Multnomah County's seniors will outnumber its children within a decade. A Portland State University demographic forecast projects the county's 65-and-older population will grow from 129,878 to 151,416 by 2036, while the number of residents ages 0 to 18 falls from 141,141 to 124,894.

The crossover helps explain why Portland Public Schools is weighing up to 20 school closures and why the county's preschool program has hundreds of empty seats.

Two forces are driving the shift, as first reported by Willamette Week: regional fertility rates have fallen 28% since 2015, and census data cited in the forecast show the county lost a net 22,416 residents to out-migration between 2020 and 2025.

Portland is one of the last places in Oregon where children still outnumber seniors. Statewide, seniors already hold the edge.

"Interestingly, the pandemic didn't affect the trajectory of birth rates much—they've been in long-run secular decline," Ethan Sharygin, director of PSU's Population Research Center, told Willamette Week.

"The effects were much more felt in terms of complete reversal of migration trends in response to the way that the city changed in the years afterward."

Portland's median age has climbed from 35.5 in 2010 to 39 in 2025.

Schools feel it first

PPS enrollment has dropped more than 10% since the 2017–18 school year, from 47,908 students to 42,622 in 2025–26. A separate PSU forecast projects enrollment will fall another 14%, to 36,763 by 2035–36.

Superintendent Kimberlee Armstrong told the PPS board on Aug. 26 that the district could close 10 to 20 elementary, K–8 and middle schools, with closures taking effect in the 2027–28 school year. Without closures, PPS's own modeling shows 37 of 45 elementary schools and 13 of 15 middle schools would fall below target enrollment by 2031–32. The district also faces a $65 million budget deficit.

Without taking a formal vote, a majority of PPS board members directed Armstrong to proceed with the consolidation process at the board's Tuesday, Sept. 1, meeting. A draft list of schools proposed for closure is expected in November.

Preschool surplus, waitlist mismatch

The same demographic decline has reshaped Multnomah County's Preschool for All program. When voters approved the program in 2020, planners estimated it would need about 11,000 seats to reach universal coverage by 2030. The PSU forecast cut that target to roughly 8,000.

Yet the program still has a mismatch problem. As of late September, 957 of the program's 7,280 seats were unfilled, costing the county about $1.5 million a month, The Oregonian reported. At the same time, 617 families sat on waitlists for preferred sites.

County Auditor Jennifer McGuirk warned commissioners on Sept. 23 that paying providers for all allocated seats, empty or filled, risks the program's long-term sustainability. The county pays providers up to $25,000 per seat for full-year, full-day programs.

On Aug. 27, county commissioners unanimously delayed a scheduled 0.8% increase in the Preschool for All income tax by one year, pushing it from Jan. 1, 2027, to Jan. 1, 2028. Commissioners Shannon Singleton and Meghan Moyer introduced the one-year delay as an amendment to Chair Jessica Vega Pederson's original proposal for a two-year postponement.

Aging shapes city priorities

The 2024 Portland Insights Survey, which drew more than 4,200 responses, found that older residents were more likely to name community safety and homelessness as top challenges. Residents ages 30 to 44 placed greater weight on cost of living, while those under 45 more broadly favored parks and environmental protections, according to the city's survey summary.

As Portland's electorate ages, those competing priorities could grow sharper. In an Aug. 18 Willamette Week interview, Sharygin joked about the collision between the city's graying population and its shrinking school-age cohort, suggesting PPS might have designed new school buildings for "adaptive use so that they could transition into senior living apartments if the demand for elementary schools evaporates."

The PPS board's draft closure list is expected in November. The 2026 Portland Insights Survey is underway, with results due in early 2027.