moorhead city council

Nancy Edmonds Hanson

The Fargo-Moorhead metropolitan area’s population may grow by 40% over the next 30 years — from 250,000 to more than 357,000 — according to projections developed by the Metropolitan Council of Governments.

The prediction was part of a presentation by planners Adam Altenburg and Ari Del Rosario to the Moorhead City Council at its regular meeting Monday. The two delivered the same information to the Clay County Commission the next morning.

Laying out MetroCOG’s Baseline Demographic Forecast, Altenburg detailed similar growth for Moorhead and Clay County. According to projections, Moorhead may increase from the 44,505 residents recorded in 2020 to 66,766 in 2050, an increase of 39%. The county as a whole will increase by a slightly smaller margin, 35%, to 61,832. The estimate for Dilworth is growth of 43%, to 6,586.

Across the river, Cass County is projected to grow by the same proportion to a 2050 total of 247,753, while Fargo’s population may reach 155,681, or 24% more than it is today.

MetroCOG is charged with making transportation policy for the entire metropolitan area. Its population, household and employment forecasts, completed every five years, are based on input from area schools, county and city governments, housing agencies, builders and economic development organizations. They take births and deaths into account, along with migration in and out of the area, occupied housing stock, employment by industry and labor force participation.

According to Altenburg, almost 52,000 new jobs are expected by 2050, leading to a total of 235,329. The fastest growth is projected to be in education, followed by construction, finance and natural resources. The only career area expected to decline is information fields,

Del Rosario shared highlights of a second study, the Metropolitan Profile 2022. He termed it “a snapshot of the metro area based on data from the previous year.”

The metropolitan area, he said, has grown by 2,293 in 2021, the latest year for which data are available. That’s substantially faster than the U.S. as a whole — 0.91%, compared to just 0.13%. The rate was slower, however, than in most of the past decade.

The community’s median age is 32.6 years, compared with 38.6 for all Americans. At the same time, 39.1% of FM residents have college degrees (U.S., 32.9%). Eight percent of local residents speak a language other than English at home, much less than the nation as a whole (21.5%) Seven percent of locals were born outside the U.S.; nationwide, that figure is 13.5%.

About three in four FM residents are in the labor force (U.S., 63%). Median household income is slightly more here than across the nation, $65,999 vs. $64,994. Households are slightly smaller here at an average of 2.32 people (U.S., 2.6). The rate of home ownership and occupancy is below the national average, however: 56% here vs. 64% nationwide.

The full studies can be viewed on MetroCOG’s website: www.fmmetrocog.org.