Center City Insights:
A Walkable Childhood

A decade of growth, against the national trend

Most large American cities are losing households with children. A recent Wall Street Journal analysis found that the child population fell in most of the nation’s 38 largest cities between 2015 and 2024, including in Philadelphia, where the number of children under 18 declined 6% citywide. CCD’s own analysis of a different census dataset revealed a 3% decline in Philadelphia’s population of children. In both cases, the data show the city following a widespread trend of fewer kids in big cities.

Zoom into Greater Center City, and we find a different story. Over the past decade, the number of children living in Greater Center City grew 11%, adding more than 2,100 kids across the eight ZIP codes in Philadelphia’s core. That rate of growth puts downtown Philadelphia in the same company as Seattle and Washington, D.C., the two cities the Journal analysis identified as outliers defying the national trend. Our downtown is steadily gaining children while the rest of the city and region experience declines in residents under age 18 (-3% and -2% respectively).

This is a timely back-to-school reminder that Greater Center City serves a major role in the attraction and retention of families in Philadelphia. Cultivating new generations of city kids by creating a downtown and neighborhoods that support families at every stage is an activity with meaningful quality of life and economic implications.

Read or download the full Center City Insights below to learn more about Greater Center City’s strengths as a place to raise kids, and what the implications are for policy makers, developers, and those shaping the built environment.