This Wisconsin Area Is America's No. 2 'Marriage Desert': Report

MILWAUKEE, WI — A central Milwaukee area has one of the lowest shares of married adults in the country, according to a new national report.

The Institute for Family Studies released "Marriage Deserts: Mapping America's Family Divide" this month. The report, written by Chris Bullivant and Ken Burchfiel, uses 2020 Census data to rank areas across the U.S. by the share of householders ages 15 to 64 who are married.

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The researchers call areas where fewer than 33 percent of those householders are married "marriage deserts." Areas where at least 61 percent are married are "marriage gardens."

The study breaks the country into Census areas known as Public Use Microdata Areas, which typically hold 100,000 to 200,000 people each.

The area the Census labels "Milwaukee County, City of Milwaukee Central" ranked No. 2 among the nation's marriage deserts. Just 14 percent of householders ages 15 to 64 there are married, meaning roughly six out of seven are not.

Only part of Detroit ranked lower, at 13 percent.

Here are the 10 U.S. areas with the lowest share of married householders ages 15 to 64:

1. Detroit (South Central and Southeast), Michigan: 13 percent
2. Milwaukee (Central), Wisconsin: 14 percent
3. Cleveland (East) and Bratenahl, Ohio: 14 percent
4. Washington, D.C. (East): 14 percent
5. St. Louis (North), Missouri: 15 percent
6. Columbus (Central) and Grandview Heights, Ohio: 15 percent
7. Atlanta (Southwest), Georgia: 16 percent
8. Cincinnati (Central), Ohio: 16 percent
9. Boston (Allston, Brighton and Fenway), Massachusetts: 17 percent
10. Chicago (South), Illinois: 17 percent

The same Milwaukee area also ranked high on a second measure in the report, which looks at the share of households with children that are headed by married parents.

Just 22 percent of households with children in central Milwaukee are headed by a married couple, the third lowest share in the nation. Only east Cleveland, at 18 percent, and east Washington, D.C., at 20 percent, ranked lower.

The report calls areas where fewer than 52 percent of households with children are headed by married parents "married-family deserts."

Milwaukee did not appear among the report's 10 largest grouped marriage deserts, which combine neighboring areas that meet the same threshold and rank them by population. That list was led by a cluster covering Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, with 686,520 householders ages 15 to 64.

Across the border, the picture looked different in the Twin Cities. The report ranked the suburbs around Minneapolis and St. Paul as the 10th largest grouped marriage garden in the nation, though two Minneapolis areas landed among the nation's top 100 marriage deserts.

That split between cities and suburbs reflects a pattern the report found nationwide. Marriage gardens are overwhelmingly suburban and exurban, the authors wrote, while marriage deserts tend to sit in the centers of major cities.

The highest share of married householders in the nation was in northwest Fort Bend County, Texas, at 79 percent.

The authors point to research by Harvard economist Raj Chetty, which found that the share of two-parent homes in a community was the strongest predictor of upward mobility for children growing up there.

Brad Wilcox, a senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, wrote on X that the report shows a 70-point gap in children's odds of growing up with married parents between the nation's top married-family deserts and gardens.

The report notes that its rankings are descriptive. It does not attempt to explain why the patterns exist or to show that marriage rates cause economic or social outcomes.