A few facts

Some residents missed a fascinating community meeting in the first week of May. The Beacon Hill Civic Association organized it to report on information gleaned by a planning committee, whose charge is to articulate a vision for what Beacon Hill should be in 10 years. (Full disclosure: I served on the committee.)

The meeting was well attended, and the participants were obviously engaged in the process. But most of you weren’t there, so you might appreciate learning what participants learned and then some.

Some of the demographics are a bit out of date, since they come from the 2000 census. On the other hand, most participants seemed satisfied that there are probably not great discrepancies from then until now.

Happily, after the meeting I unearthed a 1993 BRA analysis of Beacon Hill based on the 1990 census. These figures were not part of the meeting since they don’t have anything to do with the future. The only difference from the 2000 census figures the BHCA committee used and the 1990 census figures is that the 1990 compilation included the Beacon Street block between Bowdoin and Somerset streets that has one apartment building on it. Nevertheless, the comparisons interested me, and I thought they might interest you.

First, our population declined slightly.

According to the 2000 census, there were 9,051 persons living on Beacon Hill in 5,687 households with an average household size of 1.6 persons.

Ten years earlier, Beacon Hill’s population was 9,616, or about 500 more persons, living in 5,728 households. So household size had declined slightly since 1990. In both censuses there were slightly more women than men.

In both censuses (censi?) the largest group is in the age span of 22 through 34 year olds, which total 48 percent of the total population in 2000 compared with 46 percent in 1990.

The number of families, 1,426, was greater in 1990 than in 2000 when it was 1,395, and the number of kids ages 17 and under declined from in 620 in 1990 to 563 in 2000. Children enrolled in schools, either public or private, in 1990 totaled 434 on Beacon Hill compared to 399 in 2000.

There is some evidence that the decline in the number of kids on the Hill has been reversed. We see it in the crowds at the Myrtle Street Playground, but the best evidence for this is from Boston Public School figures. Figures compiled in 2007 showed the number of school-age children here grew from 582 to 744 between 2002 and 2006 in zip codes 02114 and 02108.

It’s not a perfect match to 1990 and 2000 since these zip codes extend beyond Beacon Hill’s boundaries and are not contiguous with the census tracts. And the counts we have are not all children, only school-age children in school. Nevertheless, the numbers indicate a trend.

There were curious items in the 1993 analysis of the 1990 census that we can’t compare without digging into the census tracts ourselves, since the BRA did not separate Beacon Hill from the Back Bay in its analysis of the 2000 census, and those of us who live in these neighborhoods know they are different.

For example, in 1990 Beacon Hill had almost as many foreign-born residents (977) as it did those born in the Middle West (986). And in 1990, 70 percent of Beacon Hill’s residents had mostly been born in states other than Massachusetts.

In 1990, 314 persons worked at home. And more than half of all the workers walked to work. That still seems about right.

In 1990, 5,557 persons above the age of 15 living on the Hill had never been married. That’s more than half of us. We didn’t extract that information from the 2000 census although we could.

 It’s been nine years since the last census and 19 years since the 1990 census. After next year we’ll have fresh numbers, and new trends to ponder. We numbers nerds can’t wait.