Children becoming hard to find in San Francisco

SAN FRANCISCO — In a compact studio apartment on the fringes of the Castro district a young couple live with their demanding 7year-old, whom they dote on and take everywhere: a Scottish terrier named Olive.

Raising children is on the agenda for Daisy Yeung, a high school science teacher, and Slin Lee, a software engineer. But just not in San Francisco.

“When we imagine having kids, we think of somewhere else,” Mr. Lee said. “It’s starting to feel like a nokids type of city.”

A few generations ago, before the technology boom transformed San Francisco and sent housing costs soaring, the city was alive with children and families. Today it has the lowest percentage of children of any of the largest 100 cities in the United States, according to census data, causing some in San Francisco to raise an alarm.

“Everybody talks about children being our future,” said Norman Yee, a member of San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors. “If you have no children around, what’s our future?”

As an urban renaissance has swept through major U.S. cities in recent decades, San Francisco’s population has risen to historical highs and a forest of skyscraping condominiums has replaced tumbledown warehouses and abandoned wharves. At the same time, the share of children in San Francisco fell to 13 percent, low even compared with another expensive city, New York, with 21 percent. In Chicago, 23 percent of the population is younger than 18, which is also the overall average across the United States.

California, which has one of the world’s 10 largest economies, recently released data showing the lowest birthrate since the Great Depression.

As San Francisco moves toward a one-industry town with soaring costs, the dearth of children is one more change that raises questions about its character.

Many immigrant and other residential areas of San Francisco still have their share of the very young and the very old. The sidewalks of some wealthy enclaves even have stroller gridlock on weekends. But when you walk through the growing number of neighborhoods where employees of Google, Twitter and so many other technology companies live or work, the sidewalks display a narrow band of humanity.

Opinion is divided on whether having fewer children in the city is something San Francisco should worry about.