The Wildly Different Age Demographics of U.S. Cities

The Urban Institute today unveiled a far-reaching data dashboard for metropolitan areas all across the U.S. that visualizes datasets – and the connections between them – on a long list of quantifiable aspects of urban life, from local unemployment to crime rates to housing prices. The tool reveals some interesting macro-trends. For one, crime appears to have fallen in many cities during the recession, contradicting the widespread hypothesis that the exact opposite might occur.

The dashboard may be most useful, though, for the comparisons it allows between metro areas on all these metrics. Particularly fascinating is a set of demographic data drawn from the 2010 Census that illustrates population dynamics by age across communities. U.S. cities don't uniformly reflect the age demographics of the nation as a whole. Rather, some metropolitan areas have an inordinate number of young children, or aging seniors, or young professionals. And the following charts from the dashboard illustrate this particularly well.