A new report finds that the share of households with children headed by married couples varies by roughly 70 percentage points across American neighborhoods, with some big-city areas falling below 25% while certain suburbs top 89%.
The study, from the Institute for Family Studies, analyzed 2020 Census data to map where married and married-parent households are concentrated and where they are scarce. Researchers describe the pattern as a divide between urban “married-family deserts” and suburban “married-family gardens.”
Among the lowest rates nationwide: eastern Cleveland and nearby Bratenahl Village, Ohio, where just 18% of households with children are headed by a married couple; eastern Washington, D.C., at 20%; and central Milwaukee at 22%. By contrast, suburban areas such as Fremont City, California, Lakewood, New Jersey, and parts of Utah County, Utah, reported up to 89% of households with children headed by married couples.
Suburban Dallas-Fort Worth was identified as the nation’s largest grouped “marriage garden.” Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn together formed the largest grouped “marriage desert,” covering nearly 686,000 householders, more than two-thirds of whom are unmarried.
Notably, high income did not guarantee a high marriage rate. In affluent Manhattan neighborhoods including the Financial District and Greenwich Village, fewer than 28% of householders ages 15 to 64 are married.
Culture, not just cost
Ken Burchfiel, a research fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, said the pattern reflects more than economics.
“It’s clear that the decision to get married is not just due to financial concerns; it’s also a matter of culture and, admittedly, perhaps a matter of affordability,” Burchfiel told Fox News Digital.
He said his own experience living in New York showed that a high salary doesn’t necessarily make it easy to buy a home or raise a family there, which may push some married couples toward the suburbs.
“Marriage and raising kids are both parts of your life that really force you to kind of die to yourself and live for others,” Burchfiel said. “When you have lots of parents, lots of husbands and wives in a region, I imagine just overall the cultural focus is less on ‘how can I get ahead in life’ and more on ‘what can I do for my family?'”
The researchers said they pursued the study because of existing evidence linking family structure to economic mobility and social capital, citing work by Harvard economist Raj Chetty finding that the share of homes with two parents present is the strongest predictor of upward mobility in a community.
The report argues the divide amounts to more than minor variation. “This does not appear to describe small variations around shared national norms, but rather two distinct family-formation regimes, so stark it could even be described as family structure polarization,” the IFS report states.
It also notes the different environments children experience growing up: those in married-family gardens are surrounded by peers whose parents are married, while children in married-family deserts are more likely to see greater instability in adult relationships and less consistent supervision.
Burchfiel suggested newlyweds and young couples weighing where to settle should look at these family-structure maps alongside local job markets, while also factoring in personal circumstances like proximity to extended family.
“Living near other married couples can be really useful when you’re settling down and raising a family,” Burchfiel said. “It’s worth seeing where those married couples are and where maybe they’re avoiding, because again, if there’s an area where 70-plus percent of individuals are married, that’s probably a good place to settle down as a married couple.”
