The share of Oregon’s population living in cities has soared over the past half century as the state has transitioned from a place with a large rural population to one that is overwhelmingly urban.
Oregon’s shift toward city living has been among the fastest in the nation. Urbanization has had a profound effect on the state’s character, with a big political, economic and cultural divide separating the Portland area from Oregon’s small towns and rural communities.
The state, once far more rural than the nation, now largely mirrors the national profile.
Most of those changes took place prior to 2010, and the pace of urbanization has slowed considerably since then, both in Oregon and across the country.
About a third of Oregonians lived in rural areas in 1970, according to Census data tracked by Portland State University’s Population Research Center. Urbanization picked up in the 1980s and then took off in the 1990s, driven largely by a transformation in Portland’s suburbs, until more than 80% of Oregonians lived in cities.
Two underlying phenomena were at work during that period: Portland and other cities grew, and formerly rural communities near Portland grew much denser, so the Census Bureau reclassified them as urban.
Ethan Sharygin, the Population Research Center’s executive director, traces Oregon’s urban transition to the passage of Senate Bill 100, the state’s historic land use law, in 1973. Oregon’s urban growth boundary “promoted urban density and discouraged sprawl,” he said, helping drive the state’s urbanization.
Another key factor, in Sharygin’s view: MAX, the Portland area’s light-rail system, which he credits for promoting urban density across the three counties in the metro region. It began operating in 1986, as Oregon’s urban boom took off.
That’s a period that coincided with rapid expansion of Intel’s operations in Hillsboro and Nike’s growth near Beaverton.
It wasn’t just the Portland area. Deschutes County transformed faster than anywhere else in Oregon, according to the Census data. It had fewer than 28,000 urban residents in 1990. By 2020, there were more than 140,000 people living in urban parts of the county — a fivefold increase.
In most places, though, the urban boom ended more than a decade ago. The share of urban residents dropped in both Oregon and the U.S. between 2010 and 2020. The government doesn’t have comprehensive data on urban demographics since the 2020 census, but population growth in the largely urban Portland area stalled after the pandemic.
And rural areas, by contrast, are showing new signs of resilience.
“We see lots of rural areas leveling off or gaining population around the state,” Sharygin said.
He noted that only one of Oregon’s rural counties, Grant, lost population between 2010 and 2020, ending the decade with 7,200 residents. Oregon household incomes, meanwhile, are growing fastest in largely rural counties across the center parts of the state.
“We’d love to have a crystal ball into which areas may turn into ghost towns, and which areas will see an influx of new residents after the current population ages out,” Sharygin said.
Any rural renaissance will have to overcome steep demographic and logistical challenges. Oregon’s average population is the oldest in the West and rural counties are significantly older than the state’s urban centers.
“I think broadband access and airports/train/highway travel times still present significant obstacles to small town living for folks who want to be connected to Portland,” Sharygin said. “But maybe more young people will want to be homesteaders — and in that case there’s lots of opportunity still in rural parts of Oregon.”
This is Oregon Insight, The Oregonian’s weekly look at the numbers behind the state’s economy. View past installments here.
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