NEW YORK — A catastrophic flood emptied New Orleans of much of its black youth. Powerful social forces may be doing a similar thing to places like Harlem and Chicago’s South Side.
The same pattern has repeated from coast to coast. Los Angeles saw a 31.8 percent decline in its population of black children, far surpassing the 6.9 percent drop in black adults. The number of black children in Atlanta fell by 27 percent. It was down 31 percent in Chicago and 37.6 percent in Detroit. Oakland, Calif., saw a drop of 42.3 percent, an exodus that fell only six percentage points below the decline in flood-ravaged New Orleans.
Demographics experts said a combination of factors appeared to be at work. Americans, in general, are having fewer children than they once did, due mostly to increased use of birth control. That has been true, too, among black mothers. Teen pregnancy rates among blacks have also plummeted.
“I’d been in Harlem for 16 years and when I first came, I was young and I was excited and it was a Mecca. But, progressively, each year, it got rougher and rougher to be here,” said Rachel Noerdlinger, a publicist whose clients include the Rev. Al Sharpton. “The violence. The profiling by the cops. I just started to get really, really frustrated.”
“He misses Harlem. He’s a teenage boy who, unfortunately, grew up here. Edgewater is quiet and slow. He’s constantly complaining,” Noerdlinger said. But, as for herself, she said, “I’m in heaven. I just love it. … If I had done this 20 or 16 years ago, I would be a completely different person.”
Oakland, a city fraught for years with violence and high poverty rates, has at last been experiencing a renaissance but the number of white hipsters, Asians and Hispanics moving in has been outpaced by the number of black families that have disappeared.
Oakland Mayor Jean Quan blamed the departures on a lack of affordable housing. Quan, who became the city’s first Asian mayor — and only the city’s second non-black mayor since 1977 — when she took office in January, said she runs into African Americans all the time who have given up the city for suburbs as far away as Antioch, Calif., a small city that has seen its share of black residents grow from 2.6 percent in 1990 to 17 percent last year.
It would be easy to blame gentrification for pushing young families out, yet Census data show that the sections of the neighborhood with the steepest drops in the number of black children are those where economic recovery has been more sluggish.
Yes, the neighborhood now has a Starbucks and two new supermarkets close by but gunmen shot up the playground on 143rd Street in 2006, wounding three adults and a 6-year-old girl. City officials tried to close the local elementary school two years ago for poor performance. At the public housing project on Frederick Douglas Boulevard, a police officer had to rappel down the side of the building in 2003 to tranquilize a 400-pound tiger living in a resident’s apartment.
Carnetta Clark, a retired tenant leader in one of the two large public housing projects in the neighborhood, said she has noticed fewer children in the area now than when she first moved in nearly 20 years ago. But she doesn’t think it is because violence is frightening parents away. If anything, she said, the neighborhood has gotten safer and more stable over the years.
“There are a lot of older people in the neighborhood now,” she said. “There are less people hanging out on the corners. The police are watching, taking care of things. I’ve always felt safe, even when I was working nights. I never feared living here.”
Indeed, there are still plenty of kids in the neighborhood – more, in fact, per adult, than the national average.
State Assemblyman Keith Wright, whose district covers Central Harlem, has noticed fewer children in the area, as well, but he, too, thinks the phenomenon has less to do with flight from crime or decay and more to do with the high price of city living.
“You don’t see those big families anymore,” Wright said. “A lot of our younger folks, I find, are moving to New Jersey. They think the city life is too expensive. It comes down to a matter of economics.”
Some black city residents, he said, are also migrating “back down South, where they think the dollar will go further.”
That migration has been evident in places like Henry County, Ga., an area of suburban Atlanta that has seen its black population more than triple in the past decade. Blacks now make up 37 percent of the county of nearly 204,000 people.
The trend has also been showing up in a less visible way in countless mostly white suburbs, such Livonia, Mich., outside of Detroit. Just a decade ago, there were 951 black people living in the entire city, out of a population of around 100,000. Now there are 3,309. The same trend has repeated in white suburbs across the country.
Those barriers have now been falling, Bositis said, opening the door for blacks to follow in the footsteps of white families who had their own move to the suburbs after World War II.
Even cities that saw a large rise in their overall black population saw their numbers of black children fall, or grow at a much slower rate. In Phoenix, the number of black adult residents grew by 44.8 percent over the past decade but the city added fewer than 4,000 black children, for a growth rate of 18.6 percent. Houston added 21,324 black adults but had 23,219 fewer black children.
“There is nothing inherently bad” about a city having fewer children, Bositis said. “On one level, it is a big plus for the cities. People without children are much cheaper than people with children, especially young people. They are making very little in way of demands on city services.”
Nearly a half-million fewer black children live in the 25 largest U.S. cities, compared with 10 years ago. The decline in select cities:
MIAMI — Twelve fathers spent a recent Saturday afternoon dancing with their daughters during the annual “Growing Up in the Arts” recital hosted by Florene Litthcut’s Inner City Children’s Touring Dance Company.
“The annual dance recital is the culminating event of nine months of hard work,” said Florene Litthcut Nichols, founder of the company that recently hosted a similar “Precious Gifts” recital. “It is like having a baby; preparing, nurturing, and finally giving birth. It is a very happy, exciting occasion.”
The recital held at the Carrie P. Meek Senior and Cultural Center at Hadley Park included seven numbers in which girls ages 2 to 16 years old performed classical ballet and modern dance.
But the highlight of the day was the “Dancing Dads” segment during which fathers danced with their daughters, grandfathers with their granddaughters and big brothers with their little sisters.
Mustafa Muhammad, 44, danced with his 3-year-old daughter Ta'Leah. “I really enjoy myself because it gave me a chance to spend more time with my daughter,” he said. “I wouldn’t mind doing it again, especially if this is for her.
Father and daughter practiced three months for the performance. “It was a lot of work,” he said. “I work 12 hours a day.”
Roy Owens, 65, danced with his 4-year-old granddaughter Chloe. “My dad replaces a big part of my kids’ life,” said Owens’ daughter Karen, 34. “He participates in everything they do. He is like a father to my kids,”
It was not the first time Owens participated in the recital. He performed the same dance 25 years ago with his daughter, who also took dance lessons with Nichols.
“I think programs like this really enhance our young folks’ look at life and how they do in life, where they head in life,” he said. “It is good to have a positive thing going for them and I believe this is positive.”
Jade Lamar, 16, the oldest dancer in the recital has studied with Nichols since she was 3. Her mother, Veronica Lamar, was impressed with her performance.
“My baby was like a professional dancer!” she said. “She really was a professional dancer after all of the hours spent practicing.”
“Self-confidence for some young women may be a struggle,” said Nichols.” But I love waiting to see them blossom on the day of the recital. It never fails.”