Where the Children Are

In CityLab, Richard Florida addresses the "growing consensus" that American cities are losing their populations of children and families. While some data has suggested that the number of families with children has fallen in 53 large cities, new data suggests that most big cities aren't far off the national average—including major urban centers like New York and Los Angeles.

Looking at the 2016 American Communities Survey, Florida identifies the following trends:

"The places with the largest shares of families with kids—where families with kids range from more than half to 70 percent of all households—are mainly smaller cities that are home to military bases, like Fort Knox, Kentucky, or agricultural communities with high percentages of immigrant families, like Watsonville, California.

Looking at the most-childless cities of any size, that list (below) skews heavily toward retirement destinations in Florida and college towns such as State College, Pennsylvania. In other words, these are places you’d expect to have fewer households with children under 18, so they don’t support the case that U.S. cities are becoming more childless."