City parenting has become a financial flex
The wealthiest neighbourhoods are defying suburbanisation
NOT LONG ago Wicker Park, a neighbourhood on the north-west side of Chicago, was among America’s hippest neighbourhoods. On summer weekends young people with weird haircuts mobbed nightclubs. Vintage stores did a roaring trade in faded T-shirts from the 1980s. A few Puerto Rican restaurants, remnants of a poorer neighbourhood, sat uneasily alongside the new cafés serving cronuts and unlimited mimosas.
Walk through Wicker Park these days and it feels a little different. It is still gentrified, more so if anything. The vintage stores have not gone away. But the new crowd is rather younger. Nursery workers lead gaggles of toddlers in bright yellow vests around the streets. On the 606, a park built along a former railway track, almost everyone seems to be pushing an expensive pram or carrying a child on a bicycle. At weekends a clutch of craft-brewery tap rooms fills up with fathers. A new private school recently opened and a billboard advertises a clever new type of child car seat.
Cities across America are losing children fast. Across Chicago, between 2010 and 2024, according to census-bureau data, the total population aged under 18 declined by 22%. In Los Angeles the figure was 23% and in New York, 12%. And yet in the country’s richest, densest cities, there is one group noticeably defying the trend: wealthier white families. In Chicago the population of non-Hispanic white children grew by 6% from 2010 to 2024, faster than the white population grew overall. In Washington, DC, it rose by a truly remarkable 62%. Their parents are professionals who grew up in boring suburbs and do not want their kids to.
The change is most concentrated in central neighbourhoods in what Ness Sandoval, a sociologist at St Louis University, calls “winner takes all” cities, like New York, Chicago or San Francisco. Good examples include Park Slope in Brooklyn, Mar Vista in Los Angeles and Bernal Heights in San Francisco. Across Brooklyn the population of white children grew by 13% from 2010 to 2024. They now make up more than two-fifths of the total, up from a third in 2010. In Wicker Park’s two zipcodes, the number of white children increased by 39% and 94%.
Race is not a perfect proxy for income. But you only have to walk around, swerving Uppababy prams ($899 plus tax) carrying infants in Patagonia coats ($99 plus tax), to know these are wealthy families. In Brooklyn in 2010 families earning less than $10,000 outnumbered those earning over $200,000. By 2024 those on $200,000 outnumbered them by almost two to one. In San Francisco private-school enrolment rose by 47% from 2010 to 2024.
What is behind this? Families are mostly not moving in; rather people are moving to suburbs less once they become parents. Eric Johnson, a software engineer who grew up in Elgin, an outer suburb of Chicago, now has a ten-month-old baby in hipstery Logan Square. “We love the farmers market…I like not having to drive,” he says. Sara Weston-Shea, a social worker, grew up in suburban New Jersey and now has two children in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. “We can just easily access the wonderful resources that a city has, the arts, music, whenever,” she says. She likes that her kids are growing up in a multicultural neighbourhood, and that she can cart them around on a cargo bike.
Such families are typically having children older, says Hamilton Lombard, a demographer at the University of Virginia. That means that they tend to have higher incomes when they do get around to it, and in turn can afford to stay in cities. For a subset of the wealthiest, being able to afford to raise children in a city—especially lots of children—has become a financial flex, says Mr Sandoval. “To say, ‘I have the money to have eight children and live in the city’…It’s showing off your wealth.”
On a macro scale, this change in urban demography may not seem transformational. The growth of the relatively rich is hardly enough to counteract collapsing working-class populations, or to reverse the shrinking of school enrolment. With immigration down, urban populations will still start falling soon. Yet the growing up of what Richard Florida, an influential urban-studies theorist, once called “the creative class” nonetheless matters.
Take politics. The urbanist parent is left wing. Last year Zohran Mamdani won the neighbourhoods colonised by wealthier families comfortably, while losing outer parts of the city. Brandon Johnson, Chicago’s mayor, won office thanks to white liberal voters who backed him in the first round of the two-round election. New York City used to elect Republican mayors. That seems vanishingly unlikely now.
They also affect cities directly. In principle this class of people loves the idea of public schools. In practice they love highly selective public schools full of kids like their own. That leads to cut-throat competition for places at the most desired schools. Similarly, more wealthy residents tends to mean pricier homes. Many contend that is why non-white families are leaving cities, though the data do not definitively prove this: the number of non-white children is shrinking in ungentrified neighbourhoods too. High house prices may, however, be hitting the next generation of young professionals, who cannot move into the homes no longer being vacated by people moving to the suburbs.
Will the rise of upscale urban parenting continue? The appeal of cities shrank during the pandemic, as professionals went in search of green space and home offices. As the virus receded violent crime soared. But crime is now down again, and working from home is going out of fashion. The better bet is that the yuppification continues. Not long ago “inner city” was a synonym for desperate and poor. In 2016 Donald Trump claimed that people in “inner cities…are living in hell because it’s so dangerous”. That is less and less true. Outside, a new day is dawning. ■