I must admit every time I hear one of our politicians talking about Portland's gigantic growth over the next 20 years, I always get the same certain feeling that it's not going to happen.
The reasons are not going to be pretty either. I think the population of the globe is going to "correct" during this time frame, or maybe things will just be so bad that moving anywhere will be too risky.
Whatever the reason, all I know is when I hear an official talk about the million extra people coming our way in the next 2 decades, I immediately have a kind of foreboding that I'm hearing about something that will not occur.

Our politicians are so worried about where these millions of new people are going to live without thinking for a second about where they are going to work.

How many more tattoo artists and baristas can our hipster cluster hold?

"Multnomah County grew by 1.1 percent, to 717,880 from 710,025 residents, but none of the growth was in the City of Portland?"

As far as the CoP being exactly the same, no I don't believe it, but Mult COunty is growing faster. It's the only place with new construction, unless you've seen something in CoP's borders.

Maybe even more telling than the population figures is a report issued by the Eastside Industrial Council that shows the median income in Portland dropping for the past four years.

Well, the easiest way to increase the population is to increase benefits to illegal aliens so that they decide to immigrate here instead of California.

The second way is to get people to make more babies, but thats not going to happen if the government taxes us so much that none of us can afford big families.

Jon,
Viva la reconquista, chulo!

Coming up with identical pop. numbers for Portland year to year is bizarre, but it's not surprising that the county grew faster than Portland metro. The Census shows the county growing at about twice the rate of the city from 2000 to 2006, with the state growing at more than twice the rate of the county.

I think it is not so impossible. Trends among older folk toward single person households, and among younger folk toward multiple unrelated person households, and among families with young to move to the suburbs might sort out to stasis. People already here can't get jobs. Not much to lure in-migration.

It will be interesting to hear their response.

I agree that zero population growth is possible, but they're showing around 7,500 population growth in the county, with about 2,000 of it going into Gresham. The rest has got to be attributable to Portland or unincorporated parts of the county. They'll probably call it just a clerical error.

My debt clock, which uses a 1.07 percent annual growth rate, has the Portland proper population at 576,804 as of this writing.

I am fairly certain that the reported number is erroneous.

I am also fairly certain that it will be revised upward. There are more people now in Portland than there were a year ago. It's very easy for me to tell - everywhere I go, it is more crowded than ever before. When I drive to work (Hwy 26 to the Tron), there is more traffic. When I walk around in my neighborhood (Hawthorne/Belmont) there are more cars at each red light than there were last year.

The highway traffic may not be from any increase in population within the city limits. The metro area is growing, but within the city? Perhaps not so much.

The population of Multnomah county only went up about 7,000. That's still not very much--a little less than 1% of the entire county population.

As someone mentioned, some of it is likely in Gresham. But there's also a few other municipalities in Multnomah County that could have absorbed it--Troutdale, Wood Village and Fairview. There is a fair amount of residential construction activity in those areas, so that may be where it all went.

Makes Mr. "There's going to be a million new people" mantra look like the Tram Boy Who Cried Wolf.

There are also a lot of multi-family crackerboxes being built on the outer east side of Portland. All you have to do is drive out past the 205 Freeway on Powell, Divison, Stark or Foster to see what I'm talking about.