Census finds Pittsburgh is growing younger
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If Pittsburgh has cleared the summit of a longtime aging trend and is headed back down -- as new 2010 data suggest -- it is because of people like 23-year-old Sudipta "Nila" Devanath.
She was born at Magee-Womens Hospital in 1987 but her father, here studying on a fellowship, decided with her mother they didn't want to settle in Pittsburgh. Ms. Devanath grew up in Virginia, only to arrive as a University of Pittsburgh student herself in 2006.
Now a Pitt medical student, she's seen a livelier city than her parents ever did, and she has no intention of leaving. She's among a surge of people in their early 20s living here over the past decade, part of the reason the city's median age (meaning half the residents are older than it and half younger) dropped from 35.5 to 33.2 between 2000 and 2010.
"People often come here to study, thinking it's just for four years, and they end up working here, staying here, because they end up falling in love with the place," said Ms. Devanath, an Oakland resident who heads the multi-college Pittsburgh Student Government Council.
The unusual drop in the city's median age was among the findings in the U.S. Census Bureau's release today of new information from last year's population count. For both the city of Pittsburgh and Allegheny County, the number of elderly residents as well as their percentage of the overall population are on the decline.
That's no surprise to demographers who follow the trends occurring naturally from the low birth rates of the Depression and World War II era -- people who would largely be ages 65 to 80 now -- but it's a marked shift in a region known for decades for pronounced graying of its population.
The 42,151 people age 65 and older living in Pittsburgh proper last year was a 23.4 percent drop from the 55,034 in 2000. Those older adults are now 13.8 percent of the population, compared to 16.4 percent a decade earlier.
Allegheny County's elderly population declined from 17.8 percent to 16.8 percent, with 205,059 people in the age group now, or 23,357 less than in 2000. After the 2000 census, Allegheny had the second-highest percentage of elderly among the nation's counties with at least 1 million residents, behind only Palm Beach, Fla. It's uncertain where it stands now, because the Census Bureau has not released information yet for all states.
First Published May 19, 2011 12:00 am
