America's Evolving Look: Census Shows White Deaths Outpace Births

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Other factors underscoring a changing country include a baby boom in big cities.

By Katherine Peralta June 30, 2014 | 3:26 p.m. EDT + More

For the second year in a row, the number of non-Hispanic white deaths in 2013 outweighed the number of white births, signaling an increasingly older and diversified American public. It is a trend that’s likely to continue for a while, as traditionally minority groups become the majority of the U.S. population.
As a result of its slower growth rate, compared with other groups, the number of non-Hispanic white individuals declined to 62.6 percent of the total overall population in 2013 from 63 percent in 2012, according to recent figures from the Census Bureau.
“As we move forward we’re probably going to continue to have a natural decrease of whites because it’s an older population and eventually, maybe in 10 years or so, we’ll have a decline in the white population,” says William Frey, a demographer and senior fellow at the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “That’s a scenario I think we’ll see for a while.”
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A previous report from the Census Bureau showed that the U.S. will become a majority-minority country for the first time in 2043, meaning the total number of black, Asian, Hispanic and other minority populations will outweigh the non-Hispanic white population, though that demographic will still make up the largest single group.

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The country as a whole grew a little bit older last year, led by a surge of the retiring-age American population and a much slower growth of younger generations. The median age for the U.S. as a whole edged up to 37.6 last year from 37.5 in 2012, Census figures showed. The age group 65 and older grew to 44.7 million in 2013, up 3.6 percent from 2012, while the population younger than 65 grew by just 0.3 percent.
Growth of the senior population will continue as baby boomers turn 65. In fact, says Richard Fry, an economist at the Pew Research Center, the biggest group of baby boomers was born in 1962, a sign it will still be some time before that largest group enters the 65-and-over category.
“We’re going to have a lot of growth in terms of absolute size [of the population of Americans 65 and older] for easily another dozen years,” he says.
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A separate report from the Census Bureau released Monday showed that the oldest population of Americans – which in 2010 was 12 times the size it was in 1990 – is more racially and ethnically diverse, with those identifying their race as white was 84.8 percent in 2010, down from 86.9 a decade earlier.
Brooking’s Frey points out that the growing diversification is mostly taking shape in younger generations, though, which comprise bigger numbers of minorities. The Census report showed that at a growth rate of 2.9 percent, Asians were the fastest growing group from 2012 to 2013, and the growth was driven by international migration. The Hispanic population, which is the second-largest group overall in size behind non-Hispanic single-race whites, grew 2.1 percent and was led instead by a natural increase, or more births than deaths.

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Overall fertility rates have declined in the U.S. as a whole and especially for white Americans, according to figures from the National Center for Health Statistics. This helps temper the growth rate of the white non-Hispanic and Hispanic populations, Frey says.
Extrapolating from the census data, a separate report from San Francisco-based real estate research firm Trulia Inc. showed where different age groups lived in 2013. Contrary to popular thought, millennials – Americans 20 to 34 years old – actually moved more into big-city suburbs and lower-density cities rather than dense urban areas. The three fastest growing millennial metropolitan areas were Peabody, Massachusetts, a town north of Boston, Colorado Springs, Colorado and San Antonio.
Americans 50 to 69 years old also flocked most to the “second quartile of counties,” wrote Trulia Chief Economist Jed Kolko, or big city suburbs and lower density cities. The fastest growing areas for baby boomers were Austin, Texas, Raleigh, North Carolina, and Dallas – all places that already have high concentrations of young people. In fact, Austin has the highest share of millennials than any other large metropolitan area, the Trulia report showed.
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“The trend in the past year was that boomer growth [took place] in millennials’ favorite places,” Kolko says.
The population of the youngest Americans, or those ages 5 and younger, grew fastest in big cities like Washington, D.C. and New York. Frey has studied demographic changes in New York and says since 2010, there’s been a growth in the under 5 population in all of the boroughs except for Staten Island.
“What you’re seeing here is whites back then were only growing in Manhattan and Brooklyn as yuppies were moving in and having kids,” he says. “But now we see white gains [in under 5 age group] … in Queens and the Bronx, so there’s probably some gentrifying of whites moving into those boroughs, which were not necessarily the hot spots for kids.”