The 2000 Census: Looking for kids? Baby boom's in the suburbs and towns


	Stacey Stoutt plays with her 20-month-old son, Owen, at a park in Carnation. Stoutt is a real estate agent, and her husband is a Bellevue Police officer. They have three boys and live in Carnation, the city with the highest percentage of babies in the county Renee C. Byer / Seattle Post-Intelligencer Click for larger photo

"It's like the '50s here," said Monica Chandler, a former elementary school principal, as she cut fruit into bite-sized pieces for her 15-month-old daughter and two sons, 6 and 3. "In the year we have lived here, I have been inside many more houses than I ever was in old neighborhoods because right away we have a connection through our children. It's wonderful."

There's a baby boom in this bucolic city on the Snoqualmie River, where the soft smell of newborn skin is more common than anywhere else in King County.

In the 2000 Census, Carnation had the county's highest percentage of babies under age 2, followed in quick succession by the other small Snoqualmie Valley cities of Duvall, North Bend and Snoqualmie, an analysis of recently released data shows.

Here in the foothills of the Cascades, spacious homes on leafy half-acre lots can be found for around $275,000, substantially less than what a family would pay further west in Issaquah, Bellevue or Kirkland. And Carnation is populated with young families who are willing to lengthen their commutes in exchange for keeping their mortgage payments low enough so one parent can work part-time, or not at all.

Chandler's neighbor, Stacey Stout, a 34-year-old mother of three and part-time real estate agent, said, "The driving force here is that you get more space for your money and can afford to have one income for your family."

There also are high concentrations of babies in other low and moderately priced suburbs in south and east King County, with Maple Valley, Kent, Sammamish, Federal Way and Auburn topping the list.

Equally striking is where babies are not. Seattle has the lowest percentage of children of any large city in the nation except San Francisco. Just 2 percent of its residents are babies. And in some parts of Belltown, Pioneer Square, the University District and Capitol Hill, there are virtually no children.

In fact, there are as many babies in 10 of the most kid-rich suburbs -- 11,462 -- as there are in Seattle, although the 10 cities combined have just two-thirds of Seattle's population.

Seattle's propensity to draw singles, empty nesters and gay and lesbian people in search of high-tech jobs, a progressive arts and cultural scene, and a vibrant downtown, is a story that has been told before.

But what caught demographers by surprise in the new census data is that aging suburbs traditionally considered meccas for children have similarly low baby rates. Mercer Island, Lake Forest Park, Shoreline, Kenmore and Kirkland have baby rates hovering lower or nearly as low as Seattle's 2 percent.

"One of the interesting stories here is that Bellevue and Kirkland are very much like Seattle, in that they are maturing into cities with fewer children, and especially fewer young children," said King County demographer Chandler Felt.

Felt said these "inner ring" suburbs burgeoned in the '50s, '60s and '70s, but their residents have since aged in place and housing prices have soared. "The first-ring suburbs closest in to Seattle have become places where not very many families can afford to live," Felt said.

Seattle, Kirkland, and Mercer Island actually saw the sheer number of kids under 5 drop by roughly 10 percent between 1990 and 2000, despite healthy overall population growth. And while Bellevue and Lake Forest Park saw increases in small children, that growth was dramatically outpaced by overall growth.

Doug Kelbaugh, a dean of architecture and urban planning at the University of Michigan who taught at the University of Washington in the '90s, said the steady erosion of children in Seattle and its inner-ring communities threatens the richness of urban life.

"Part of the human condition is to be around people that are older and younger," he said. "It's not healthy for our suburbs to become nurseries for the whole cross-section of society. Some kids should grow up in cities."

Kelbaugh and other experts add that Seattle and its close-in suburbs remain highly desirable places for families with children to live, with quality schools and educational attractions such as the Woodland Park Zoo, Seattle Aquarium, Pacific Science Center and museums, sports stadiums and galleries. Seattle was named the most kid-friendly city in the nation in 1999 by the Washington, D.C.-based organization Zero Population Growth, measured on factors such as education, transportation, environment and economic health.

Also, it's important to look at the dwindling concentration of urban-area children in the context of an overall decrease in the number of young kids in the county. Kids under five dropped from 6.9 percent to 6.1 percent of the county population over the decade. Demographers blame the echo boom, a 25 percent increase in the nation's birth rate that began in the mid-1970s and peaked in 1990 as the result of the post-WWII baby-boomers having children.

Now that the echo boom has subsided, all but four school districts in King County have seen their kindergarten enrollments drop significantly since 1995 and most are projecting further declines.

Still, when it comes to children, the county is growing unevenly. William Frey, an urban demographer for the Milken Institute in Santa Monica, Calif., and a national census expert, says there are two main forces drawing new population to cities at the millennium: immigration and the growth of the high-tech economy.

Seattle and its inner-ring suburbs have been in the unusual position of drawing high-tech workers, but not a huge influx of immigrants, Frey said. Census data show Seattle's diversity has increased moderately over the decade, but minorities have been far more likely to move to lower-priced suburbs south of Seattle, particularly to Tukwila, Renton, Skyway, Kent, SeaTac and Federal Way -- all cities with higher percentages of babies.

Meanwhile, birth rates have been dropping among people who are educated, affluent and white. And the King County cities with the lowest percentages of babies -- including Seattle, Bellevue and Kirkland -- have high household incomes and white populations ranging between 70 percent and 86 percent.

"Seattle and its leafy inner-ring suburbs are filled with the kind of urban professionals that get into their 40s and still aren't having kids," said Joel Kotkin, author of "The New Geography: How the Digital Revolution Is Reshaping the American Landscape." "There is a big, growing segment of well-educated professional women having kids late, or not having them at all."

Frey, the census expert, points out that the Puget Sound region has the good fortune to be struggling with the problems of wealth, as opposed to the daunting challenges that kid-saturated but impoverished cities such as Philadelphia and Detroit face.

In the city of Seattle, the top 10 baby neighborhoods include High Point, South Park, the Rainier Valley, Rainier Beach and Delridge, which have high percentages of minorities. But other mostly white, affluent neighborhoods are also in the top 10, including Magnolia, Laurelhurst, Montlake, and Ravenna/Bryant.

"There's a mix of (baby-saturated) census tracts that have a high percentage of cultures that tend to have larger families, and some other highly desirable neighborhoods with high-tech families who have the wherewithal to pay high housing prices for the super-kidness of the neighborhood," Felt said.

While school quality plays some role in where young families settle, economics seems to be the decisive factor in King County. The 2000 baby boom is not concentrated around the highest-performing school districts in the county.

"People will avoid the most problematic inner-city schools, but for the most part people with kids aren't moving to the places with the best schools," Kotkin said. "The square footage and the price is what is driving them."

Carnation is about in the middle of the pack when it comes to student achievement scores. Chandler, the mother of three, said she had concerns about the quality of the schools, but is encouraged that a new superintendent and school principal have been appointed. And she said her oldest son had a rewarding kindergarten experience last year.

"As a former principal who was always encouraging parents to spend more time with their kids, it's wonderful to be in a neighborhood with educated women with degrees who are choosing to make children their priority," she said.

P-I reporter Heath Foster can be reached at 206-448-8337 or heathfoster@seattlepi.com

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