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- Parents with children under 5 are shunning big cities faster than everyone else.
- It's the intersection of remote work and the housing affordability crisis, as parents work from cheaper areas.
- But the flight of young parents and a shrinking population might mean cities have to compete to keep you.
City kids could be a thing of the past, as America's youngest residents leave cities at a breakneck pace.
A new report from the Economic Innovation Group, or EIG, found that families with young kids are shunning big cities. The population under 5 years old in large urban counties, or "counties which intersect with an urban area of at least 250,000 people" as the report states, has fallen by 6.1% from April 2020 to July 2022, according to EIG's analysis of Census data. That's far more pronounced than the 3.3% decline in the number of young children seen nationally.
Families fleeing cities for the town next door illustrates the intersection of overlapping issues plaguing Americans and the economy: Unaffordable housing, and cities suddenly losing their value proposition as remote jobs reshape when and where work takes place.
That created a nexus of families with young children just outside of cities, what the report calls a "donut effect." In essence, there's the emptying hole of the city, with its population growing or moving out into a suburban and exurban ring around it.
The following map shows how the population of those under 5 has changed for counties and county equivalents. Births, aging, and other factors could contribute to a population change — in addition to families moving somewhere else.
As the map suggests, many places have seen their population of those under 5 decline from April 1, 2020, to July 1, 2022. However, there are also counties or equivalents that saw this young age group increase, such as many counties in Florida.
Connor O'Brien, a research and policy associate at EIG and the author of the report, told Insider that the pandemic sparked a "general exodus" from major cities. Even with a "normalization of the economy" after the wild swings of 2020 and early 2021, and the reopening of offices, people weren't returning to cities — "and it has especially not brought families back to big cities."
"Families have a lot more options than they did three years ago," O'Brien said. "Whereas in 2019, maybe some families would've essentially had to put up with the housing cost crisis, or insert other issues that folks may have with life in certain cities."
But that mass migration will also reshape cities — and the exurban areas families are making an escape to — in its wake. For instance, not all urban areas are created equal when it comes to retaining or boosting their younger populations. Southeast cities, like those in the Carolinas, have been able to grow their populations of those under 5 years old. Meanwhile, the middle of the country and the coasts are emptying out of their youngest residents, as big coastal cities like New York and Los Angeles see staggering contractions in their youngest populations.
That shrinking population comes as some cities, especially those in the Midwest, contend with what's called a "doom loop." As Insider's Eliza Relman reports, cities are seeing a hollowing out of their downtowns — the donut migration pattern — and, in turn, lose out on key commercial property taxes. That worsens quality of life, and pushes many people back out, creating a self-fulfilling loop of a shrinking population and deteriorating living conditions.
But for cities that are shedding young families but still hold allure, like New York, the reshaping might be more of a rethinking of their value proposition. If the advantage of living close to work, or being tethered to that area, is gone, then cities will have to "compete on other dimensions to attract people and to keep their residents," according to O'Brien. And that might not be a bad thing.
"This could spark a healthier competition between cities and suburbs where cities are forced to get back to the basics of local governance, get back to making sure that their schools are high quality, that the trains run on time, that garbage actually gets picked up," O'Brien said. "Because suddenly those things take on relatively more importance when you have the option of decamping to the suburbs or to a resort town that may have awesome amenities, or simply to just another maybe smaller city that has these things taken care of."
Are you a young family moving out of a big city, or contributing to the "donut effect"? Contact these reporters at jkaplan@insider.com and mhoff@insider.com.