Child Boom in White Manhattan

Recently I reported on pre-schools in Midtown. 

My personal observations in Kips Bay and Murray Hill are confirmed by latest report I heard on  New York Public Radio today-- people with small children are moving into Manhattan below 102nd Street at an increasing rate ( In Murray Hill, you are sometimes startled to see how many blond toddlers you see walking or being wheeled around by mothers or nannies).

These childrens' families are usually white, and by necessity, pretty affluent. While some parents choose public schools, most opt for one of the many private schools around.

When the kids get older, a lot of these families move to the suburbs....but some remain. One woman caller to the radio show I listened to has a younger daughter in college.

These families also tend to have fewer children -- one or two at the most it seems. New York apartments that are large enough to accommodate more kids are hard to come by and very expensive.

This following is from an article from 2007, before the child boom in Manhattan had gotten into full swing....even then, it was a noticeable change.

The Manhattan Baby Boom

By SAM ROBERTS

Since 2000, according to census figures released last year, the number of children under age 5 living in Manhattan mushroomed by more than 32 percent. And though their ranks have been growing for several years, a new analysis for The New York Times makes clear for the first time who has been driving that growth: wealthy white families.

At least half of the growth was generated by children who are white and non-Hispanic. Their ranks expanded by more than 40 percent from 2000 to 2005. For the first time since at least the 1960s, white children now outnumber either black or Hispanic youngsters in that age group in Manhattan.
The analysis shows that Manhattan’s 35,000 or so white non-Hispanic toddlers are being raised by parents whose median income was $284,208 a year in 2005, which means they are growing up in wealthier households than similar youngsters in any other large county in the country.
What those findings imply, demographers say, is not only that the socioeconomic gap between Manhattan and the other boroughs is widening, but also that the population of Manhattan, in some ways, is beginning to look more like the suburbs — or what they used to look like — than like the rest of the city.
“We knew Manhattan was having a baby boom,” said Andrew A. Beveridge, a demographer at Queens College of the City University of New York, who conducted the analysis. “Now we know who’s having the babies.”
The raw numbers are subject to interpretation, but, coupled with anecdotal evidence, what they generally suggest is that more well-to-do Manhattanites who might otherwise have moved to the suburbs with their children are choosing to raise them in the city, at least early on.
Here’s Chris Osborne, 44, who lives on the Upper West Side with his wife Marcia, 37, and their two children, ages 4 and 6:

If both parents are working, it actually becomes logistically difficult to live in the suburbs. If you’re 90 minutes away, we just don’t like that feeling.
Even if we were disposed to — for the usual space, quality of life reasons — to go to suburbs, we would have to consider the practical difficulty.

Details
Affluent White Families Lead Way in Manhattan Baby Boom