Defying predictions of a post-Covid resurgence, America’s birthrate has plummeted in the 2020s. Some 3.59 million babies were born in the United States in 2023. This rate, if it continues, translates to 1.62 children per woman over a lifetime, far below the 2.1 needed to maintain the nation’s population without immigration. It amounts to “a new low and a sign of years of decline” to come, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.
An underreported demographic story of recent years has been the emergence of vast birth-rate differences across the nation’s red state-blue state political map, as City Journal senior editor Steven Malanga explored recently. One rejoinder to the argument that red states have more babies is that they tend to be less urban. But even if we compare big cities only, stark differences persist. Fertility rates have fallen much further in deep-blue metros like Boston, Minneapolis, and Seattle than in red-state metros like Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, and Nashville. Based on estimates derived from Census data, the average woman in the city of Seattle will have 0.96 kids over her lifetime if 2022 patterns continue, for example, while her Dallas counterpart will have 2.23 children.
These differences, far wider than the geographic gaps that prevailed during the mid-twentieth century baby boom, reflect two trends reshaping America’s demographic landscape. First, childbearing desires diverge across states and metro areas in ways closely mirroring the nation’s political fault lines. Second, as Manhattan Institute scholar Robert VerBruggen reports, cities with the lowest birthrates have become less family-friendly, pushing young adults to have fewer children than they had hoped or to move to more welcoming locations. These fertility divides will help determine the future of America’s “baby bust” cities and the economic vitality of the nation.
Sharply falling birthrates are a recent development. From the 1980s through the mid-2000s, America’s annual birthrate remained within a range of 65 to 70 births per 1,000 childbearing-age women, according to economists Melissa Kearney of the University of Maryland and Phillip Levine of Wellesley College. But that figure has since collapsed, falling below 55 in 2023. The United States was long an outlier, with higher birthrates than most other developed countries. Now, its fertility level is approaching that of Canada (1.33 children per woman) and the European Union (1.46).
The problem is most dire in large blue-state metros. Census data from 2022 suggest the average woman in the New York metro area will have 1.80 children over her lifetime; in San Jose, 1.68; in San Francisco, 1.66; in Boston, 1.58; and in Los Angeles, a paltry 1.55. These rates are between 8 percent and 25 percent lower than those of average women in the Atlanta, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, and San Antonio metros.
The gaps are just as large across suburbs. The fertility rate of Marin County, across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco, runs 57 percent below that of Comal County outside San Antonio. Many blue-state cities are on their way to becoming what authors Joel Kotkin and Ali Modarres described in a 2013 City Journal essay as “childless cities”—hip, fun, but with very few kids.
These gaps are partially a reflection of the nation’s growing cultural divide. Young Americans in general want to have just over two children, but actual fertility breaks down along ideological lines. According to a global study by Austrian researchers, progressive people have smaller families than conservative people. In the United States, the difference in birthrates between “extremely liberal” and “extremely conservative” people amounts to almost 0.5 children per woman over a lifetime.
While there hasn’t been much research on how political orientation influences young people’s childbearing goals, it’s almost certain that opinions about religion, income inequality, and climate change affect people’s views on family size. As Kearney and Levine show, “shifting priorities” are the chief reason many young Americans want fewer children than earlier generations did, or no children at all. This is evident in the way Americans are increasingly politically sorted across cities, with progressives moving to more left-leaning metros and conservatives doing the opposite, as journalist Bill Bishop reported in his 2008 book, The Big Sort.
Economics also help account for intercity birth gaps. Families with children are disproportionately migrating from pricey coastal metros to more affordable Sun Belt metros, partly for better, more affordable housing options. Those who remain in dense urban settings on the coasts, by contrast, often live in tiny “rabbit hutch” apartments or in densely packed neighborhoods, which leads them to have fewer babies than they had planned, as Lyman Stone has shown.
High prices and outmigration help explain why cities like Boston, Seattle, and Los Angeles are following in the footsteps of Rust Belt metros like Detroit and Cleveland, which have seen their populations crater in the past seven decades. Fertility declines in these cities are an exponential problem. If a city’s lifetime birthrate falls to 1.2 children, its population collapse by more than half over three generations—that is, by the year 2100—absent inmigration, based on my estimates using Census data.
For cities, fertility declines and outmigration can have devastating consequences. As populations collapse, cities have weaker incentives to construct housing and lack the tax base needed to fund basic services. Such forces sparked many Rust Belt cities’ downfalls.
This holds at the national level, too. If America follows Japan, China, and most European nations into long-term population decline, federal programs like Social Security and Medicare will become impossible to sustain on their current spending trajectories. Innovation will slow as creative, risk-taking young adults become scarcer. In other words, we will live in a very different country if the blue-state baby bust continues.
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