By Andy Hinds | Guest Columnist

Have you noticed that Uptown neighborhoods are loaded with little kids these days? Morley Field is swarming with pre-K soccer teams. You can hardly walk down a South Park sidewalk without being sideswiped by a stroller. Rambunctious rugrats are running roughshod in respectable restaurants.

Well, you can thank me, among others, for what most Uptownies I’ve talked to agree is clearly a trend around these parts: raising children in our decidedly un-suburban environments.

Our twin girls were born at Scripps Mercy in Hillcrest just shy of three years ago, and it was during their gestation that I started noticing all the young families in our area. Have they always been here? I wondered. Is it possible I just haven’t been paying attention?

We had moved into our North Park cottage in 2004 after a short stint in Hillcrest, and I had not thought of ours as a particularly kid-centric neighborhood. But suddenly it seemed as if every other Uptown hipster over 30 was sporting a fully-loaded Ergo or pushing a Bob.

So, have I just been perceiving an increase in the numbers of youngsters lately because they are now on my proverbial radar, the way one starts seeing Priuses (or in our case, minivans) everywhere after first buying one? Or has there really been a demographic shift in that direction during the decade during which we’ve lived Uptown? I decided to seek corroboration for my hunch.

Everyone to whom I mentioned this perceived influx of children said they had the same gut feeling, including City Councilmember Todd Gloria, who referred me to the SANDAG Profile Warehouse (profilewarehouse.sandag.org), an excellent resource for getting to the bottom of my query. Or at least a vast collection of data that would allow me to spend hours developing crackpot theories about the socioeconomic trends in my stomping grounds.

Alas, when I looked at changes in the age distribution in our area based on the census numbers from 2000 versus 2010, the data didn’t provide the slam-dunk for which I had hoped. For some reason the only numbers available for 2010 were listed as estimates, so they might not be totally trustworthy.

Also, there was no way to isolate “Uptown” as a demographic area, so Council District Three was as close as I could get. Sure, based on the data, there has been a gradual rise in the number of kids in proportion to the total population in our district, but no matter how I sliced it – by zip code, council district or specific age groups – the increase was not as dramatic as I had suspected it would be. In fact, according to my somewhat suspect math, the proportion of kids under ten years old to the entire population in District Three only rose about one percent between 2000 and 2010, from 14.6 percent to 15.4 percent.

There are plenty of other interesting tidbits to be gleaned from these data though. For instance, we do have a slightly higher proportion of kids aged 14 and under than the rest of the San Diego region. Despite the increases in the proportion of young kids in the district, the median age went up from 31.8 to 34.5 between 2000 and 2010.

But the most striking changes I found when sifting through these numbers were when I looked at the population of District Three based on age and race, specifically comparisons between those who identify as “White” and those who identify as “Hispanic.”

In terms of the total population of the district, the numbers have virtually flip-flopped. In 2000, there were 55,606 Hispanics (I feel like this term is politically incorrect, but I’m using it because it’s what the census uses), and 64,565 whites. In the census estimate for 2010, there were 66,918 Hispanics and 55,795 whites.

Despite the growth of the overall number of Hispanics, the numbers of Hispanic kids age nine and under has stayed almost the same. Despite the decline in the number of whites overall, the number of white kids nine and under has increased appreciably. Expressed in percentages of the total population of their respective races, Hispanic kids nine and under have gone from 23 percent in 2000 to 19.9 percent in 2010; while white kids nine and under have gone from 5.3 percent to 10.4 percent.

These changes and their causes can be interpreted in countless ways, but the crux of it is that white kids seem to have contributed disproportionately to the increase in the ratio of children to the overall population of District Three.

In our district, there are still more than twice as many Hispanic kids under age 10 as there are white kids. What’s noteworthy is that there are 2,300 more white kids than there were in 2000.

So, when we say, “Oh, yeah, there are suddenly tons of kids Uptown,” what we are really saying is, “There are suddenly tons of white kids Uptown.” I suspect the reason that these kids are so visible is that, despite the diversity of our area there are distinct concentrations of different ethnicities, so this cohort is probably clustered in a few neighborhoods. So, since I spend many of my days (I’m a full-time dad to mixed-race kids, by the way) pretty close to my home near Morley Field, which is probably a lot “whiter” than some Uptown neighborhoods, it only makes sense that I would think there are a lot more kids around here these days. And minivans too.

– Andy Hinds is a stay-at-home dad, blogger, freelance writer, carpenter, and sometimes adjunct writing professor. He’s known on the internet as Beta Dad, but you might know him as that guy in North Park whose kids ride in a dog-drawn wagon. Read his personal blog at www.butterbeanandcobra.blogspot.com (or just google “Beta Dad”). Reach him at [email protected] or @betadad on Twitter.