The Evolution of U.S. Cities Into Child-Free Playgrounds

Besides their role as incubators of civilization, cities have served as places for families. Whether along New York’s Park Avenue, or in such storied ethnic communities as Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Chicago’s South Side and Boston’s North End, the urban saga featured parents bringing up children and youngsters struggling to adjust to the discordant rhythms of city life.

Yet today, amid widespread claims of an urban renaissance, many of America’s most successful cities are increasingly characterized by a dearth of families. Instead, the paragons of the urbanist revival, from Manhattan to San Francisco, are childless couples, gays, young singles and “empty nesters,” over-50 couples whose children have left home. “These are the people who want to live in the city now,” says Fred Siegel, an urban historian at New York’s Cooper Union. “They are the ones redefining the city, not as a family place, but as a kind of adult carnival and tourist mecca.”

This transformation may mark both a new beginning for many U.S. cities and the end of the era when cities largely defined the cultural, economic and political life of the nation. It also may enable cities to take full advantage of such trends as the rise of the divorced, the never-married and two-income couples without children, who now account for one-quarter of all married couples.

Yet, cities can only hope to attract the wealthier tier of these groups, according to University of Michigan demographer Bill Frey. Poor divorced people, singles and childless couples are unlikely to find work and affordable housing in expensive urban communities. Consequently, as cities come more to embody and reflect the values and interests of their new majorities, they are likely not only to be largely childless but also devoid of the middle- and working-class people who tend to define normative culture in America.

This may leave the ethnically and economically homogeneous suburbs, edge cities and smaller towns as the dominant shapers of political, cultural and economic life. Rather than the stage for the spontaneous mixing and jostling among groups and classes that is the epitome of the urban experience, the historic core may serve more as amusement park, lifestyle playground and high-end service center for the sprawling hinterlands. Finally, this transformation of U.S. cities could further fragment American culture, between one that is more libertarian (or libertine) and urbane and one more conservative and family-oriented.

Perhaps no city in America fits these categories better than Seattle, a city that has long prided itself on its family-friendliness, livable neighborhoods and middle-class culture. When he arrived in Seattle in 1955, University of Washington demographer Richard Morrill encountered a city that was “very middle class, union blue collar, homeowning,” with a large preponderance of families. But in the last Census, he says, the city’s population had the lowest percentage of residents between ages 5 and 17--10.8%--of any major U.S. city, followed closely by Boston, Denver and San Francisco.

Seattle’s demographic transformation is chiefly the result of an influx of upwardly mobile professionals, many of whom have postponed childbearing or intend to remain childless. Formerly family-oriented, close-in Seattle neighborhoods--Fremont, Queen Anne and Capitol Hill, to name a few--are now simultaneously fashionable and nearly child-free, with percentages of 5- to 17-year-olds as low as 5%.

The new demographics, coupled with a citywide apartment vacancy rate of 2%, have sparked a building boom in multiunit apartments and loft developments, which are favored by childless urbanites. Between 1990 and 1997, more than 11,000 multifamily units were built in the city, 2,000 of them last year; with the average price of apartments in some areas rising as much as 15% annually, plans for many more are on the drawing board.

The exodus of middle-class families in Seattle and other relatively childless cities does not signify urban decline. Unlike many troubled urban cores that have steadily lost residents, such as St. Louis, Detroit and Atlanta, they enjoy strong economies, population growth and rising real estate prices. Other cities, among them Houston, Baltimore and Cleveland, are consciously trying to duplicate the Seattle lifestyle by marketing their long-distressed centers to predominately childless populations.

Economic trends have accelerated the urban demographic changes. Between 1978 and 1997, U.S. manufacturing jobs stagnated at about 16 million, but in urban centers, according to a study by the Ann Arbor-based Industrial Technology Institute, they fell from 4.1 million to 1.6 million, a more than 50% decline. This has meant a reduction in blue-collar jobs that once provided economic security to working- and middle-class urbanities.

In the Seattle area, this phenomenon has manifested itself in the shift of both manufacturing and warehousing to less-expensive urban areas like Tacoma, and in the move of some high-tech employment to the outer suburbs. “It’s an era of land inflation in the city and it’s [thus] becoming too expensive for small industrial and warehousing companies,” says Paul Sommers, senior research fellow at the University of Washington’s Graduate School of Public Affairs. “Retail, housing and headquarters of companies like Starbucks are moving in. The industrial zones increasingly don’t even look industrial.”

Among the forces propelling child-bearing couples out of Seattle are its generally poor urban schools and high real estate prices. According to research conducted by Morrill, for example, one-third of all children born in Seattle move out within five years. Even the people who want to keep the urban lifestyle have to move. You can’t buy a decent house here for less than $240,000,” says Seattle developer David Sucher. “Even if you can pay that, in the end, the schools force the issue for almost everybody. You have kids, you move to suburbs.”

Seattle’s relative childlessness sharply contrasts with immigrant magnets like Los Angeles, Miami, Houston and New York’s outer boroughs, where the exodus of Anglo families has been largely offset by the influx of family-oriented immigrants. Seattle remains relatively untouched by this kind of migration. Roughly three-quarters of the city’s population is Anglo, one of the highest proportions of any major U.S. city.

Perhaps the largest childless zone is on the island of Manhattan. While the New York’s 5- to 17-year-olds constitute 16% of the overall population, a ratio roughly equivalent to that in Los Angeles, Houston and Dallas, barely 11% of the households in New York County, which covers Manhattan, have similar-age youngsters. Meanwhile, the outer boroughs, the historic bastion of the white middle and working classes, remain heavily family-oriented, but mostly immigrant and poor.

As in Seattle, childless populations in San Francisco and New York bring with them significant economic benefits; prices for loft and other living space in lower Manhattan have increased by as much as tenfold since the 1970s. With higher incomes and less need for space, childless urban classes also represent prime consumers of high-end services such as restaurants, live theater and upscale shopping districts. In a 1992 Louis Harris survey of migration, 56% of the respondents cited a city’s cultural amenities as among their reasons for moving there.

A new class dynamic is being created in cities increasingly dominated by childless adults, with the highly affluent on one end and the destitute on the other. Manhattan, which once had a large child-bearing middle class, now boasts the nation’s highest per-capita income but also ranks among the top fifth in terms of households living in poverty. A similar income disparity can be found in San Francisco and Seattle, although in these cities, poverty takes the form not so much of marginalized minorities as of the socially dysfunctional. In Seattle’s gentrifying areas of Pioneer Square and Belltown, for example, the newest high-end housing units, with 1,600 square feet and priced at $200,000 and up, are rising alongside some of the densest concentrations of homelessness, drug addiction and other forms of destitution.

To observers such as Siegel this new class structure is not necessarily unexpected. Single people, gays and other urbanites tend to be more tolerant of deviancy and dysfunctional government than families with children. They also tend to demand fewer traditional city services. Yet, the price is that cities, by turning themselves into bastions of the single, the affluent and the childless, may diverge ever more from cultural, political and social norms. Urban life will continue to evolve in its postmodern form, but without the common touch of humanity that only the sight and sound of children can bring.