Demography Isn't Destiny, but We Shouldn't Ignore It Either

The Baby Boom, Social Class, and the Failure of Social Policy

This weekend, I’m traveling to Indianapolis to celebrate the FIFTIETH anniversary of my high school graduation.¹ According to the reunion Facebook page, about a third of the graduating class could be there.² The reunion won’t be at my alma mater, John Marshall High School or celebrating a homecoming game. That’s because my school no longer exists.

Never having been to a reunion, I have no idea what to expect. Are we still the same people (hopefully grown up some)? Will the old social groupings remerge on Saturday — student government, athletes, honors students, music, theater? Do our memories still work after all this time?

Your author’s senior picture

Sorry for the poor exposure. This is a screenshot from a PDF of the yearbook.³ My actual yearbook is in a box somewhere in the house but I couldn’t find it.

Back to my school that isn’t a school. John Marshall High School opened in 1968 on the far east end of Marion County. It was needed to relieve the overcrowding of other east-side Indianapolis Public high schools⁴ created as the Baby Boom moved through the school system. Being born in 1954, I am almost the exact middle of the Boom so my experience tracks with this growth and decline.

As Chalkbeat Indiana explained last December, the high school closed in 1986. It reopened as a middle school in 1993 and lived again as a high school for a brief period thereafter. It permanently closed in 2018. In 2021, Indianapolis Public Schools agreed to sell the property to a non-profit to create an “Opportunity Hub.”

I went to find the Chalkbeat story on Saturday after reading one of my favorite newsletters: Philip Bump’s “How to Read This Chart”. It appears each week from the Washington Post. This week’s column was on how to show population distributions. After discussing a chart from Canada, he uses census data to recreate a chart for the US in 2020. Then he creates one for 1980 and a projection for 2060. There’s a nifty graph toward the bottom of the newsletter where he animates the three graphs.⁵ You can literally watch the Baby Boom Bulge move through the population.

In the 1980 graph, the “abnormal” bulge appears between ten and thirty-five. As we would expect, the 2020 bulge occurs between forty-five and about seventy-three.⁶ By 2060, the bulge is predicted to be between roughly sixty and eight-five.

By the time I graduated from John Marshall, the Baby Boom bulge was moving through the teenage years. Certainly by the mid-80s the demand that justified the high school in 1968 was waning.⁷

Anyone who could read a population distribution should have seen this transition coming. Policy makers eager to fix the immediate problems wanted new facilities but didn’t plan for what to do after the situation changed.

Philip Bump has a book coming out in January on how the Baby Boom impacted social policy. It’s called The Aftermath: The Last Days of the Baby Boom and the Future of Power in America. I’ve already pre-ordered it.⁸

There are other issues that operated in a similar manner to the Baby Boom. David French had a piece out this weekend describing how technological changes in industry, construction, and the military lessened the need for “strong men” and called for a reconsideration of gender relationships. He was using an article by Ruth Graham in the New York Times describing F3 groups — fitness, fellowship, and faith — in the suburbs that provide meaning for thirty-something men.

As I read both articles, I wondered how well the predominantly white, suburban, middle class situation described translated into other settings. Blacks saw a double transition of industry over the decades, first as the agricultural revolution prompted the Great Migration and then as automation devastated factory work.⁹ I also wonder if the militia cosplayers aren't working out these transitions in their own way.

Again, policy makers at various levels were aware that manufacturing was undergoing a metamorphosis. But it was easier to rail about “jobs going overseas” than to seriously address the economic transformation happening under their noses. I wonder how much that neglect in policy contributed to the Opioid epidemic of the past decade plus.

Finally, there is the issue of housing. Emily Badger, whose work is always worth reading, wrote an analysis in the New York Times yesterday titled “Whatever Happened to the Starter Home?”. She describes how just thirty years ago, one could get a home of 1,000 to 1,500 square feet as a first place to settle. Not only are those homes no longer being built (due to both demand issues and zoning laws) but those that do exist have skyrocketed in price (as cities tried to control sprawl, the price of land shot up).¹⁰

When we moved to Indianapolis in 1966, my mom got a three bedroom townhome that was about a mile from Marshall High (and a quarter mile to my elementary school, PS 103). It was probably a transitional neighborhood even then, as a lot of the housing in our immediate area was of similar stock. As suburbanization expanded, it went North and Southeast from where we lived. There never was a huge suburban expansion east of the high school (because it was built near the county line). The kinds of properties we lived in were cheaply built and likely some of the first properties flipped into rentals. On one of our trips to visit family in the early 1990s, we drove through the old neighborhood. The deterioration was palpable.

Again, this was not surprising. Any planner who was paying attention would see that this was problematic. If a neighborhood could be salvaged, maybe it would attract more families. If there were more families and better jobs, maybe there’d be a need for a high school on the far east side of Indianapolis.

And maybe I’d get to go to the homecoming game.

1. Due to travel days, there won’t be newsletters this Friday or next Monday.

2. A high school friend told me that over 50 of our classmates have passed away out of a class of about 340.

3. If you look closely at the picture, you can see the tons of stuff my uncle got me to put in my hair to make it straight. To this day, I don’t know why I did that.

4. There were also other county high schools nearby. My mother taught at one.

5. I don’t know how to share the animation which is too bad. It’s cool.

6. I know the census department factors in differential death rates for their projections.

7. The John Marshall story was complicated by the US Department of Justice order against IPS for school segregation, a case that ran from 1968 until 2016. Feeder school lines were redrawn in my senior year changing the racial makeup of the high school overnight. I’ll write about the “Marshall Riot” another time, but I’ve always felt the high school was under a cloud after that day in October of 1971.

8. He promises it will have lots of charts.

9. I should also mention that the economic transitions also put many women in predominantly service work and underpaid helping professions.

10. That lack of starter home demand is also driving up rental rates.