Marin County Executive to MTC/ABAG: your high growth numbers are not “realistic”
Regional planners aim to fix transit, housing, the environment, and the economy in their Plan Bay Area 2050+, a long-range nine-county development blueprint that hinges on high-growth estimates. But in a letter to MTC/ABAG, Marin County Executive Derek Johnson rejects the plan’s assumption of 22,200 new county residents. Actually, the state predicts Marin will lose 6,437 residents. Stopping short of demanding a rethink, Johnson instead recommends the planners do better next time. H/t to Susan Kirsch.
3. Growth Forecasts and Policy-Based Assumptions
We continue to have serious concerns regarding the population and employment growth assumptions reflected in Draft Plan Bay Area 2050+. Based on actual residency and demographic trends and recent employment patterns – we do not believe the projected levels of resident and job growth are realistic for Marin County.
Draft Plan Bay Area 2050+ relies on a policy-driven forecasting approach that differs materially from the demographic and economic models used by other state agencies. The Draft Plan’s population projections diverge significantly from those issued by the California Department of Finance (DOF), the State’s official source for population projections, which rely on a cohort-component methodology grounded in observed trends in births, deaths, aging, and net migration. For Marin County, the Draft Plan assumes population growth of approximately 22,200 additional residents by 2050, while DOF instead projects a population decline of 6,437 over the same period.
Similarly, the Plan’s employment projections do not reflect recent and ongoing structural shifts in Marin’s economy. Over the past decade, Marin has experienced the departure or consolidation of several major employers, including Autodesk, Glassdoor, and Fireman’s Fund, reflecting broader regional trends toward consolidation, remote and hybrid work, and reduced demand for traditional office-based employment.
We recognize that the Draft Plan’s growth assumptions were approved earlier in 2025 as part of the adopted Plan Blueprint, and that revisiting those assumptions at this stage would require extensive re-modeling that is not feasible within the current planning cycle.
However, it is important to clearly acknowledge the implications of relying on growth assumptions that are not aligned with observed demographic and employment trends. While Plan Bay Area 2050+ itself does not directly determine Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA) numbers, future forecasts developed for Plan Bay Area 2060 will inform the next RHNA cycle and will carry significant regulatory and legal consequences for local governments.
Accordingly, we strongly requests early and close collaboration with MTC as Plan Bay Area 2060 assumptions are developed, including transparent evaluation of alternative growth scenarios such as lower-growth, remote-work, and technology-driven productivity scenarios; clearer articulation of how policy-based forecasts should be interpreted by local jurisdictions; and greater alignment, where feasible, with other state demographic frameworks so that local governments are not required to plan against inconsistent datasets.
Read the whole letter here.
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