If you take a walk on a Saturday morning through San Francisco’s quiet, family-friendly Noe Valley neighborhood where I live, the first thing you’ll notice is the strollers. American stereotypes of San Francisco generally involve some combination of hippies, hipsters, and gay bars, but Noe Valley is all about the babies. Walk along 24th Street past the relaxed restaurants serving brunch, the trendy (in a yuppie kind of way) furniture sellers, the coffee shops, and of course the baby stores — and you’ll see the high school classes of 2026, 2027, and 2028 represented in full force.
As I took it in one day, I couldn’t help wonder about the demographics of it all. Why do I see so many babies in Noe Valley, but so few school-age children and teenagers?
Fortunately, Circle of Moms is an incredibly rich web site and can aid in answering questions like these. Over 10% of moms of toddlers in the U.S. are using the Child Space to share updates and milestones with friends and family. The data they provide allow us allows us to make some interesting inferences about where all the big kids have gone.
Little-kid-ville and Big-kid-ville
It starts with demographics. Child Spaces on Circle of Moms are a little bit more common for very young children (under 3) than they are for, say, 10-year-olds. Once we controlled for that, we were able to look at whether there are relatively more little kids or big kids in any US city. In “Averageville” about two in seven (27.8%) children are under age five. “Little-kid-villes” are cities with lots of small children and fewer older children, so this percentage is larger; “Big-kid-villes” have fewer small children and more big kids (a percentage under 27.8%).
San Francisco may be Baby Heaven, but You’re Better off Finding a (teenage) Babysitter in Stockton
Let’s take a look at some of the actual numbers and how a few American cities rank:
San Francisco, San Diego, New York (Manhattan), Minneapolis, and LA are all Little-kid-villes, with lots of young children (under age 5) and relatively few older kids. Detroit, Amarillo, and Stockton are all Big-kid-villes with more older kids. San Francisco in particular is an outlier, with far more young children per older child than the next highest on the list (San Diego).
A City-Wide Baby Boom
So why is this true? We can think of a couple of reasons. First, according to the California Department of Finance, there were 5-10% more births per year in San Francisco the past three years (2007-09) than there were during most of the 1990s and 2000s (incidentally, this is not true of Los Angeles). That means that even without anyone moving, San Francisco would have relatively more children under age 4 than elementary school kids.
Yuppie No More
Second, it seems that parents leave the most expensive cities as their kids get older. They may want to live in San Francisco in their 20s, get married there, and have kids. But as the kids get older, the cramped apartment in the hip neighborhood becomes less appealing, and they move to suburbs and smaller cities like Stockton, CA.
An in-depth analysis of this topic is well beyond the scope of this blog, but we did take a quick glance at a list of the US’s most expensive cities. Sure enough, every single one of the top ten is a “Little-kid-ville”. Meanwhile, the strongest “Big-kid-villes” — Detroit; Stockton; Amarillo, TX; Mobile, AL; Reading, PA; Flint, MI; Ft Wayne, IN; Buffalo, NY; Bakersfield, CA — are hardly trendy, but serve as areas where families can settle down and buy an affordable home. Several of these areas have also suffered substantial decreases in property values in the past few years, but we don’t have good longitudinal data which might help us understand whether those drops are cause or effect.
New York’s Many “Villes”
The trendy and expensive vs. non-trendy and inexpensive relationship holds within New York City as well. The expensive and dense Manhattan (36.3% of kids are under age five) and Brooklyn (32.2%) are strong “Little-kid-villes” while more the affordable Bronx (28.2%) and the less dense Staten Island (29.2%) are “Average-villes.” Clearly, this is a strong trend affecting cities and families across the US.
Mike Greenfield is Circle of Moms’ co-founder and CTO.
SAN DIEGO 1.55
NEW YORK 1.48
MINNEAPOLIS 1.39
LOS ANGELES 1.25
PHOENIX 1.13
LAS VEGAS 1.06
PHILADELPHIA 1.04
SAN ANTONIO 0.95
MEMPHIS 0.95
DETROIT 0.86
AMARILLO 0.85
STOCKTON 0.81
Housing prices are obviously at work, but I would not leave out concerns about the public schools. The combination of housing prices and private school tuition often tips the scale when moving from little kids to big kids. If they can move to a place where the public schools work, they only have to face the housing cost side of it.
In your list of big-kid-villes, Detroit is an interesting question mark.
Rick, I’m sure that’s a part of it, and a big chunk of why SF’s little kid percentage is so much higher than any other city’s.
I didn’t mention it explicitly above, but almost all large cities are little-kid-villes, and almost all of the big-kid-villes (Detroit being the major exception) are smaller cities. Do you know if big cities tend to have lower quality schools (all else being equal) than smaller ones?