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Twin Cities growth trends over the past several decades have remained vary stable in relative terms. Specifically, among the largest twenty-five metro areas the Twin Cities has been near the middle in terms of growth rate for the past 50 years. Since 1950, the Twin Cities has outgrown all of the dozen northern and eastern large metros, but has seldom grown faster than any of the dozen largest sunbelt or western metro areas. In the 1980s the Twin Cities growth rate was closer to the rates of several sun-belt/western metro areas'(Miami, Houston, San Francisco and Seattle). Such stable long-term relationships make a step-down approach especially appropriate. This relative trend stability is the major reason we have relied on a national step-down method in preparing overall population forecasts for the Twin Cities region. U. S. mid-range forecasts prepared by the U. S. Census Bureau were used as an overall control forecast. Trends of the Twin Cities share of growth for the U. S., all metros and 25 largest metros were projected using several different trend-based assumptions. The result chosen continued to show the Twin Cities increasing its share of U. S. growth, but at declining rate. We also looked at the high and low Census Bureau forecasts and related the Twin Cities growth to these forecasts. The result ranges from 2.3 million to 3.35 million for the year 2015--no change to an increase of over one million people in the next 25 years. This is a reasonable range of expectations based on the variation in trends occurring in the U. S. and Twin Cities over the past 40 years. In the future we will use models such as cohort-survival to improve our understanding of the more subtle growth factors and generate essential detailed data on age and race. But we will still rely on a general step-down approach to provide realistic"control" forecasts. SUBREGIONAL HOUSEHOLD (AND POPULATION) ALLOCATION Subregional forecasts were prepared as the next stage in the Council's step-down forecast method. There are two main reasons for using subregional forecasts (allocations of the regional control total) as an interim step in making city-level forecasts. One reason is that large subareas of the region have much more stable, and thus predictable, trends than individual municipalities. The second reason is that subareas can be related to regional policy. The Council's subregional allocation process uses households because they relate to land supply more closely than population. Once the households were allocated to subareas they were converted to population based on past trends, and.then reconciled to regional forecasts. One grouping of subregional areas used for this allocation is quadrants. These areas'break the region, excluding the central cities, into four areas: Northwest, Northeast, Southeast and Southwest. The north-south break is roughly Highway 12 and the east-west break is about at the Minneapolis-St. Paul boundary. This configuration was used because it best fits the geographic grid pattern of Twin.Cities Area cities and townships. • Quadrant trends for household growth have been extremely stable over the past three decades as a share of regional growth. Most of the "errors" of past Council forecasts are due to major changes in overall regional growth trends and local variation, not changes in the broad patterns of growth within the region. ` • Quadrant trends were expressed as shares of regional household growth and extrapolated(with shares converging slightly over the forecast period). Since these quadrants are of roughly uniform size (in terms of development capacity over the next forty or more years), it is unlikely that any one quadrant will capture a greatly increasing share of growth for an extended time period. Different assumptions regarding how these past trends should be projected were tested. This resulted in little variation in household forecasts.