Consistent growth led, in 2022, to a new designation for the Matanuska-Susitna Borough’s core area: urbanized instead of its long-held “rural” designation. The designation affects transportation planning as well as other federal funding sources, including US Department of Agriculture housing loan programs.
To be fair, it’s been a long time since the Mat-Su Borough, known for affordable homes on one-acre lots with decent commute times to lucrative jobs in Anchorage, has been truly rural. Never mind that it’s not uncommon to see residents out for a Sunday horse ride or dust plumes from four-wheelers ripping down trails beside heavily traveled roads. The urban/rural designation when it comes to transportation planning has little to do with these things—it’s strictly a numbers game.
Topping 50,000
The Mat-Su Borough’s population has grown steadily in the past few decades. Between the 2010 and 2020 censuses, the number of residents grew from 89,000 to more than 107,000. Exceeding the 100,000 mark didn’t lead to the designation, though. Borough planner Kim Sollien says the threshold was that the population exceeded 50,000 people in a contiguous area, or about 1,000 people per square mile.
“We’re up to 57,000 people in our core area,” Sollien explains. “That growth triggered the requirement to form a metropolitan planning organization.”…