Sunday, October 20, 2002

A story published today by the Oakland Press reports that a new study by the Southeast Michigan Council of Governments shows that married households in the region slipped to 49 percent. One-person households rose in the last decade to make up 27 percent of households in the area.

But, according to Kurt Metzger, research director at the Center for Urban Studies at Wayne State University, looking more closely at the information shows that many singles are drawn to the southern part of Oakland County while more traditional families live in the northern part.

The young, single crowd is drawn to the area's dynamic mix of housing styles and arts and entertainment offerings, he said.

"Singles tend to live closer to the urban center," Metzger said. "They like to be where the action is."

Although the average household size is shrinking throughout much of the county, it's likely that the high number of singles and nontraditional households in the southern part of the county is pushing the statistics higher for the entire county.

Along with singles, the number of nonfamily households - containing two or more unrelated people, such as roommates, gay couples or nonmarried straight couples - showed the largest increases, more than 20 percent each between 1990 and 2000 - from roughly 470,000 to 570,000.

Jeff Montgomery, executive director of the Triangle Foundation, a gay and lesbian rights advocacy group in Detroit, said that although gays live throughout Oakland County, there's a reason people associate Ferndale and Royal Oak with the gay community.

"It's certainly the case that those are the places that gay and lesbian people are looking to go because they're seen as more friendly, more accessible and maybe more welcoming places," he said.

Charles Goedert, mayor of Ferndale from 1995 to 2001, was known for encouraging residents to return to the depopulated city and fix up older homes, and said he noticed an increase in the amount of young professionals, gays and lesbians who renovated older homes.

But while the overall population of Oakland County grows, many older communities across southern Oakland County have witnessed a steady drain of residents. That's led to several complications for a city such as Ferndale, which saw its population dip by nearly 3,000 in 10 years while gaining 39 new households since 2000, according to the SEMCOG report.

"We have the same number of households, in fact more," said Tom Barwin, Ferndale city manager. "But the smaller household size means that we have less people."

Perhaps nowhere are the effects of shrinking households and a change in family dynamics more acutely felt than in the schools.

Across south Oakland, declining enrollment numbers have led to problems as districts qualify for less per-pupil funding from the state.

Metzger said the recent SEMCOG study "really points out the vast array of living arrangements. Society is changing so much in terms that there is no typical household anymore.

"Society has fractured in so many different ways that we now have a variety of different lifestyles and a variety of different households that people are looking for."

In Oakland County, that frequently translates into many families moving to the northern suburbs for larger lots and school districts where students score high on Michigan Educational Assessment Program tests.

Jim Rogers, SEMCOG data center manager and author of the report, said that although the area is growing at about half the rate of the rest of the country - due partly to the fact that more people are moving out of the region than are moving in - the overall trend is that Oakland County is growing.

"More people are being born than are dying," he said. "But because families have kids who grow up and leave home and form their own households, and because people are living longer and are able to keep their own households ... we have more households formed from this base of population."

And Rogers expects the trend of married-family households moving to the northern and western suburbs to continue, as long as there are open land and local plans to accommodate growth.

"Communities like Ferndale or Southfield will continue to have households turn over, and the question for them and their schools is, 'Is that turnover going to bring new children for the schools?'" he said. "I think that's where there's less certainty about how things will evolve over time."