San Francisco is holding onto its title as the country's most childless major city, and in fact the numbers haven't budged in a decade.
Every couple of years the national media seizes on the story, with each update from the Census Bureau, of the American cities that have the fewest families with children under 18, and San Francisco has been coming out on top for over two decades now. And, the percentage of children in SF's population, while holding fairly steady for the last ten years, actually came down a couple points from the early to mid-aughts, when it hovered around 15%, and 1990, when it was around 16%.
The latest number is 13.4%, the same share of residents under 18 as back in 2014. The number dipped as low as 13% during the pandemic, when the 2020 Census came out, but it's come back up to 13.4%. (For the 2022 update, the Chronicle broke things down by neighborhood, finding that Seacliff and the Bayview had the highest kids per capita, while, predictably, the Castro and SoMa had the lowest.)
Seattle is the next-most childless city, according to the latest census estimates, per the Chronicle, with 14% children under 18.
Compare that to Los Angeles (18.5%), New York (19.6%), and Houston (24%), all far larger cities where more people still seem to be managing to raise kids.
In SF, of course, affordable housing is an issue for the middle and working classes, and being the boom-and-bust city that it has been since its earliest days, it has taken on the character of a transient haven — a place where younger people come to make career moves, and then move on.
The preponderence of rental housing that is often shared by wage-earning roommates is also a factor in affordability, as the New York Times noted back in 2017. This keeps prices high for larger apartments that are more appropriate for families, pricing those families out to the suburbs.
"When we imagine having kids, we think of somewhere else," said software engineer Slin Lee, speaking to the Times at the time and sharing a studio apartment near the Castro with partner Daisy Yeung and one Scottish terrier named Olive. “It’s starting to feel like a no-kids type of city."
That story came at the height of SF's last boom time, as an "urban renaissance" was sweeping through the nation's cities, per the Times — and while SF's percentage of kids was estimated at 13% that year, New York's 21%, so the percentage is falling there as well.
And, the Times noted, "In many areas of [San Francisco], pet grooming shops seem more common than schools."
That remains the case, and unfortunately, as is happening in Oakland and other communities as well, the dwindling number of children has spelled financial disaster for SF schools, which depend on headcount for the amount of state money they receive each year.
Back in 1970, there were 90,000 kids in SF's public school system. Now, it's 50,046 as of the 2024-25 school year.
The Chronicle notes that in the last ten years, Oakland's percentage of kids under 18 fell from 21% to 18%, a fairly steep decline. Similarly, San Jose's percentage dropped from 23% to 19%.
In California, only Bakersfield and Fresno have child populations over 25%. And elsewhere in the country, the trend has similar in major cities, with only Washington DC and Orlando seeing modest, 1% upticks in the last 10 years, per the Chronicle.
At least in SF, the writing has been on the wall in terms of the youth population going back to the 2010 Census and beyond.
"It’s a statement on our age that in order to make it in our more advanced, best and most-skilled industries you really have to sacrifice. And the sacrifice may be your family," said Richard Florida, an urban demographics expert and author of The Rise of the Creative Class, speaking to the Times in 2017.
"If you get to the age that you’re going to have kids in San Francisco and you haven’t made your million — or more — you probably begin to think you have to leave," Florida said.
Previously: SF Still the Most Childless City in U.S., New Map Breaks Down Childlessness by Neighborhood [2022]
Photo by Brett Wharton
