All Over Albany

A generational shift

Quick: Guess which 5-year age group has the most people of any age group in the Capital Region.

OK, got your answer? Hold onto it for a second.

The Census Bureau recently released new estimates for the populations of counties by age. And those numbers can help us get a sense of the age distribution of people here in the Capital Region -- and answer questions like which age group has the most people.

Plenty of graphs and maps are the jump.

But first, let's answer that question at the top...

The answer is...

The age group with the most number of people in the Capital Region 2015 according to Census Bureau estimates is: age 20-24. That group was estimated to have more than 69,000 people, a little more than 8 percent of the total population of the Capital Region core.

If you had guessed older -- like, say, one of the Baby Boomer age ranges -- that wasn't a bad guess. Age 50-54 was #2 with almost 7.5 percent of the population. And five years ago that same cohort of people -- then ages 45-49 -- was the region's largest age cohort.

This local switch fits with the national trends: Millenials recently replaced the Baby Boomers as the nation's largest generation. [Pew Research Center]

Look up for maps and graphs

We were curious about how the population of the Capital Region has shifted across the age distribution over time, so we pulled up the estimates for each five year interval going to back to 1990. They're in an animated graph above that show the generational population peaks moving through the age distribution.

That graph -- along with a few other graphs and maps -- are above in large format. Click or scroll all the way up.

A few things

The Capital Region, overall, is right in the middle in terms of age
The Capital Region's four core counties -- Albany (37.7), Rensselaer (39.8), Schenectady (39.8), Saratoga (42.2) -- have median ages that are around the median for the state as a whole (38.3) -- though Saratoga County leans to the older end. Between 2010 and 2015, Albany County was the only county in the Capital Region core to see its estimated median age go down (-0.8).

The estimated median age for the United States was 37.8 in 2015, up from 37.2 in 2010. (It's been rising about 1/10 of an age year each year.) And compared to the rest of the nation, the Capital Region's core leans toward the older age of the distribution -- see that first graph at the very top.

Albany County is a little bit weird
It's weird in the sense that it ranks near the bottom in New York State (#50 of 62) in terms of the percent of its population that's under age 18 and also near the bottom (#49) for percent of its population over 65. As you might guess from that, it ranks very high (#5) for share of population ages 18-64.

One of the reasons for this distribution is probably the presence of universities/colleges such as UAlbany and Saint Rose. Albany County ranks #4 in the state for percent of its population that's ages 20-24. And it does relatively well with ages 25-29 (#19) and 30-34 (#8).

By the way: The counties that appear to be magnets for the post-college crowd: Kings (Brooklyn), New York (Manhattan), Queens, and the Bronx. They were the only counties in the state* to draw shares of the 25-34 crowd at higher disproportionate rates to their shares of the overall state population. (Example: Brooklyn has a little more than 13 percent of the state's overall population -- and almost 17 percent of the state's population ages 25-34.)

* The one exception (and just barely) was Jefferson County, where Watertown and Fort Drum are located.

Women and men

Have a look at the second (magenta) graph at the top -- it's the Capital Region's core's age distribution divided by female and male. Starting on the youngest end of the distribution, there are more males than females up to the 30-34 age group -- then it's more females than males all through the older end.

Housing
We're reluctant to draw much in the way of conclusions from this sort of cursory overview, but looking at the Capital Region's age distribution did make us think a little bit about housing. Specifically, the apparent recent strength in the apartment rental market. (See all those residential conversion projects.) And when we talk with developers about who's renting these places, we often hear the same thing: Millenials and empty-nest Baby Boomers.

Of course, there are other factors at work, such as the apparent national shift toward renting over buying after the housing bust. But... if you figure people tend to buy their first house around age 30, then the Capital Region is currently at a relative low point for that population -- and that age group could (maybe, potentially) be at a much higher point in about a decade.

Earlier on AOA

+ A quick look at city and town population changes