Tamara McCoy and her partner are raising their three kids, ages 8, 3 and five months, in an old house in southwest Minneapolis’ Tangletown neighborhood.

They love the neighborhood, the many languages spoken at the playgrounds they visit, the close proximity to activities for kids of different ages. Sometimes, the family’s three-bedroom house can feel crowded, but McCoy said they feel lucky to have bought it when they did.

“I know lots of people that are looking for houses in the city who are like, ‘We just can’t find something that fits us’ and so they end up leaving the city to find something that is affordable,” she said.

New research from the Economic Innovation Group (EIG), a bipartisan public policy organization, backs up McCoy’s sense of what is happening, finding fewer families like hers in urban areas such as Minneapolis and St. Paul than just a few years ago. Between 2020 and 2023, the number of kids under 5 in Hennepin and Ramsey counties has declined by nearly 12,000. Meanwhile, the counties in the region seeing growth in the number kids under 5 tend to be on the outskirts of the metro or just outside it.

The overall decline in young kids is tied to larger population trends, with declining birth rates playing out unevenly. The result is emptying classrooms in some parts of the state while other school districts rush to make space. The demographic trends among the youngest Minnesotans could also have implications for services and amenities, such as day cares and parks, that are important to young families.

Growing households generate demand for more space, and the vast majority of new housing units being built in cities such as Minneapolis are apartments, said Todd Graham, principal forecaster at the Metropolitan Council.

For those families, “You are looking farther out, in maybe the second- or third-ring suburbs where that single-family home building is going on,” he said. “The net change in that housing stock does attract family-age households with kids who want the extra bedrooms.”

Across the country, large urban counties like Ramsey and Hennepin have averaged an 8% decline in young kids since the beginning of the pandemic, EIG’s research found.

“In some cities, the population of young kids has fallen 15% or 20% over the course of three years,” said Connor O’Brien, an EIG research and policy analyst. “That’s just not something that American cities have experienced in the recent past, or in any kind of comparable episode.”

In the Twin Cities, the decreasing number of kids isn’t so simple as young families picking up and moving, said State Demographer Susan Brower. Rather, she said, the decline seems to stem from a trend toward net migration out of Hennepin and Ramsey counties on the whole, as well as a declining birth rate.

In Minnesota, Brower said, birth rates have been declining overall after a peak in 2007, a trend mirrored nationally and in many countries.

“This is kind of like a heavy blanket on growth across the board, and then you’re just going to have different patterns in local areas depending on how much movement in there is,” Brower said.

The EIG study found that while the birth rate declined in all types of U.S. geographies, it declined fastest in urban counties. In Hennepin and Ramsey counties there were 3,550 fewer births in 2022 than in 2015, according to state data.

Another factor depressing the number of kids under 5 in Hennepin and Ramsey counties is an overall decline in international in-migration, Brower said.

“Those who move here from other countries tend to be young, they tend to be of childbearing age,” Brower said. “And so when you’ve got kind of a stoppage in that flow of people to these counties, that’s also going to impact the number of children.”

The decrease in young kids is contributing, along with other factors, to enrollment declines — cited in the closures of some St. Paul schools and discussions about potential closures in Minneapolis.

O’Brien said the decline in kids could change cities long-term in other ways, too.

“If families are the ones disproportionately exiting cities, you’re just going to see a weaker lobby for the amenities that matter to families,” he said. “So, the political support for a new playground or updating child-friendly amenities will be weaker because they’ll just be a smaller force in the community.”

While the overall trend is toward fewer young kids, EIG’s research identified growth in some counties ringing the Twin Cities, including Wright County, where the under-5 population has increased by 7% since 2020.

Delano, a small Wright County city just over the Hennepin County border, has seen steady population growth in recent years — and a coinciding rise of young kids in its school district, both due to more children living in the district and an increase in open enrollment, Superintendent Matthew Schoen said.

New projections for the next decade in the district, which serves Delano and the surrounding area, are for a steady increase in enrollment for the first half of the decade and faster growth in the second, for a total enrollment increase from 2,400 students to nearly 3,000. Schoen said he expects the district to be able to handle the growth well because it expanded about a decade ago.

“We’re 30 miles directly west of Minneapolis, so we have a lot of people that live in our community that work for the western metro companies, like your Cargills, your General Mills, your Targets,” Schoen said. With more parents in hybrid or remote work situations, communities like Delano become more attractive, he said. Compared to Hennepin County, he said, “you can get a bigger house for usually less money.”

Alaina White, a real estate agent specializing in the west metro, says most of her clients are young families, some moving from Minneapolis and looking for more space that’s affordable. Still, getting them to consider going as far out as Delano or Buffalo rather than inner-ring Hennepin County suburbs can take a little convincing.

“Then we get out there, and they’re like, ‘Wow, this is actually a really cute community,’” White said, adding that she once had some of her own assumptions about the area.

“To me, areas like Buffalo and St. Michael used to be considered the boonies,” she said. “But now I’m there all the time and the people who relocate there end up loving it.”