Metro staff today announced two corrections to the region's draft urban growth report, the document regional leaders use to guide decisions about the urban growth boundary.
In July, Metro staff issued a draft of the 2014 Urban Growth Report. It contains population and employment forecasts for the next 20 years and assesses the region’s capacity for accommodating anticipated growth with existing local, regional and state plans and policies. Metro releases such a report every five years to inform conversations and decisions about managing the region's growth.
The first correction relates to the data Metro staff used to estimate future regional housing demand. In one step of the report’s calculations, staff used household data for the entire seven-county metropolitan area instead of data limited to the area within the Metro urban growth boundary. As a result, the draft report overestimated demand for single-family housing within the urban growth boundary.
A second correction relates to lands added to the urban growth boundary by the Oregon Legislature in March 2014 under House Bill 4078, which addressed the designation of urban and rural reserves and made changes to the urban growth boundary. At the request of staff from the city of Forest Grove, the revised draft report will count lands added near Forest Grove as industrial, rather than residential.
Together, these corrections result in a larger surplus of single-family housing capacity than previously identified in the draft report. Staff will issue a revised draft of the report later in September to allow time for review before the Metro Council holds a formal public hearing on the report on December 4.
"In this region, we work together to tackle difficult questions about growth and change," said Metro chief operating officer Martha Bennett. "Communities around the region have plans for how they want to grow. The urban growth report presents an opportunity for the region's residents to discuss what they like and don't like about how those plans may play out over the next couple of decades."
Bennett noted that while expansions of the urban growth boundary often attract a lot of attention, most development still occurs well inside the boundary because of factors like the cost of building infrastructure like streets and sewers in new neighborhoods. "The big question: what is our region doing to make available land inside the urban growth boundary ready to accommodate new residents and jobs?” she said.
The urban growth report poses these key policy and development questions, but does not answer them. To complement the urban growth report’s analytical foundation, Bennett will convene a diverse group of stakeholders over the next year that will focus on policy recommendations for making land currently inside the growth boundary more ready for housing and employment development.
For the next fifteen months, the region's residents and leaders will weigh the findings of these efforts before the Metro Council makes a final growth management decision in December 2015. In that decision, the Council will determine whether there is a need to expand the region’s urban growth boundary.