Trends in Youth and Adult Populations
As El Paso has grown, where is the population getting younger or older?
A trend that has been getting more attention lately is the increase in the average age of populations around the world. Particularly in more developed nations, elderly people are living longer, and young people are having fewer children ( Japan is perhaps the most extreme example of this trend ). The US population is also aging, albeit more slowly. From 2010 to 2020 (the two most recent census dates in the US), the number of people under eighteen years old decreased as a percentage of the overall population and decreased overall. We wanted to look at how El Paso compares to these broader trends. Compared with the rest of the country, El Paso has a higher percent of its population under eighteen years old. Also contrary to the rest of the US, El Paso saw no change in the proportion of youth from 2010 to 2020 . This is great news for the region, as there is evidence that younger populations are associated with greater economic growth . We wanted to look deeper at these regional trends, so we looked at the 2010 and 2020 populations by age in each neighborhood. In the map below, you can see where in El Paso the population is getting older, getting younger, or roughly staying the same.
Change in Proportion of Youth
Looking at the overall map, relatively few neighborhoods saw an increase in the proportion of their population under eighteen years old. Since that percentage stayed the same across the city overall, this suggests that the increase in youth percentage was more concentrated. A few areas stand out as having gotten younger: Viscount and Lee Trevino on the East side, Riverside in Mission Valley, and Montecillo on the West side. However, we see some neighborhoods that became younger right next to ones that became much older, so there are clearly many factors at work that don't show up in this map.
Data & Methodology
Data on population age comes from the US Census. We imported the 2010 and 2020 population age data for each block group in El Paso and took the difference in proportion under eighteen years of age for each block group. For block groups that changed from 2010 to 2020, we did a weighted average based on overlap.