The Urban Family Exodus Is a Warning for Progressives
6 min read
Children—and the millions of private decisions to have or not have them—are in the news these days, for regrettable reasons. Ohio Senator J. D. Vance, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, has made a habit of excoriating progressives who don’t have a record of procreation. In November 2020, he implied that childless Democratic leaders are “sociopathic.” In an interview with the Fox News host Tucker Carlson in 2021, he lamented that the country was being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies.” Later that year, in an address in Southern California, he said he wanted “to take aim at the left, specifically the childless left … because I think the rejection of the American family is perhaps the most pernicious and most evil thing that the left has done in this country.”
Vance’s commentary is rude and revisionist. Childless adults aren’t psychotic, and many childless people are desperate to bear children. Suggesting that their unsuccessful reproductive efforts amount to sociopathy is cruel. More substantively, in 2022, it was progressive Democratic leaders—that witchy coven of child-loathing felinophiles—who pushed for an extension to the refundable child tax credit, while Republicans overwhelmingly rejected a deal that would have sent tens of billions of dollars to parents.
But, at the risk of giving Vance any credit here, I must admit that progressives do have a family problem. The problem doesn’t exist at the level of individual choice, where conservative scolds tend to fixate. Rather, it exists at the level of urban family policy. American families with young children are leaving big urban counties in droves. And that says something interesting about the state of mobility—and damning about the state of American cities and the progressives who govern them.
First, the facts. In large urban metros, the number of children under 5 years old is in a free fall, according to a new analysis of Census data by Connor O’Brien, a policy analyst at the think tank Economic Innovation Group. From 2020 to 2023, the number of these young kids declined by nearly 20 percent in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. They also fell by double-digit percentage points in the counties making up most or all of Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, and St. Louis.
This exodus is not merely the result of past COVID waves. Yes, the pace of the urban exodus was fastest during the high-pandemic years of 2020 and 2021. But even at the slower rate of out-migration since then, several counties—including those encompassing Manhattan, Brooklyn, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco—are on pace to lose 50 percent of their under-5 population in 20 years. (To be clear, demographics have complex feedback loops and counter-feedback loops; the toddler population of these places won’t necessarily halve by the 2040s.)
Nor is the exodus merely the result of declining nationwide birth rates. Yes, women across the country are having fewer children than they used to. The share of women under 40 who have never given birth doubled from the early 1980s to the 2020s. But the under-5 population is still declining twice as fast in large urban counties as it is elsewhere, according to O’Brien’s census analysis.
So what’s the matter with Manhattan (and L.A. and Chicago)?
After the Great Recession, during a period of low urban crime, young college-educated people flocked to downtown areas to advance their career. Retail upscaled, and housing costs increased. Soon, families started to leave. In 2019, the economist Jed Kolko showed that in cities including San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C., young, high-income, college-educated whites were moving in, and multiracial families with children were moving out. The coronavirus pandemic, which resulted in school closures and loosened the tether between home and office, pushed even more families to flee.
“I’m deeply worried about a family-exodus doom loop,” O’Brien told me. “When the population of young kids in a city falls 10 or 20 percent in just a few years, that’s a potential political earthquake. Almost overnight, there are fewer parents around to fight for better schools, local playgrounds, or all the other mundane amenities families care about.”
Behavior is contagious, as the Yale sociologist Nicholas Christakis has shown. If you have a friend who smokes or exercises, it significantly increases the odds that you will do the same. The same principle might hold for having or not having kids. As young children become scarce in big cities, people in their 20s and 30s who are thinking about having children will have fewer opportunities to see firsthand how fulfilling parenthood can be. What they’re left with instead are media representations, which tend to be inflected by the negativity bias of the news.
At a glance, these trends may not seem like they have anything to do with contemporary progressivism. But they do. America’s richest cities are profoundly left-leaning, and many of them—including New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco—are themselves ensconced in left-leaning states. These places ought to be advertisements for what the modern progressive movement can achieve without meddlesome conservatism getting in the way, at the local or state level. If progressives want to sell their cause to the masses, they should be able to say: Elect us, and we’ll make America more like Oakland. Or Brooklyn. Or suburban Detroit. If they can’t make that argument, that’s a problem.
Right now it’s hard to make the argument, because urban progressivism is afflicted by an inability to build. Cities in red states are building much more housing than those in blue states. In 2024, Austin, Raleigh, and Phoenix are expected to expand their apartment inventory more than five times faster than San Diego, Baltimore, or San Francisco. Housing policy is the quantum field of urban life, extending across every sector and making contact with every problem. When cities fail on housing policy, the failure ripples.
Housing has for several years been the most common reason for moving, and housing in America’s biggest and richest blue cities is consistently the least affordable. According to the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University, among the cities with the highest median price-to-income ratios in 2023, nine of the top 10 were in California or Hawaii. The five cities with the most cost-burdened renters and owners were Los Angeles, Miami, San Diego, Honolulu, and Oxnard, followed by Riverside, Bakersfield, the New York metro area, and Fresno.
One hidden effect of expensive housing is that it raises the cost of local services and creates shortages of workers willing to accept low wages in labor-intensive industries, such as child care. As a result, large urban areas have more expensive child care, even relative to their higher levels of income. A 2023 analysis by the U.S. Department of Labor and the Women’s Bureau found that infant child care devoured the highest share of family income in large urban counties. Nationwide, the average family with at least one child under the age of 5 devotes about 13 percent of family income to pay for child care. But the typical infant day-care center in San Francisco and Chicago consumes about 20 percent of a local family’s income. In Boston, Manhattan, and Brooklyn, it’s more like 30 percent. Child care is just another example of how constrained housing supply can poison parts of the economy that don’t immediately seem to have anything to do with it.
To be fair, one might argue that federal policy nudges families toward the suburbs. Federal spending on highways lubricates suburban transportation while urban transit sputters, and the mortgage interest deduction reduces the tax hit from homeownership. But a national trend toward the burbs doesn’t explain why cities in red states have managed to build houses, or better restrain child-care inflation, better than those in blue states.
Conservatives like J. D Vance think they’re getting mileage out of judging the private-life decisions of urban progressive men and women. But these decisions exist … well, in the context of all in which we live. They are shaped by place and by policy. The steady march of the childless city is not merely the inevitable result of declining birth rates. It’s the result of urban policy, conceived by, written by, and enacted by liberals. Progressive leaders aren’t family-hating sociopaths, but they currently preside over counties that young families are leaving. They should pride themselves instead on building places where those same families would want to stay.
