worsening problem, and a problem that can be solved by allowing more housing in Portland.
