NEW YORK (BLOOMBERG) -- Families are still leaving large US cities, with the number of young children in New York City down by almost a fifth since the beginning of the pandemic, according to an analysis of the latest census data.
Since April 2020, the under-5 population has fallen by 18% in New York, 15% in Cook County, which includes Chicago, and 14% in Los Angeles County, the Economic Innovation Group said in a report .
The research, based on US Census Bureau data released at the beginning of this month, shows how big cities are still grappling with the after-effects of the pandemic, which touched off an exodus of urbanites to smaller cities, the suburbs and the country. While departures of small children are slowing down, the continued loss of families highlights the risk of a so-called urban doom loop as cities struggle to retain one of their most important demographics.
“It’s possible that cultural norms can kind of gather momentum here,” said Connor O’Brien, policy analyst at EIG, a research and advocacy group that calls for a more dynamic and inclusive US economy. “If the number of kids in NYC can drop 18% in 39 months, suddenly you’re almost weird if you start a family in New York.”
A total of about 800,000 people moved out of large urban counties last year, or twice the pre-pandemic rate, EIG said. Moves out of the city have combined with lower birth rates to drag down the number of young children in big urban counties. Birth rates there have fallen at twice the rate of those in rural areas over the past decade or so, EIG found.
The loss of families with small children is persisting as cities like New York grapple with rising childcare and housing costs, and questions about whether those financial pressures are driving New Yorkers — particularly middle-income families — to leave.
In a separate report released recently, the left-leaning Fiscal Policy Institute found that households with children under the age of six were 47% more likely than the rest of the population to leave the state of New York post-pandemic.
Big cities are hardly alone in seeing a decline in younger kids as the US population grows older, even if their losses are more extreme. Nationwide, 58% of all US counties saw a decline in their under-5 populations, EIG said.
“Birth rates appear to be falling fastest in the country’s most urbanized counties and slowest in rural areas,” EIG said.
Still, some counties have registered an increase in their their under-5 populations. Florida’s Polk County, home to Legoland and not far from Walt Disney World, added a net 5,100 young kids since April 2020, an increase of more than 12%.
Suburbs in the two biggest Texas metro areas have also recorded gains in the under-5 population. In the Dallas suburbs, Collin County had a 7.8% increase while Montgomery County in the Houston area registered an 11% boost.
“Outmigration started to accelerate out of large urban counties in the 2010s,” O’Brien said. “That might be a story of the long, slow recovery from the Great Recession finally reaching other parts of the country and allowing people to escape high-cost cities for the first time since the recession.”
This story originally appeared on Bloomberg.com.
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