New York’s childbirth rate continues to decline as women wait longer to have kids, new data suggests.
In 2021, around 211,000 babies were born in New York — a 13% drop compared with about 241,000 a decade earlier in 2011, according to newly compiled data from Cornell University’s Program in Applied Demographics.
Young people moving out of the Empire State — compounded by a lack of affordable childcare and housing, which has seen downsizing baby boomers compete with millennials for starter homes — continue to spiral the trend downward, experts said.
“In general, declining fertility rates are part of greater demographic change where populations adjust their reproduction to match societal demands such as participating in the workforce, having the ability to provide or find full-time care for children, and participate in family life,” Leslie Reynolds, a research support specialist at Cornell, told The Post, in an email.
The 2021 fertility rate — the average number of births a woman would have in her lifetime — for New York was 1.55, down from 1.85 in 2009, and below the current national average of 1.71.
“On the individual level, having children is a very personal decision that can be based on factors from not having the money for full-time childcare, needing both partners to work full-time, to just not being ready,” Reynolds said.
New York women were having their first child at the average age of 28.9 in 2021, the findings show — more than a year later than a decade ago, when the average age was 27.2. And while the fertility rate has increased significantly for women aged 35 to 44, it’s still not enough to offset the decline in childbirths by younger women, the data outlines.
More young people moving out of New York to start families could be another potential reason for the decline in childbirths in the last decade.
Spurred on by the COVID-19 pandemic, New York State’s population lost a net 651,742 residents to other states from mid-2020 to mid-2022.
A lack of affordable housing is a driving factor, said EJ McMahon, senior fellow for tax and budgetary studies at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research.
“We don’t have a big enough variety of housing — single-family residences are very expensive and apartments are scarce. The baby boomers with a pocket full of equity are competing with the younger couples for starter homes,” McMahon told The Post.
“The market doesn’t match needs when it comes to young families,” he continued. “It’s an expense issue at every level — part of the expenses issue for New York and New Jersey is property taxes and expensive houses.”
Dr. Michael Nimaroff, senior vice president of obstetrics and gynecology at Northwell Health, said he’s recently noticed more patients moving out of the city to have kids in the suburbs.
“This is something we definitely see, and we feel it. Our rates of deliveries are going down a little bit more in the city, and when we go further east and [up to] Westchester, we’re seeing our facilities growing — people are moving out,” Nimaroff told The Post.
“Affordability is a driver — everyone is in a two full-time working [parent] family. The traditional family structure has changed, especially in New York. The number of children we’re having or waiting to have is by choice because of affordability, and the family size is just smaller.”
Meanwhile, the median cost of full-time infant childcare in Manhattan was nearly $23,000 in 2022 — more than 2.5 times the median cost in Miami — according to the Department of Labor.
“Women having their first child would want to take some time off but they can’t because it’s so expensive,” McMahon said.
