Central Arkansas’ population is still growing, despite a drop in life expectancy and fertility rates.
That’s according to the annual Metrotrends Demographic Review and Outlook report released last week by Metroplan, central Arkansas’ regional planning agency.
Jonathan Lupton, Metroplan’s Senior Planner for Publications, says families in central Arkansas are, on average, choosing to have fewer kids.
“Back around 1990… we were seeing around two births per woman in a lifetime, maybe a little less, in our region. We’re now down quite a bit, down to something like 1.6, 1.7 births per woman,” Lupton said.
The report shows the region’s General Fertility Rate, or number of births per 1,000 women of childbearing age, fell to 58.5 in 2020. Lupton says lagging fertility rates in central Arkansas can be explained in part by more women entering the workforce, but also because members of the millennial generation are aging.
“So they’re moving out of the childbearing ages, they’re moving more into the early raising kids ages, or if they didn’t have them, they’re less likely to have them,” Lupton said. “There certainly are younger females who will soon be of childbearing age, but we know when we look at the model that there simply will be fewer of them.”
Despite that, the report shows central Arkansas’ population continues to grow, with Conway surpassing North Little Rock as the region’s second-largest city. Little Rock remains the largest city in the region with just under 207,000 residents, while Conway boasts a population of 67,509.
Lupton says the town of Ward in Lonoke County is now the tenth-largest in the region, owing partly to its geography.
“A lot of it is that Cabot has slowed down its growth, and Austin… is a little bit hemmed in by the borders of Cabot and Ward, and there’s only a little bit of land to develop so the growth is spilling on up to Ward,” Lupton said. “It’s still a relatively short freeway ride to the jobs in North Little Rock and the Air Force base and in Little Rock, and those are the major job magnets.”
Lupton says housing in the region remains more affordable than the national average in the face of population growth, and that there’s been an uptick in so-called “missing middle” housing like duplexes and triplexes.
“To me, that’s a good trend to see because those are potentially more affordable units… [for] a lot of people a big house, a single-family house, is just out of reach. And so the more we can build these so-called missing middle units, the more we can address the affordable housing problem.”
The report also shows life expectancy waning in the Little Rock area, dropping by just over a year over the past decade to an average of 75.3 years in 2023.
