Age Distribution in Hidden Valley

Knowing who we are is to some large extent knowing what ages we are, and how this is changing over time. A population with many young children may need more focus on childcare, one with many teenagers may need to focus on activities, one with many seniors may need more assisted living resources. So how our ages are distributed is significant to who we, Hidden Valley, are.

But here again, the boxes that statistics are kept in can interfere with the clarity of our focus. First off, this data is not normally shown by Census Blocks or even Block Groups, because it can be fairly specific, identifying individuals too easily. So the best we can do is to look at our data at the full Census Tract level. And, of course, that means compensating (in our minds, at least) for the neighborhoods included in our Census Tract and yet outside the scope of our neighborhood blocks. In our Tract, 40.79, we would be including Sabino Mountain, Summer Set, and Rockcliff subdivisions to the south, as well as Sabino Town and Country, and Catalina Vista to the north. We also would be including the three or four townhouse and garden apartment complexes around us. This blurs our sense of what our neighborhood is like, but the statistics are still quite interesting.

Another issue is that as regions grow, their Census Tracts are redefined every ten years, if needed. In 2010, Hidden Valley was in Census Tract 40.25, which included both what is presently in 40.79 and what is in 40.80 now, to our south: essentially, in 2010, it was everything east of Sabino Canyon Road, north of the Rillito, west of Sabino Creek, and south of the Sabino Canyon Recreation Area. For 2020, that was cut in half between Canyon Ranch subdivision and the Hacienda senior center on the south and Summer Set, Rockcliff and Hidden Valley on the north. This means that to see shifts in our age distribution over the last ten years, we need to adjust for what part of the changes came from the southern portion, and what part came from the northern portion.

Fortunately, the human mind is designed to extrapolate (that is, to make intelligent guesses). So let’s look at the data we have…

The graph here has a thick gold line through it: that is the US national average percentage of population by age group. The solid red line shows the 2020 distribution for our own Census Tract, 40.79. The solid green line shows the 2020 distribution for Tucson Metro area, in which we have been included since 1960. The dash-dotted blue line is the 2020 distribution for tract 40.80 to the south of us, and the dotted orange line shows the 2010 distribution for the census tract 40.25, which held the geography of what is now both 40.79 and 40.80.

Comparing our red line to the gold US average, we can see right off that we have fewer folks under 40 and more folks 55 to 80 than the national average. Curiously, we show peaks in both the “under 5 years” and the “25 to 29 years” categories — indicating that recently our neighborhood has started looking good to young couples starting a family. Clearly, this was not as true ten years ago, as we are well below average in both “10 to 15 years” and “35 to 39 years”. Either that, or maybe folks with growing kids move out (?). The 2010 curve actually had a spike in “10 to 15 years”, but you can see that a large portion of that was in the 40.80 tract, where those kids are now teenagers (or gone to college). It will be useful perhaps, to dig deeper into this, and determine how many of the youngsters in our tract are in the apartments and townhomes, versus in our neighborhood.

Interestingly, too, while we have an abundance of retirees, we don’t have as much surfeit in folks over 80 — not even in tract 40.80, where the Hacienda senior center is. Nor is tract 40.79 as sparse in 20 to 40 year olds as tract 40.80 is. Again this may be a function of our tract including more apartment living.

Statistics are stochastic. That means simply that there are many causes and reasons for variation in the numbers. We should not try to read too much into them. Yet, we can say that we know these are numbers that were earnestly worked to collect across the months when they were gathered. While not perfect, they are a glimpse of the facts at points in time. And if a glimpse is all we’ve got, it is better than nothing.

So what does this tell us? It confirms what we knew — that our neighborhood has a generally older population. But it also shows that this may be changing, and younger families may be moving in to stay. We should follow up on that, as it may well change who we are.

Please feel free to comment back with your own conclusions, amendments, or corrections. The data is ours: our taxes paid for it. And my observations and conclusions are worth every penny you have paid for them. Right?