Nestled below street-level and hidden behind a dense wall of emerald shrubbery, Michelangelo Playground feels like a small miracle. Standing in the San Francisco park on a good day, when the weather is just right, you can see wild parrots visit from Telegraph Hill and lemons that hang like jewels from trees – even hear the sound of sea lions barking from down by the marina.
It’s quarter past 11 on a Sunday morning, and the park is eerily empty. It’s that time of the weekend when kids have been cooped up for too long, and parents are desperate to get them outside, to do something, anything. Yet, all four of the slides on this morning sit unused. The tire swing hangs perfectly still. There are no children shouting or shrieking or singing nonsense, no thumping of a basketball against the lifeless court. There’s only silence.
It’s a beautiful day in a beautiful playground. But where are all the children?
Russian Hill is one of the city’s most childless neighbourhoods.
The park is tucked in the middle of a block of clay-coloured apartment buildings in a neighbourhood called Russian Hill, on land that Thomas Manchester –who struck it rich in the California Gold Rush – bought in 1848 for $16, then sold to the city just seven years later for $24,000.
On the surface, Russian Hill seems like the perfect place for families. It’s in the heart of the city and an easy walk to the financial district. The demographic here is young and affluent – the median age is about 35, and median income more than US$150,000.
Instead, Russian Hill is one of San Francisco’s most childless neighbourhoods, which makes it one of the most childless neighbourhoods in the country. San Francisco has the smallest child population of any major U.S. city, at just 13 per cent (compared with the national average of 21 per cent). And even by San Francisco standards, Russian Hill is exceptional. Just 7 per cent of the population here are under the age of 18.
It’s a city where parks and swimming pools and schools sit empty. Where you can wander for blocks without seeing signs of families. No strollers left by doorways or chalk drawings on the sidewalks. No shushing or crying or cooing.
To demographers watching birth rates plummet around the world, Russian Hill is a harbinger of an oncoming crisis. To economists, it’s a looming bubble. To policymakers, an existential threat. To Conservative politicians including U.S. President Donald Trump, it’s reason for asserting control over women’s health and bodies – justification for a return to “traditional values.” To others still, it’s just a sign of the times: the natural consequence of the massive cultural, economic and gender shifts of the past century.
This is a conversation that’s just as pressing in Canada. Last year, the country officially entered the category of “ultralow” fertility countries, after recording its lowest birth rate ever at 1.25 children per woman (well below the replacement rate of 2.1). Every one of Canada’s major cities is experiencing a decline in fertility rates, which threatens to permanently change our communities and cities, too.
So a visit to San Francisco’s Russian Hill is a glimpse into the potential future for some Canada’s cities. It provides answers to the questions that cities such as Victoria, Vancouver, and Halifax are increasingly facing: How does a city plan for a future without the next generation? And what does it sound like, look like, feel like to live in a city without children?
The idea that something exceptional was happening in San Francisco – something that would eventually preoccupy Norman Yee for most of his career – first came to him in the early 2000s. As a commissioner on San Francisco’s Board of Education, he had witnessed for years a steady drop in student enrolment.
The dominant narrative at the time was to blame “white flight” – the affluent white families leaving San Francisco for what they perceived as safer, more family-friendly suburbs in the North and East Bays. But that explanation didn’t sit right with Mr. Yee. He’d lived in the city all his life, and saw that many of his middle-class and even lower-income friends from Black, Hispanic and Asian families were leaving, too.
In 2016, as part of San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors (akin to its city council), he commissioned a report to study this. The findings might seem obvious today: That housing and affordability were mostly to blame. Home prices tripled between 2000 and 2020, and the vast majority of that housing was studio and one-bedroom apartments. Just 9 per cent of the city’s housing, the report found, could be considered “affordable and family-friendly.”
Wearing a plaid shirt, a knit cardigan and a flat cap, Mr. Yee led the way around Russian Hill one recent morning. Between his spry step and piercing gaze, he seemed decades younger than his 76 years.
Mr. Yee was born and raised here, on the blocks straddling Russian Hill and Chinatown. His mother was a third-generation Chinese-American, and his father an immigrant from China.
Standing at the corner of Vallejo and Powell Streets, Mr. Yee pointed westward. “These two blocks here,” he said. “These two blocks were my life.”
His grandmother’s sewing factory was just one block north. His own family’s apartment was one block west. He remembers these streets as lively, bustling. The mostly Chinese and Italian families would spill out onto the steps and streets. There were always kids out playing, he and his cousins among them. “Just a lot of chaos.”
Affordability is a major factor as to why some families choose to leave the city.
The apartment Mr. Yee’s family once paid $500 to rent now costs about $6,200. Most flats now, he said, are occupied by young couples.
He led us to the building where his grandmother used to live with seven other people. Another four of his relatives lived in the unit above.
“Now,” he said, “one person is living in the space where 12 people used to live.”
When Pauline Li moved to San Francisco in 2019, she considered herself no stranger to big cities and high prices. Ms. Li was born and raised in Toronto, and had spent years living and working in Hong Kong. Still, the Bay area felt like culture shock.
San Francisco has long faced challenges with homelessness and drug use, challenges that exploded into full public view during the pandemic. Ms. Li’s Mission neighbourhood, she said, soon no longer felt family-friendly. “It just wasn’t the kind of atmosphere I wanted my son to grow up in.”
So when she and her husband went looking for a home to buy in 2021, they quickly saw how much further their dollar would take them outside of the city. In the same way that young families leave Toronto for Oshawa, or Vancouver for Surrey, Ms. Li’s family looked to a suburb about an hour’s drive east, called Clayton.
“Affordability,” she said, “was a major factor.”
In the years between 2020 and 2024, San Francisco saw a further 15 per cent drop in the number of families with young kids. With schools and playgrounds under strict lockdown, Roxana Schwettmann watched as many of her friends – and her two kids’ friends – left Russian Hill, and the city, for good.
“The big exodus was so hard to see,” she said. “It makes you wonder whether you’re doing the right thing by staying.”
What Ms. Schwettmann described was a sentiment you’ll hear echoed by many: While there are joys to raising kids in the city, it’s hard to be a parent in San Francisco.
Geography alone poses a challenge. It’s a city famous for its hills, and Russian Hill is notorious for some of the steepest slopes. The terrain is challenging enough as an individual, never mind with a stroller, or a toddler in arms.
Norman Yee in front of the elementary school he attended and later taught at.
Childcare, too, is hard to come by, and the school system filled with uncertainty. The public school system operates as a lottery, designed to encourage equity. But in practicality, it means parents aren’t always guaranteed a spot in their nearest school. And schools such as Yick Wo Elementary School in Russian Hill are constantly on the chopping block. Yick Wo was only spared last year because of advocacy from parents.
At the end of Vallejo Street, Mr. Yee began climbing a steep set of steps that led to a hilltop park. We were the only ones there. This was where he used to play hide and seek, he said. “You can see how, as a kid, this was wonderful.”
Once, this park was a place of play and discovery. But now, in the absence of families, “There’s no sense of community,” he said. “It feels like there’s no buy in from people.”
Instead, what you feel walking around San Francisco is a city obsessed with the future.
Everywhere you look is a billboard for AI. Everywhere you turn, the low whirring sound of a self-driving taxi gliding by like a UFO. It’s a city run by techbros in Teslas, and a culture consumed by technology and competition.
Here, “996” is common vernacular, the abbreviated term for working 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week. Here, the cafes sell AG1 smoothies – powdered supplements – rather than actual food. Uber drivers cite the annual Salesforce conference (and not the recent Super Bowl) as the year’s biggest event.
And though there’s nothing more future-focused than parenting, there’s also nothing less efficient than children. In a city obsessed with optimization, there’s nothing less optimal than a toddler in the throes of a tantrum, or the last-minute disruption of a sick day.
Just ask Alison Johnston. The 38-year-old had already founded three startups before her daughter was born. “That’s kind of the norm here,” she said. “To have almost 20 years in your career before having kids.” As such, most of her friends have just one – if any.
She’s one of the lucky few to own a single-family home in the city, made possible after selling her second startup in 2014 for US$30-million. Now, pregnant with her second child, she’s running another, called Parent Haven, an online community for parents.
A quick glimpse at the San Francisco parent Facebook groups, meanwhile, illustrates the parenting expectations in this competitive city. There are advertisements for bilingual, STEM-focused preschools and Ivy League-focused, college-admissions tutoring for high schoolers.
“There is this culture of achievement, this arms race around achievement,” said Jennie Herriot-Hatfield, who lives in San Francisco. She said she loves raising her three kids here, but acknowledged the specific challenges. “People worry that if their kids don’t go to the best schools, that they’ll miss out.”
Jennie Herriot-Hatfield with her three kids at home in the Miraloma neighbourhood.
The lack of support for working parents here – for working mothers in particular – only worsens matters. California offers just eight weeks of partial paid parental leave, already generous relative to the rest of the country’s affordable daycare, flexible work schedules and other family-friendly policies are similarly hard to come by.
And within the home, said Andrea O’Reilly, a professor of gender studies at York University in Toronto, many women still lack the support they need.
“Even though women might be making the same as or more than their male partners, they are still doing the bulk of labour in the homes.”
A city without kids, she said, is like living in a theme park – a sci fi horror show.
“It’s a loss of our humanness,” she said, “to live in a world just with adults.”
Just a few blocks west of Mr. Yee’s old apartment, Cobi Kennedy, 33, was out walking her dog in Russian Hill. Ms. Kennedy, who’s gay, said that she and her partner are still discussing the question of kids. As such, she’s begun the process of freezing her eggs, happy to put off the decision for another day.
She’s a self-described “native ‘Friscan” who left to study in Europe, but came back a few years ago to begin her PhD. Most of her childhood friends, she said, have moved away. And those who have replaced them are young people looking to build startups, the next unicorn. They are tech workers and nomads, for whom San Francisco could be anywhere.
This has created a tension, she said. Between natives and newcomers, locals and transients, gentrifiers and gentrified. Tech people and everyone else.
“There’s this idea of, ‘Let me come here and get rich. And then go somewhere else to have a family,’” she said.
The city’s reputation was once as a haven for liberals and progressives – a sanctuary for refugees and members of the LGBTQ community, a hub for artists and counterculture. But all of that is changing, said Maria Luz Torre, another long-time San Franciscan.
“San Francisco used to be a very liberal city,” said Ms. Torre, an organizer at Parent Voices, who raised her now-adult children in the city.
“Then the millionaires moved in. And then the billionaires moved in,” she said.
“I’m worried that the city is going to become a city filled with just rich yuppies. Rich yuppies with no kids.”
Cynthia McKelvey, 36, believes that making the choice to have kids will come down to a general sense of optimism or pessimism in the future.
At 2:30 p.m. on a Tuesday afternoon, there wasn’t a single free table at Poesia Cafe in the Castro. All of the seats in the cafe were occupied by 20- and 30-year-olds with laptops. It was the kind of place you wouldn’t dream of bringing a toddler.
Sitting near the back, Cynthia McKelvey, a 36-year-old with shoulder-length hair and wire-frame glasses, represents a key constituent in the discussion around childlessness. She’s one of an increasing number of young people choosing to opt out of parenthood.
As she sipped her coffee, Ms. McKelvey described watching her siblings raise her nieces and nephews. She loves them, but doesn’t want the same for herself.
“There’s joy,” she said, “in the freedom we’ve allowed ourselves to have.”
Part of Ms. McKelvey’s story is generational. As a millennial, she graduated at the peak of the economic crisis and has yet to feel financial security. She’s also come of age in a time where it’s okay not to have kids. And in a city as progressive as San Francisco, she rarely feels the need to have to explain herself.
It’s hard to have a conversation about birth rates in the U.S. without the rhetoric quickly getting political – and ugly. On the right, Conservatives from Elon Musk and the late Charlie Kirk to J.D. Vance catastrophize the issue, warning that the decline in birth rates signals a potential collapse of our civilization. They’ve used it as justification to enact pro-natal policies.
Since his election, Mr. Trump has systematically targeted women’s reproductive rights, cutting funding and limiting access to contraceptives, family-planning clinics and reproductive health services. Already, 13 states in the U.S. have banned abortion, which experts say is putting the lives and well-being of millions of girls and women – especially marginalized, rural and racialized women – at risk.
“There’s that assumption that women are presumed to be tools that can be manipulated,” said Amy Blackstone, a professor of sociology at the University of Maine. “That we’re not human. That we’re part of the machine.”
The perception that she often hears about child-free people, said Ms. McKelvey, is that they’re selfish. But how can it be selfish, she asked, to not want to bring children into this world? She cited among her concerns overpopulation, climate change, the economy and the current political state.
For such a life-changing decision, the choice might simply boil down to a general sense of optimism or pessimism in the future.
“I want to believe that things will change for the better,” said Ms. McKelvey. “But it feels like things are getting darker.”
On that Sunday morning, the only two people standing in Michelangelo Playground were 73-year-old Ruby Lipscomb and 56-year-old Natasha Babaian.
The women were quietly tending to the community garden at the edge of the park, digging up dirt and pulling weeds. Ms. Babaian was shovelling, while Ms. Lipscomb stood crouched over a garden bag. Both women have lived in Russian Hill for decades.
“This used to be a very busy playground,” said Ms. Babaian. She shook her head at the empty space around her. “Now, it feels like a ghost town.”
Ms. Lipscomb, a retired teacher, bought her Russian Hill apartment in 1984. She raised all of her kids here. She used to take them to the marina or the aquarium or the planetarium on a cable car, the wooden tram clanging down the hill as they made their way across the city.
And on weeknights, she’d bring them here.
She looked around that morning – at the city before her, and the city that once was. She took in the playground that stood untouched, and the basketball court that went unused. The lawn that sat empty, except for the dogs.
The only corner still filled with life was the very garden where she stood. The garden that she and her neighbours had so lovingly cultivated. Each seed an act of hope, a gift for the future. Each one of the pink and orange blooms, each sprig of the fragrant herbs and leafy greens a small miracle.
“It’s very sad,” she said. “My God,” she said. “This was the greatest city in the world to raise kids.”
