Elizabeth Barcelos and her husband James believe they did nearly all they could to set themselves up for success and prepare for parenthood.
The San Jose couple, both 36, graduated from college, found stable white-collar jobs and tried hard to live within their means. Yet the prospect of buying a home and raising a family in the Bay Area still seems out of reach.
“It’s definitely not a question of wanting — we both very much want to have kids,” Barcelos said. “It’s really a question of affording.”
Throughout the Bay Area and California, other would-be parents also are seeing their dreams of having children fade away. And many parents who do have children are packing up and moving to cheaper places, fueling a profound change in the population of the Golden State.
Over the past decade, every county in California has seen a decline in the share of people under 18 in the overall population, according to the latest U.S. Census data. Even San Francisco, which historically has recorded the lowest share of youths in the state, saw a slight dip from 13.4% to 13%.
The shift is more significant than in many other states seeing similar trends. Overall, California went from having the 11th highest youth population in the country in 2010 to 26th last year.
Experts who study these trends say there are several factors at play, including California’s declining birth rate, families moving out of the state and a leveling-off of immigration — all of which appear to have been amplified by the COVID-19 pandemic.
As the share of young people drops, experts worry that any sustained downturn in births will create serious challenges ranging from school closures to the state’s inability to adequately care for an expanding number of seniors.
“It’s not just because babies are darling,” said Dowell Myers, a demographer and public policy professor at the University of Southern California. “It’s that we need them to be future workers, future taxpayers and future consumers because we have way too many baby boomers who are retiring.”
Although California’s overall population grew 6% in the last decade, that was in stark contrast with the youth population, which saw a 6% drop of 583,922 from 2010 to 2020, census figures show.
In the core six-county Bay Area, San Mateo and Santa Clara County saw a dip in both the number and share of residents under 18. Santa Clara County lost more than 23,000 residents in that age group and San Mateo County lost 5,566. In San Francisco, Marin, Alameda and Contra Costa counties, the total number of residents under 18 increased modestly, but they now make up a smaller percentage of the population overall.
Demographer Hans Johnson said the connection between the declining youth population and high living expenses in the Bay Area is difficult to ignore.
“Clearly, housing and the cost of living are big factors,” Johnson said.
It’s not only contributing to young women like Barcelos deciding to delay parenthood but also leading families with school-age children to relocate to more affordable areas of the state — or leave California altogether.
After losing their home during the Great Recession in 2008, Greg Weisman, 52, and his family rented a place in Brentwood for more than a decade while saving up enough money to put a down payment on a new residence.
But when that time came, they realized they were priced out of nearly every Bay Area neighborhood that interested them.
So Weisman, his wife and their two teenage children moved 1,700 miles away last year to central Texas. The family now owns a home nearly twice the size of the place they rented in Brentwood with triple the amount of land — and their mortgage payment is roughly the same as what they paid in Bay Area rent.
“We would have had to go back to living paycheck to paycheck to buy a house in the Bay Area and we didn’t want to do that to ourselves — or to our kids,” Weisman said. “For their entire lives, we’ve had to work super hard just to survive and we want to show them that there’s a better way to live.”
Lydia Kiesling, 37, made a similar decision after some frustrating rental experiences in San Francisco. In 2019, she, her husband and their two young children moved to Portland, where they bought a home with just a 10% down payment — “inconceivable” in the Bay Area, Kiesling said.
“We were defeated by the prospects” in the Bay Area’s housing market, she said, “and the cost of child care was like the nail in the coffin.”
As some families are driven out of the area, they’re often being replaced by younger college-educated workers who typically don’t have children and may not be in a rush to raise a family, according to experts and census data.
Since the Great Recession, fertility rates — the average number of children per woman — have fallen across the country, especially in larger, coastal cities. In California, the drop has been even more dramatic, from 2.2 in 2007 to about 1.5 this year, according to the Public Policy Institute of California. It’s a trend that spans racial and geographic boundaries, the organization found, with the fertility rate among Latino women in California declining the most during that time.
Bree Kirkland, who grew up in Tennessee with a mother who had her at age 20, always thought she was going to be a young mom. But when Kirkland, 26, moved to San Jose with her fiance Joseph Warner after he got a new job at a Silicon Valley tech company in 2019, her perspective began to change and children became less of a priority.
“Back home, I feel like people get into the routine of life — they have their house and their set jobs and they feel like having a kid is just the appropriate next step,” Kirkland said. “But out here, I’ve found different ways to spice up my life. I find all of the new innovation coming out of tech and the Bay Area as a whole really inspires me.”
Kirkland, who works in medical technology sales, said she’s not opposed to having children down the road but wants to focus on her career and travel the world first. And, in the meantime, the couple’s year-old puppy Yona is serving as a good bridge to potential parenthood.
Although the state hasn’t reached a “disaster situation” just yet, Myers said its declining youth population is concerning.
For one thing, it means more school districts across the state will see student enrollment fall in the coming years, which could lead to school closures. In the last year, several Bay Area districts, including Newark Unified and San Jose’s Alum Rock, announced they would be closing schools for that very reason.
Historically, births have dipped after economic crises and then picked back up a few years later. That trend, however, was bucked after the Great Recession and experts are still unsure when — or if — it’ll bounce back.
As for Barcelos, she’s not giving up on her goal of buying a condo and starting a family here in the Bay Area — despite the many reminders she’s heard about her clock ticking.
Barcelos’ parents both immigrated from Portugal to San Jose before she was born and although her sister moved to the Central Valley a few years ago to settle down and have children, the idea of leaving the place Barcelos has called home her entire life doesn’t feel like the right answer.
“My parents were able to make it work here, and I think I would feel like a sense of failure if I couldn’t,” she said. “If having kids is out of reach for people like me, I can’t imagine what it’s like for families making less.”
