Shared from the 10/3/2020 The Columbus Dispatch eEdition

3M people still expected here by 2025

Despite the coronavirus pandemic, an economic downturn and a cloud hanging over national immigration policy, a central Ohio planning agency is sticking to its 2018 population forecast for central Ohio and reaffirming that the 15-county area will grow to 3 million residents by 2050.

“With so many things changing, we’re getting a lot of questions on: Well, what does that mean for our growth?” said Aaron Schill, director of data and mapping or the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission. “All of those things kind of combine to cause partners to ask for more clarity.”

MORPC’s view: Over the long haul, such short-term bumps in the road to regional growth will get smoothed out, and will not dramatically alter central Ohio’s trajectory.

MORPC updates its population projections every four years to help planners anticipate transportation, housing and other needs. The region experienced explosive growth in the last decade, leading MORPC several years ago to up it’s 2050 population projection by 800,000, or 36%.

“To plan effectively, it’s important to understand how our region’s population is growing and changing so we can prepare local communities, partners and businesses,” MORPC Executive Director William Murdock said in a statement.

The region’s natural increase – or births minus deaths – has steadily declined, making growth increasingly reliant on new residents moving into central Ohio, either from within the country or internationally. “The 2010s was the first decade when as much growth came from migration as from births,” the agency said in a news release.

Whether the recent move toward curtailing immigration has a long-term impact isn’t yet known, Schill said. From 2000-2010, half of the inflow into the region was from outside the nation.

“Migration has become such a big part of growth in the last decade, international and domestic,” Schill said.

While MORPC expects the 15-county region — Franklin and adjacent Delaware, Licking, Fairfield, Pickaway, Madison and Union, plus Logan, Marion, Morrow and Knox in the west and north and Fayette, Ross, Hocking, Perry on the south and east — to grow as a whole, Columbus was the hands-down growth engine in the previous decade, accounting for 70% of the increase in population, up from 42% in the 2000s.

MORPC expects that central Ohio will continue to grow based on the strength of the region’s economic development and corporate culture, relatively affordable housing and ease of commute, a thriving downtown and strong suburban communities, it said.

“From 2010 to 2019, 58% of all new units built were multifamily, compared with 42% single family. To keep up with projected growth, the region is expected to need nearly 270,000 additional housing units by 2050,” the agency said in its release. bbush@dispatch.com

@ReporterBush

“To plan effectively, it’s important to understand how our region’s population is growing and changing so we can prepare local communities, partners and businesses.”
William Murdock
MORPC Executive Director

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