Over the past decade or so as $10 million apartments have prevailed in New York and more and more neighborhoods have been given over to the kind of luxury shopping required to fill them, it has been common to say that the city has turned into a “playground for the rich.” At the same time, of course, New York has turned into a playground of the more literal kind, with a child-centric ethos bearing well-established variants of urban nuisance: stroller gridlock in gentrifying areas, car services that cater to 5-year-olds, sidewalk whining that in some cases becomes its own source of noise pollution. (When you can hear Amadeus demanding a second packet of Pirate’s Booty from your fourth-floor walk-up on West 83rd Street, do you feel like calling 311?)

That the city’s birthrate has been in steady decline seems unlikely to eradicate these dominant conventions. Data recently released from the Health Department’s vital statistics bureau indicates that in 2013 the city achieved its lowest birthrate since the Great Depression. Currently at 14.3 (a figure that refers to the number of births per 1,000 people), the birthrate now just barely surpasses what it was in 1936, when it stood at 13.6.

It is not well-to-do families in TriBeCa who are responsible for this waning, as any casual examination of Greenwich Street at 3 p.m. and a look at the outsize apartments in real estate listings might make evident. TriBeCa, in fact, logged one of the highest birthrates in the city. In 2013, the highest rates of multiple births occurred on the Upper East Side and in Brooklyn Heights. Between 2004 and 2013, of all the racial groups that the city’s Health Department measures, birthrates increased only among whites.

Beginning around 2010, as birthrates among whites started steadily to climb up, birthrates among blacks began to go down. In 2013, blacks had a birthrate of 12.7, the lowest of any group in the city, with the abortion rate four times as high among black women as among white women — a reality that has had certain black clergy members alarmed and calling for action. Asians and Hispanics maintained the highest birthrates, but these figures, too, have trended downward in recent years.