The Baby Boom in Georgetown

Photo by Sean Dreilinger.

Yesterday GM wrote about the increase in Georgetown children attending Hyde-Addison Elementary School and chalked up the growth to a Georgetown baby boom. It’s a topic GM has briefly mentioned a few times, but a reader asked him expand a little on the phenomenon and GM is happy to oblige.

GM bases his conclusions primarily on Census data. Unfortunately these data only go back to 1990. But the growth has been sharp even since then:

Here are the numbers behind that chart:

The population of Georgetown children under the age of 18 grew by 27.89% from 1990 to 2000. The overall Georgetown population only grew by 2.14% during that time.

While we will know the firm numbers for 2010 in a couple of months, we already know what the average numbers are from 2005-2009 from the American Community Survey. Those are listed above. Keep in mind that the 949 number is an average. Taking that into account, the implied growth of Georgetown children from 2000 to 2010 is 33%. And the implied total number of children in Georgetown in 2010 is 1,031.

That over four hundred more children in Georgetown than there were in 1990, a 70% increase. If that’s not a baby boom, GM doesn’t know what is.

And this is a boom that has taken place during a period of modest overall population growth for Georgetown. So the growth in the child population reflects a shift in the overall demographic mix. Not that many more people are moving in than are moving out, but they are bringing (or producing) children and staying.