‘Kindergarten Cop’ lied to us. This is the real single-parent capital of America.

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We simply can't shut off that one part of our brains that looks for interesting patterns in data. Even in situations where it shouldn't be triggered – like when you're just rewatching a movie like “Kindergarten Cop.”

That ramshackle Arnold Schwarzenegger movie from 1990 is a humorous film from start to finish. One of the most suspicious moments in our opinion occurred when the young and muscular Arnold, playing police detective John Kimble, reveals in front of a child at Oregon’s Astoria Elementary that he’s not married.

“Welcome to Astoria,” the mother, clearly exasperated by Arnold's antics, replies with a labored breath, “this is the single-parent capital of America.”

Astoria, Oregon, doesn’t pass the smell test as the city with the highest number of single-parent households.

Areas with the highest numbers of single parents generally face significant challenges. Specifically, high poverty levels and a sizable portion of the local population receiving government aid are the strongest indicators of single parenthood.

It doesn't quite live up to expectations. Despite being situated at the mouth of the vast Columbia River, the city may not have achieved the level of success envisioned by its proponents, who once hoped it would become the New Orleans or New York of the West Coast. However, it has still managed to establish a contented existence in Oregon's northwestern corner.

The county's poverty rate is higher than both the average for the U.S. and the state of Oregon on the whole, and its rate of residents on food stamps or other forms of public aid is also higher, but not nearly as high as the peaks seen in Oregon or nationally.

It's no surprise that Astoria has a relatively high rate of single parents, considering that about 28 percent of the households with kids in the area don't have a partner, which is slightly higher than the national average of 25.5 percent, making it about the 6,000th highest out of over 15,000 places where the 2020 Census has at least 100 households with children.

— and, presumably, by Arnold’s fellow Austrians — and named themselves after American fur trader and baron John Jacob Astor instead.

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I still remember all the empty stores here in the 1970s and 80s," she said in an email. "For a long time, it seemed like Astoria would decline and disappear. But now, the younger generation is reviving the area with new businesses and activities.

It's true that back in the 1970s, Clatsop County in Oregon had the 12th-highest poverty rate among Oregon's 36 counties. Also, Astoria's Clatsop County had a higher percentage of unmarried parents compared to total parent households than almost all other Oregon counties. In 1970, it had the 732nd highest percentage of this demographic nationwide, and by 1980, that ranking had dropped to 462nd.

Out in the countryside. Later, a group of cattle being driven by a clueless young country boy were blocking the road and had to be moved out of the way by a townsman carrying a gun.

In the late 20th century, it seems popular entertainment may have actually helped save the town by supplying another big-budget film: "The Goonies," a 1985 movie about a group of brave young outcasts that try to save their homes from a powerful real estate developer.

If you talk to many of my college students, they would say that "The Goonies" helped trigger Astoria's four-decade-long resurgence. They'll tell you that before the movie turned the town into a well-known destination around the world, no one appreciated Astoria's charm. While the truth is more nuanced, there's some validity to their statement.

Today, Astoria is now a highly sought-after destination, with Goodenberger saying that some worry it's being overwhelmed by the amount of love it's getting. Home prices have risen significantly, increasing by over 140% in the past decade, outpacing more than 90% of its comparable communities, according to Zillow's data. This rapid growth is making it difficult for many long-time residents to afford to stay in the area.

We wanted to know why the "Kindergarten Cop" script portrayed Astoria as a place with a lot of single parents. We connected with one of the screenwriters, Herschel Weingrod, in Hollywood to get some answers. He told us that he and his partner, Timothy Harris, were brought in to make some changes to a script that was originally written by Murray Salem. Weingrod said he doesn't remember writing that particular line about Astoria being the "single-parent capital," which means it might have been in Salem's original script or it could have been added later during filming.

That led us to director Ivan Reitman, but he passed away in 2022. His close associate, executive producer Joe Medjuck, told us that he wasn't aware of where the line originated, but it seemed to fit nicely in the script with the rest.

“They put the line in there just to make the detective's job harder, and with more single parents, the odds are tougher to narrow down to the one they want.”

Less than a decade after the film's debut, it appears that the director may have had another town in mind: Salem was reportedly inspired by a kindergarten teacher he met at his 20-year high school reunion in a declining Rust Belt town in Ohio. The original script may not have been set in Astoria as initially thought.

So where should the script have been set? What's the actual city in America with the most single-parent households?

When we crunched the numbers, we discovered it exists in an even more quintessentially, idyllic American setting – but one that appears to be unlikely to suffer from being over-loved.

The counties with the most single parents are often located in the Black Belt, the Southern heartland, known for its rich dark soil - the kind that's so fertile that landowners purchased countless thousands of enslaved black people to cultivate it.

Their descendants, of course, made up the core of the region's large Black population, which helped keep the name relevant up until the present day. And in fact, being a single parent is often associated with the Black community, both in everyday culture and in studies.

According to sociologist Regina S. Baker from the University of North Carolina, Black American women are three or four times as likely as Whites to be single parents, and Black children are three times as likely to grow up in poverty. However, Baker's research also warns against assuming that one causes the other, as some politicians and sociologists have repeatedly done in their "Negro pathology" theories.

Baker and her colleagues, including David Brady from the University of Southern California and Ryan Finnigan from the University of California at Berkeley, dispute that straightforward conclusion. They found that younger parents, less educated parents, and parents without a job in Black families predict child poverty more effectively than the prevalence of single mothers.

In fact, it's observed that children of white mothers are more frequently exposed to poverty due to single parenthood compared to those of black mothers. This is largely attributed to the reality that black women do not experience as significant of an economic benefit from marriage as white women do.

“A lot of people focus on the challenges Black single mothers face, but what about the big disadvantages faced by kids in Black married families? These racial inequalities go far beyond single motherhood, they're a much bigger issue overall.”

It becomes clear there's no universal force that makes poverty more likely just because someone is a single mother when you look at poverty rates in other developed countries, Brady said. In most wealthy democracies, being a single mother creates no statistically significant link to poverty.

“Compared to other wealthy democracies, the United States doesn't set itself apart when it comes to single parenthood, but the odds of a single mother being poor are significantly higher here than anywhere else.”

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But the Delta's airline-spawning heyday also marked the beginning of its downturn, as farmers started replacing human workers with machines, kicking off a long period of population decline that still hasn't ended.

We can debate which town or county within the Delta is the single-parent capital, but it varies by the specific measure and time frame used.

The rivers of the Delta mainly make up much of the region.

One British author, "the most American place on Earth." We imagine Arnold Schwarzenegger will be headed there next.

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