While working on a piece for Newgeography, I generated a couple of Census maps depicting the percentage of various central Austin block groups populated by households with children. I was particularly curious about the change in the composition of central Austin households between 1990 and 2000. I've put the maps below the jump.
As expected, the maps show that the percentage of households with children generally declined between 1990 and 2000. I'm not trying to make any other point than that. I just like this kind of stuff.
The maps below show, by block group, the percentage of households with at least one member under 18. The first two maps depict central south Austin; the latter two, central north Austin.
First, the percentage of south central Austin households with children under 18 in 1990 (click to enlarge):
Next, the percentage of south central Austin households with children under 18 in 2000:
There are no real suprises here. The Bouldin, Galindo and South Lamar neighborhoods experienced a marked decline in households with children. (Just focus on the decrease in the bright red and reddish-brown splotches.) In about half the block groups, households with children comprised less than 20% of all households in 2000.
My little infill subdivision of 55 homes is not reflected on either map because it was built after 2000. But my neighborhood's stats are consistent: only five or six of the 55 households have children.
It is worth noting that the Barton Hills and Zilker neighborhoods were populated almost entirely by childess households in 2000. Very few block groups reached even 20%.
Next is north central Austin circa 1990:
And now north central Austin circa 2000:
There are a couple of surprises here. In 2000, few households in the area bounded by MoPac, I-35, Town Lake and North Loop had children. That's not the surprise, though. The surprise is that few such households had children in 1990.
The second surprise is that one of the neighborhoods in this area with the highest concentration of households with children was West Campus. (It's the bright red splotch in roughly the middle of the map.) My guess is that, because the Census Bureau treats dependent students as residents of their parents' households, these tallies picked up a lot of graduate students with children. (Correction: I brilliantly misread my own map. Karl-T points out that the red splotch is to the west of Lamar and West Campus.)
One last point. Although people usually think of I-35 as the boundary between the "whiter" part of central Austin and the more heavily Latino/African American east Austin, one could also view I-35 as a boundary separating households without children from households with children. East Austin's heavy concentration of households with children stopped abruptly at I-35 in both 1990 and 2000. (The only exception was the triangle bounded by Manor Road, Airport Boulevard and I-35). Interestingly, the concentration of households with children in east Austin increased between 1990 and 2000, bucking the trend in the neighborhoods to the west of I-35.
I for one am looking forward to the 2010 Census data. No doubt central Austin has continued to lose households with children.
N.B. The Census Bureau needs to move to a five-year schedule; the country is changing too fast to wait ten years for comprehensive data.
