Red states attracting more young families due to lower housing costs: study

March 5, 2026

A new report from the Institute for Family Studies (IFS) indicates that states that backed President Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election are seeing overall increases in young children and young families.

The Christian Post reports that report also shows decreases in states that voted for Democrat Kamala Harris, with housing costs playing a large factor in where families settle.

IFS, a conservative think tank, published its report last week documenting state-level population change patterns from 2019 to 2024. Those years also coincide with the COVID-19 pandemic which caused disruptions from 2020-2021.

Backed by statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, the report states: “Both red and blue states are watching the share of residents who are age 60 or over grow as Boomers continue to age into retirement. But blue states are losing twenty-somethings, and, relatedly, kids.”

According to the Christian Post, the study shows that between 2019 to 2024, the number of children aged 0 to 9 dropped by 1.2% in states that supported Trump and by 4.7% in states that backed Harris.

Researcher, Patrick T. Brown, wrote, “That’s 600,000 fewer kids under five in blue states in 2024 compared to 2019. And nearly half of this number was due to one state alone — California, which saw its total number of kids in this age group fall from 2.45 million in 2019 to 2.16 million five years later.”

The report attributes the increase in population of young families and children in red states and the corresponding decrease in blue states to housing costs.

The study recommends that blue cities seeing their populations of young families decline might invest in “large-scale spending programs to make child care more affordable” or make “safety-net programs more generous.”

Likewise, the report says red states could continue to attract families by “freeing up land and legalizing denser housing in cities and suburbs” in addition to embracing “state-level child tax credits, expansions of school lunch programs, or tangible benefits like paid leave,”

Photo: top, Credit: Pabst_Ell