America’s urban rebirth is missing actual births
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
This means that house prices are a race to the top so to speak. You're always competing with your neighbors.
The first thing you do is have both of them work (this happened ~4 decades ago). Even if you don't want to, you have to, because your neighbors are doing it and they're your competition in the home hunt.
The second thing you do is live together with other unrelated adults to save money on rent (hey, housing is scarce for some dumb reason, after all).
The third thing you do is decide not to have kids, because after all, the 2+ bed flats are full of adult professionals sharing them. You can't possibly outbid them!
Meanwhile, the few extremely well-paid people are able to pay for the nice homes that were built before the housing cartels took over. Everyone else is screwed. They can move to the country, but jobs are scarce and crappy <massive generalization of course>.
Not sure what comes after step 3. Maybe we could trying building a flat or two?
The steps 1...3 you described are literally "the demand for housing will gradually fall". What follows is, naturally, gradual lowering of the prices, with subsequent stabilization and rebirth.
Curiously enough we observe the same patterns in nature: a species out-grows its prime ecological niche; the population starts falling down (usually without outright crashing), and then stabilizes at the optimum point. The cycle repeats.
The only possible source of instability in the whole housing/population cycle would be the government trying to prop up the house prices once the price correction starts. Some people have this misbegotten idea that real estate has to be a magical kind of investment that always appreciates in value.
The price signal called "rent in SF" suggests that there is a scarcity, given that people who would like to have a 2 bed apartment to themselves can't get one. That's not weird. What's weird is that we've let the owners of homes vote on whether it should be illegal to build more homes. It makes sense - it increases the value of their asset. It's just not helpful to non-home-owners.
You wrote "The only possible source of instability in the whole housing/population cycle would be the government trying to prop up the house prices once the price correction start" - but the government, at the behest of local homeowners, IS propping up the price of houses by making it nearly impossible to build new ones (this has abated somewhat in the extremely recent past).
Do we give GM a vote on how many cars Ford is allowed to build?
Note that I write "home", not "house" intentionally - providing homes for many people in a small area usually means apartments, condos, etc. for the most part. Houses still exist, albeit as a luxury. It also means you don't price land used for sleeping cars cheaper than land used for sleeping people.
Then,once the foraging/pasture regrows, that rate being the same, the elk rebound.
Calhoun proved this. The mice would, despite having everything they needed, despite the population crash giving them the space they apparently required, just not procreate. Lots of bizarre behaviors, but no procreation.
No little girl who has grown up an only child, most of the adults in her life either having just one child or even none at all, will say "I want to have 2.1 children when I grow up!". And it would have to be every little girl that did that for replacement fertility. If only a few do it, then the number has to be higher than 2.1 for it to average out.
The implication is that fertility rates can only ever fall, and never rise. We're more like Calhoun's mice than we are like some cervines that have outgrown their food supply.
Humans out in the real world aren't like that. Some live in the crowded city, some live in the open regions. Some hunt for best deals in the mall, others hunt for the game for lunch. There's a constant trickle of cultural & genetic mixing, and there's a lot of small towns etc. that are somewhere in-between on the scale of self-reliance.
If the city populations were to crash, we the humans wouldn't really suffer all that much. Perhaps less new entertainment content would be produced, but the necessities would be taken care of as per the usual, knowledge would be preserved, and communication & trade would go on. In due time, cities would be re-populated.
"this will hurt home values"
"I like being able to park on the [public, taxpayer-funded] street instead of paying for land to store my car on"
"This will bring more cars"
but it was telling that nobody at the meetings had school-age kids. They also fought like hell against bike lanes, which would help with the whole "people === cars" relation. I'm sure what you describe is a concern for people too.
Ironically the neighborhood was a huge draw for people from _other_ neighborhoods because it was so nice (South Park San Diego). Known for its small bungalow-style housing and pleasant, narrow streets - both illegal to build now. More housing would allow more folks to live walking distance from the nice bars, restaurants, etc. (and the well-regarded German-language school I would've wanted to send my kid to if I had one), instead of driving in and consuming available parking.
After all, kids learn all sorts of dubious things from "innocent" Places and well-off kids use things like drugs at a similar rate. They are simply less likely to get caught because they have unsupervised large back yards and things like that.
More seriously, preferring rich neighbors isn't rooted in racism, it's a cause of racism. Why don't you want poor people moving into your neighborhood? For the exact reason poor people want to move into your neighborhood! Because proximity to wealthy is valuable, and proximity to poverty is less valuable.
Have a kid in the big city is the ultimate flex. No one else has kids because they can barely afford to live there themselves, let alone support a kid in it.
Edit: Also, it's not as if the author failed to mention that it's expensive to raise families in the city. It's that he says "yes it's really expensive to raise kids in the big city" but then goes off on a completely different tangent to say that everyone living in NYC and SF are "affluent childless" singles who just want to turn the city into their own childless entertainment machine, which completely negates his earlier comment on cost of living as the primary reason why there are so few young families in the city (plus something about fewer people enjoying sex).
While I’m not trying to be overly critical, he is also off base with his violent crime statistics as the nineties had the highest aggregate number of murders up until the end of the decade.
The cost is high because those "affluent childless" singles are willing and able to pay more.
If a city has high-paying jobs but doesn’t build enough housing for all the people working those jobs or the economy supporting those jobs, only those with lots of money to spend can afford housing, food, &c.
Presto, you get a high proportion of “DINKs” (double-income, no kids.)
Either explanation may drive the presence of high costs and density of DINKs. Or both: Perhaps the two things create a cycle of costs spiralling up combined with a change in demographic.
They've started to co-opt words typically reserved for human children at a rate that is difficult to believe is some sort of bias on my part. It's bizarre. Pets are surrogate children.
I lived in San Francisco for 20 years and never, ever saw that. I'm not some boring techie who never leaves SOMA or the Mission, I've walked every street in san francisco (according to my Garmin), I've had a drink in every bar, I've made music in almost every park.
Have you ever even been to San Francisco?
What do we do if our canine companion has mobility issues? How do we take them shopping with us so that they aren’t left at home, lonely? How do we take them to the park so they can lay down under a tree with us while we read a book?
Many people choose very small dogs. I don’t know if it’s fashion, or if it’s the best choice for living in a very small apartment/condo, but perhaps very small dogs aren’t able to keep up for long outings, and a stroller lets them accompany their human.
I stop far short of ridiculing things without looking past my biases and knee-jerk impulse to criticize things I don’t understand.
I don't know if it's ever going to be anywhere near 1:2.
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=san+francisco+stroller+wit...
The city that I know, have supported, run companies, run punk venues, run hacker houses, and taught children to program does not bear any resemblance to the views of recent techie imports.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2018/10/19/us-fertilit...
Harder than in the 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, up to 80s? Millions of dirt poor immigrants raised children in the city just fine, and tons of working and middle class people were born and raised there.
I seriously doubt it's "too hard" in any other sense, except job/rent wise.
Most also own a home, that they bought... by saving money. They do not come from privileged backgrounds, and at least one family immigrated to this country.
Now, nothing is wrong with material goods as such. Nothing is wrong with sacrificing having children for the sake of a higher goal (as a Catholic, you already understand that to be something people can do, e.g., the priesthood or the religious life). But a society that has traded the privilege of raising a new generation in not for superior goods but for inferior goods, for the sake of empty self-indulgence, surely smacks of malaise and decadence. Is it any wonder why so many of us are depressed when we celebrate a perverted form of individualism that is ultimately self-destructive? We have a nature and this recent fad that denies human nature or perverts it will not produce happiness.
I don't mean that out of some disdain for families who cannot do that. My own parents (immigrants to this country) could not, and I wish they could have, and I am happy we can pull this off. To be fair, they made up for it by accepting jobs that let them be home more. Like my dad refused promotions so he could be home with his children more often, and my mom became a teacher to spend more time with us. The value of such a gift is incredibly understated in modern society, as is the joy of children.
> The problem is that there is no support in the U.S. for working couples who choose to move away from family for economic opportunity.
There is a lot more than their ever was (governmentally at least), and people are not having children. The issue is we've abandoned all community institutions, but this is due to the aggregate choices of many people, not a social policy, IMO. Speaking of the families I was talking about, we rely on each other for many things you'd rely on family for, like babysitting.
I mean, this is just not true, you know. Being with babies whole day every day is not fun for overwhelming majority of adults, neither male nor female. They may see meaning in it, but like, fun it is not. And it definitely is not easy fun when you are on fourth or fifth baby, meaning care about siblings too.
Also, managing both 5 kids and full time job would be pretty hard even if good daycare is available. Your "she can go to work because she has college" completely ignores logistics of it and expectations on software engineers these days.
I don't remember this being my dream as a child, quite the opposite actually.
This isn't to argue that women should be barred from working. It is merely to emphasize that this rather vicious characterization of women who raise their own children as "oppressed" or "subjugated" has the very real potential to amuse those women who are confident enough in having chosen their children over their careers.
> create choices
> shame women for making the choice that already existed and you didn't have a hand in creating
It used to be that the cities had lots of single-income families. They only had to compete with each other in the bidding war for good housing.
Women entered the job market due to birth control and legal changes, so now we have lots of two-income households in that bidding war. Same-sex couples also became legal, adding even more two-income households.
Meanwhile, low-cost forms of housing were legislated away. You can rent an apartment or be homeless, but you can't rent an SRO (single-room occupancy) or bed cage. The homeless scare away families, and the lack of SRO options forces single people into the bidding war for larger housing.
I'm no expert, and it seems likely that women joining the workforce in large numbers would increase housing prices due to increased purchasing power, but this seems like a bit of a stretch. unless you go back to the times of wide-spread lynchings, wouldn't same-sex couples have lived as "roommates"? also forget about couples, two or more acquaintances sharing a housing unit has been legal and common for quite a long time now. I'm skeptical that this is a significant cause of shock to the housing market.
A bigger issue is that a lot of formerly big housing, at least in New York, has now been subdivided, since the whole is less than the sum of its rents. You are also seeing a large rise in people willing to be roommates with people they don’t know, so if you have three income-earning singles they’ll outbid a two-income family. And students are a special case of that, since the rents will go as high as their student loan balances can sustain.
CityLab recently documented the rise and fall of the SRO:
https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/02/the-rise-and-fall-of-...
the argument that dual-income households becoming necessities for home ownership and raising a family is plausible, if unsupported.
but the quoted causal relationship above is not even plausible, let alone supported. women entered the job market because they wanted to realize their ambitions and support their families, just like men. other societal changes may have aided or hindered that ambition to various effect, but they don't form the driving force as you state.
This applies to a narrow subset of urban locations
Legal changes is fascinating euphemism for "not being punished for it anymore".
City dwellers seem to think of smaller towns as some sort of dessert wasteland, but I can get to anything a city dweller can in the same amount of time. There's just as much stuff out here, we just also have enough room to live comfortably. The low property prices and crime are great too.
I herd my 12 kids down from my far-too-small apartment. My wife and I go in separate elevator cars so that we can fit. We'll go enjoy a trendy restaurant because we're city people and we do that. We walk along toward the subway station, sometimes stepping out into traffic to avoid tents. Every 30 seconds, we count the children to make sure that we have the same number we started with. We really should do more than count, in order to prevent substitutions. Sometimes we have to back up to find a kid who is slow. Sometimes we must run to stop a kid who is running ahead. We check shoelaces, then lead the kids onto the escalator. At the platform, we continue counting while keeping kids away from the platform edge. Once the subway arrives, we get on, hopefully 100% of us. We guard the door to make sure nobody exits before the correct stop. At the correct stop, we herd them off, hopefully getting 100% of them onto the platform. We check shoelaces again, and then head up the escalator. We continue on our way, counting as we go. The kids are tired. Some need to pee, without warning. Too late! We find the restaurant. People glare at us. Oops, backtrack for a missing kid, hopefully not swiped or squished or infected. Again we go to the restaurant. We order a meal. It's only $1400 for the family, such a deal. Oh, they want to tack on a huge tip for themselves, so more. People are still glaring at us. Food gets dropped. A glass slides off the table and shatters, splattering the drink on several people. At least my kids don't scream and throw things, so I get some credit for that. Now we can go to the parkland or activities, but several kids are looking sleepy. Well, back home we go. This happens 3 times per day, every day, just so we can eat. We can't possibly carry enough overpriced groceries home for cooking, and anyway the kitchen in our apartment is a joke. We just have to accept spending $1,533,000 per year to eat.
What choice did they have? Birth control wasn't widely available until the 60s.
But effective condoms were widely deployed to the non anglophone armies in World War One, and had existed long before then.
It’s true that there was a theocratic campaign against all birth control from the 1920s that finally succumbed in most countries in the 1960s, but that’s not all of history.
Just one example out of many I found in the article: jobs in big cities are the highest paying. Thus, the article quickly announces then moves on, living in a big city equals a “winner takes all” situation, which leads to dramatic inequality.
How does that remotely support such a dramatic conclusion? Does having a bit less paying job mean you have nothing? Do people not commute into the city for work? Do the lower costs of living outside big cities not offset the lower wages? How does this translate into high inequality? Where does all that inequal wealth go when these “childless couples” die? Etc, etc.
I haven’t read the Atlantic in awhile, but this seemed like something I’d find in the opinion section of my local newspaper. So many poorly supported points in this article.
At least in Europe I have found that while salaries can be a bit higher in cities (maybe 10-20%) compared to rural areas, the housing cost can be massively higher (200-500% higher). The difference between regional and capital cities is smaller, but can still be important.
This doesn't take into account other costs such as food (supermarkets are cheaper) and entertainment (mostly because there's less of it and mountainbiking in the forest is largely free).
I'm always surprised so few people seem to realize and take advantage of this.
The word inequality (as opposed to poverty or standard of living) explicitly registers disinterest in this kind of argument. The important thing is that the distribution is too wide; the objective conditions at its midpoint are irrelevant.
Outside, you have a narrow strip of concrete, possibly with a few trees, that you are allowed to inhabit. Beyond it is as asphalt with two ton steel contraptions whizzing past at speeds that will maim or kill you.
There are a few places you can go from here. There are a few parks, where you can have some green space, along with the sound of the steel contraptions. There are other strips of concrete throughout the city between the contraptions' domain and the buildings. There are places you can pay to be allowed to occupy for a time. There are places you are paid to be for some number of hours each day. And there's the public library if you can reach it.
If you're responsible for just you and have access to a ready stream of money, you can cobble together an okay existence from this. You escape into intellectual pursuits in your small housing box. You spend lots of hours at the place you are paid to be. You visit your friends' small housing boxes. You spend some money to have somewhere else to go from time to time.
If you have small children, this changes. Intellectual pursuits? They can't read yet, so your only option is parking them in front of videos. It hurts to see their faces go slack and their motions grow spastic. You spend time taking them to visit their friends in other boxes and meeting their friends at the park. You breathe a sigh of relief when they enter school, since now they have a place to be analogous to the place you are paid to be. You can't let them outside to play on the narrow strips of concrete. One false move and some yahoo in a steel contraption has killed them.
If you want families in the city, bulldoze the major urban cores and replace them with low rise cohousing communities. Cars are parked on the edge. Everyone lives in spaces that face onto communal spaces. Community centers become focal points in each block, along with lots of other public space, indoors and out, instead of turning it all over to commercial interests. Short of that, if you want to raise a family and you have the means, you buy your own place that has its own small park and inside space to play. Everyone is cut off and must own the same amenities because of the tyranny of commercial space and cars over the ground level of the city.
You have a very narrow definition of the infrastructure required to raise kids. People have been raising families in cities long before suburbs were invented.
We used to do apartment living, it sucked, especially when the neighbours kids started learning instruments.
Walking or... driving?
A 20 min drive is assuming a bit of traffic. It's not a big deal though. We are avid surfers and the kids go to "nippers" (Australian national club that gets kids into life saving and understanding the ocean).
As the kids get older, they will either drive themselves or they will get the bus to the beach if they want to hang out with their mates. The driving age here is 17 (that's when you can drive yourself). It's a semi rural area so driving or buses (good quality buses) are the norm.
When we liveed in Sydney, we used to live right next to the beach but the droves of people that come to visit ruin it a little. Where we live now, we don't get too many people coming this way other than locals which is awesome.
I mean, isn't a play room and a computer game room and even a music room just overlapping ?
The second living room has darkened walls and tints on the windows. It has a project bolted to the ceiling and a screen that rolls down for movies, smash and mario kart (my kids are still young enough to think Nintendo are the only computer games :-)
I don't know about you, but those are things I'd go to at most once a year so taking the train/driving downtown for those rare events wasn't a big deal for me growing up.
> free events for kids, concerts just for babies,
more details?
> parks
My friends and I used to play basketball, american football, and ultimate frisbee all the time growing up. Now I live downtown and the parks I walk past never have enough free space to play those kind of sports. Not to mention the walking parks and playgrounds in the suburbs are usually way bigger and less crowded.
> swimming pools
Suburbs have these too and one of my friends growing up even had their own backyard pool where we would play sharks and minnows, use the pool basketball hoop to play 21, or use the diving board. Playing the former 2 are much harder in a packed city pool then a suburban pool due to crowds, let alone a private backyard one.
> little league, soccer league, skate parks,
Had all these in the suburbs when i grew up and again, those require a lot of space which is in short supply in the city so there's almost always more available options to do these in the suburbs.
This is your problem. In a city you don't need to put yourself and your family in a deadly metallic stress machine to get places. And as a result you will feel happier and more connected.
Even in a city I am sometimes very shocked at what we put ourselves through to use a car. People constantly honking and flicking each other off with various insults and me on the sidewalk wishing they'd all calm down. (And when I used to drive too much, I was angry like them, and weighed substantially more.)
It's difficult to go anywhere without putting yourself in a "deadly metallic stress machine", whether it be a car, plane, train, boat, etc. I suppose if you have that much fear of transportation, living somewhere with ample options within walking distance is best.
A packed 4-5-6 line on a sweltering summer late afternoon can be a bit of a metallic stress machine. Not deadly, at least.
I don't want to use the word virtue signaling because it's become a politically loaded term and I don't want to use it that way but your comment is just virtue signaling to the anti-car crowd.
Do you have children? I ask, because the frequency of attending these and all the other public institutions skyrockets when you have kids.
Before I had kids, it had been literally decades since I stepped foot into a public library. After we had kids, we go all the time. Same with museums, parks, pools, everything.
I’d bet that most towns and suburbs with 10,000 inhabitants have 2-4 of those, or more :-)
Well, the vast majority of families could never afford to raise a child in NYC or any other 'dense urban' area, so the decision is mostly made automatically.
You're missing qualifiers like "in the United States in recent times."
Your preconceived notions of what suburban living is like are just as inaccurate as the perceptions of city life of the person you responded to.
There were "woods" between the endless maze of houses, but all of them were just parts of other people's property. And who was I going to play with in them, except for my one nearby friend?
I ended up just playing a lot of video games.
For all that urban centers are supposedly "hostile places" (according to the GP), I look at the adults and children I know in cities and I see mostly fit, healthy, active people with multiple hobbies and interests. I look at the adults and children I know in suburbs and I see overweight, sedentary people who spend so much of their life commuting between work, school, and home, that they barely have time for more than one day of a week of something fun like an organized sport. The rest is just spent at home watching TV or playing video games.
If I do decide have children, I definitely know what kind of place I want to do it in.
We would ride our bicycles more than 5 miles along US-44. It has 2 lanes each side for a total of 4 lanes, 2-foot shoulders, and traffic that often got to a decent highway speed. There could be snow on the shoulder. One of the older bridges was narrow, with only about a half-foot shoulder. We went anyway.
We had similar woods. We went out there and built a fort. We camped. We misbehaved. We went to the railroad tracks and put coins on the rails. We hiked a mile to a lake, carrying an inflated raft and fishing or camping gear.
Don't blame the suburb if you chose to play video games. I hear that cities also have video games.
I grew up in a city of 75,000, in a house currently worth about $150k (purchased new in 1976 by my parents for $38k and sold in 1993 for $120k), on 2.5 acres. It was about 30% lawn, gardens & sports area and 70% wooded (with a creek, even!). I only had 1-2 good neighborhood friends but I did have a younger brother & sister and we were constantly outside doing something.
I think you need to think about how you define "city" and "suburb" a little more.
I get that everyone is living the best existence out there, but c’mon people, isn’t it clear that there is no objectively better place, only places with trade offs that appeal to different folks?
I hated that move to the burbs... Nothing to do except getting kicked out of the local mall or Borders. No libraries, no parks, no pools nearby... And no public transport.
When before in the city I could just take public transport and go downtown, meet my friends, go to the library, etc..
Now that I have kids, I live in a city. But it's a quiet neighborhood, and we have a yard -- that I did appreciate from the suburbs ;-)
Currently raising two kids in an urban center, and I'm excited for them to have way more opportunities than I had.
Suburbs are boring. I grew up in them and much of my family still lives in them. I understand why people live in them — cost and space for raising kids, but they are definitely boring. And most of the people I know that live in them wouldn’t disagree, it’s a necessity driven by cost.
I think a lot of people here think suburbia is some vast wasteland of houses as far as the eye can see. Sure, that exists in some places, but a lot of us live in vary diverse suburbs with mixed residential, retail, commercial, etc.
I also have to say I have not met anyone who lives in my area because it's cheaper :). If anything I could save a few bucks by moving closer to the urban core. Again, I'm sure the cost thing is true somewhere but America is a pretty big place.
In ages past, this had more to do with shopping than entertainment. I suspect that it will become obvious that Amazon has negated this need, partially or wholly. The only they don't sell (mostly) is groceries, which for the large part were and are available locally.
I'd say look for a cross-section of both if you can - city so vibrant that it offers 10x (or 100x) more culture, events, activities, jobs etc. than you can possibly cover, while having walking distance to amazing swimming (at least in summer), great nature and mountains within quick drive distance for the weekends, or where traffic jams mean usually at most 1 bottleneck street getting slow a bit twice a day for an hour. Those places are rare but they do exist.
And all the "muh school district" types can't see that the inner suburbs are the worst of both worlds (IMO).
Oh, and our kids have hundreds of other kids to play with.
But then again, where I grew up is very different from NY. My parents are both from NYC, and my cousins are both raising kids in the NYC area (one in the city, one in the suburbs), but my parents moved to Dallas a few years before I was born, and I grew up in Dallas but still got to visit my family in NY. NYC's strength is also the most aggravating thing about it: everything is in the city. This means that the suburbs are just bedroom communities with nothing to do. Visiting my family in Westchester has always felt like spending time out in the country. Dallas, on the other hand, is distributed and spread out. Except for a teeny tiny urban core, we're all suburb. We have edge cities everywhere instead of concentrating everything on one place. The suburbs where I grew up are also much denser than the suburbs where my cousins grew up, which helps.
One interesting study though is with my cousins in NY. They have three kids each, and both are fairly wealthy (honestly, they make more in a year than I'll ever see in my life). One of them lives in a swanky apartment on the Upper West Side, in walking distance of both Central Park and Lincoln Center. The other lives in a large house in Westchester, not far from where she grew up. I can say that, for my cousin who lives in the city, her kids have access to everything you mentioned, and she and the kids are very happy with where they live. But she's also filthy rich and is able to afford a very large apartment in a prime location. Not many people in Manhattan have that kind of privilege. Before she moved to the suburbs, my other cousin used to live in a teeny tiny two-bedroom apartment in Battery Park City. When she had twins, there was pretty much no space for anything, and as soon as she got pregnant with her third kid, she and her husband immediately began looking for a house in the suburbs, and they moved right after she gave birth. It's a giant house with six bedrooms, an expansive basement, and a backyard that won't quit. She told me that while she misses her short commute, it's all worth it to give the kids a perfect environment to grow up in. And the kids certainly have no lack of anything to do: when I visited last year, the kids were all involved in multiple sports leagues and other activities. Everyone is happy with where they live.
Kids used to be able to play in the street in the city.
You have to have all these things, because the children in a city can't just run off on their own and have to be marshalled and entertained at every step. Living in the suburbs I used to just go out every day and play in the woods and hills with my friends and we entertained themselves. Hardly boring!
Of course, Japanese cities don't have enormous parking lots, everyone driving cars, etc. They have taxis of course, and some cars (not a lot really, given the population), and work vehicles, but not the huge amount of vehicle traffic we have. And of course, there's tons of trains and buses, so it's really cheap and easy to get around by public transit. On top of that, there's bicycles: tons of people get around by bicycle, and the traffic level and speeds are low enough to make this very safe, plus there's no culture there of being aggressive towards cyclists or pedestrians the way America has.
It’s not a complete reversal, but the fact that Japan’s rising birth rate has defied regional and global trends and persists despite continued urbanization and secularization shows they might be on to something.
Culture matters, and quite frankly Japanese culture is different.
Public transit? Most everyone in cities that really depend on it like NYC.
There are various historical factors that have resulted in that abysmal situation in the US. Assigning it all to a four-word summary of Japanese culture is a bit reductive. The dangers in the city are different than they in the 80's, and they'll change again. The important part is to believe we can do better.
In major American cities, kids are taken on public transportation all the time. Often big groups of school kids are in transit for a museum field trip downtown.
Homogenity has little to do with it. Same paranoia is applied to playground structures, when the child can stay alone home for 1 hour, to everything.
America (just as most developed nations) only props up their birth rate though immigration.
Also your ideas of children are way off. We have a seven month old and we read to her, take her to the library, go to space talks, etc. Actually we do a lot more intellectual stuff now. My wife has taken some online courses ans weve started re learning french. Parents who put their kids in front of the TV are lazy.
Parks exist in most urban areas and are perfect for kids to play in.
All the other dangers you mentioned are way overstated
I do not understand this paranoia that has gripped the American public. The way people act would have you believe things are worse today than in the past when all actual data (anf observation) say the contrary
Maybe when your kid is a bit older you'll understand the appeal of turning on the TV just to have an hour to clean up, do a bit of laundry, and prepare dinner...
You might be surprised how interested they are in helping out.
Maybe there are some super-parents out there who can manage to always make that work, but in my experience trying to get my kids to help when they are hungry and tired after getting home from some activity on a hot summer day is just an exercise in frustration.
They come from raising a pair of kids, currently aged four and five. We actually have been living on a semi-rural island for the last five years, though.
Minus the used needles and other debris that litter many of them. It’s a sad state that that’s the best place people with drug problems can go, but it seems they don’t have anywhere else to go.
It’s just not where I want to bring my kid to hangout.
The vast majority of the parks I've been to in the US have been clean and well kept up, even ones in the higher-crime areas of town.
> Singapore's top diplomat in the UK, Michael Teo, defended Singapore's harsh drug laws by pointing to the country's lower rates for drug use.
"8.2% of the UK population are cannabis abusers; in Singapore, it is 0.005%. For ecstasy, the figures are 1.8% for the UK and 0.003% for Singapore; and for opiates—such as heroin, opium, and morphine - 0.9% for the UK and 0.005% for Singapore," claimed Teo. "We do not have traffickers pushing drugs openly in the streets, nor do we need to run needle exchange centers."
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/05/portugals-radic...
Not exactly aligned with Western countries of human rights.
Junkies would get little red sharps disposal containers, and bring it back those back in for the deposit refund. They'd stop doing it on the streets (for the most part), for the same reason you don't see raging alcoholics crowding the alleys drinking moonshine.
Drug criminalization/prohibition creates all of the problems that most people associate with drug use/addiction.
When a city is wealthy it gets like the top level comment described. I don't know what it is but it's related to money. You can see this by comparing the wealther boroughs of NYC to the poorer ones or comparing the wealthier suburbs of Boston to the poorer ones. The poorer ones are more "alive" for lack of a better term.
The car stuff really doesn't bother me. It's just a function of the dominant means of transit when that city was built out.
Actually, it sounds a whole lot like the Phoenix metro area. Atlanta, SLC, and most of LA probably qualify too.
>Because "car-centric and pedestrian hostile" sounds more like most suburbs than most urban areas.
Most American "cities" really are more like suburbs, when you compare to real cities in other countries. Especially the cities which grew up after cars became popular. These cities were never very pedestrian-friendly. Phoenix is probably the poster child for this. The amount of sprawl there is ridiculous, and there's really no place that's pedestrian-friendly, just because everything is so far apart that it would take forever to get to your destination on foot, even though sidewalks generally do exist.
With rural areas the isolation is even larger if your on a farm that is miles away from any other human beings. You have a nearby forest to explore, but that isn't exclusive to rural areas.
I think what your complaining about is culture, and you're conflating it with the form of housing. It's how you can't let kids go out and find other kids to play with in the local neighborhood like you could in the 70s or earlier because it's illegal and enforced quickly.
You can do that in a city (see berlin: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/05/travel/berlin-family-holi... ), suburbia or a village but it's all dependent on culture and law.
when they get older, they develop more specific personalities/interests and they are likely to go to a larger school and make friends that live further away. when I was a kid, I lived basically right on the border between the city and the suburbs. all my friends lived just a little too far away to walk/bike to their houses, and the streets were busy enough that I doubt my parents would have let me anyway. any plans I made had to be convenient for my parents, and they tended to be pretty busy.
this is just my opinion, but I think "real life" doesn't really begin until you can move around the world on your own. for me, this wasn't until I got my license near the end of high school (which represents its own danger; teenagers are terrible drivers). I suspect my friends who grew up in the city, taking public transit to hang out with each other, had much richer teenage years than I did, maybe even safer.
But I have noticed (and been criticized on HN for claiming) that the parenting cultural bubble in SF seems completely unknown to many other subcultures. It is indeed a very good community, though.
When I was a kid I grew up in a rural area, an urban area, then a rural area, then an urban area. They were both super cool, but I had more friends I could hang out with in the latter and so my life was automatically better.
There is some interesting historical reading here: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/4ef3/28b64fdb97357674725324...
The modern twist on the concept is to focus on preservation instead of total replacement, trying to enhance the environment that attracted people to the diverse urban area in the first place rather than outright replacing it with centrally-planned alternatives. There are also large efforts to redevelop totally unused land (with projects like the Docklands in London or Hudson Yards in NYC) - but rarely in isolation, the goal is usually to incorporate the space into the rest of the city's fabric.
I completely agree with your points about cars, though - most American cities devote far too much space to them, especially storage of empty ones. We'd do well to shift our streetscape priorities to people, especially in dense mixed-use areas, which I think would be a big step towards the communal spaces you envision.
Not where I grew up and at least there is space to play sports. My friends and I used to play basketball, american football, and ultimate frisbee all the time growing up. Now I live downtown and the parks I walk past never have any free space.
I stepped out of my door into a hallway of doors, greeted by the scent of several different ethnic foods being cooked, and usually the sound of one or more families.
I take an elevator down the stairs to the lobby, nod at the guy manning the desk who was interested in what I ordered yesterday (it was heavy - he thought car parts, was a rack-mount UPS).
I step out into a U shaped walkway, lined with bushes, with a cherry tree in the middle before merging onto the sidewalk.
Fifteen minutes away in one direction is a zoo that was free. Full of kids learning new things about amazing wildlife. Five minutes in the other direction is a hiking trail, onto another hiking trail.
I think the city and the country and everywhere in between can be a wonderful or terrible place, but I would hesitate to say that any one place is right or wrong for any one person.
Honestly, most of SF is rather friendly and nice. I like it. First moved here 6 years ago.
Parking spaces and road lanes.
You can choose to optimize for car throughput or not.
Or you can choose to make your spaces look like this: https://www.google.com/maps/@42.3082077,-71.3535296,3a,75y,2...
Your call.
Residential and commercial space are both required. Picturesque low-density residential zones kind of force the commercial areas to be like this; how else would people get to them?
[0] http://cityobservatory.org/the-illegal-city-of-somerville/
You can get a surprising amount of density from low rise buildings, with narrow tree-lined streets and generous sidewalks.
My take on the bad thing about sprawl and suburbs is the amount of time and driving needed to get to not sprawl and suburbs. And when there was 'the city' and 'the suburb' living in 'the suburb' was 'nice'. Now that it's all suburbs and a city jammed with traffic from the suburbs, nothing is that nice.
What you've described would be the experience of living inside the Loop in Chicago, amidst class A high-rise office space. People do this! But they actively select themselves into it; by far, most people in Chicago live in residential neighborhoods that read as such, are close to the heart of the city, and don't respond at all to your description.
Now I can get to all of the aforementioned places via car in under 5 minutes. There's Uber and Lyft for when I want to go to a bar. DoorDash serves more than 50 local restaurants. Traffic adds at most 5 minutes to any drive, and only during a small window around 5pm.
The city offers convenience in theory, but from my admittedly anecdotal experience it doesn't hold up in practice. And I'm not sure that matters. At the end of the day, it's just a preference.
I... sorry, I don't believe that. I've never seen a suburb anywhere with ALL that stuff within the 1.5 mile radius you postulate. Sure, you get some of it locally. We have restaurants within 5 minutes, but the place we want to go tonight is 11 minutes away. There's a park next to the local school, sure, but the kids want to go swimming at the place with the good slide and it's 22 minutes away.
And FWIW: I literally grew up in urban Boston, and live in west coast suburbs now.
I have that too, and I didn't even try for it. I'm in unincorporated land just north of Indialantic, FL.
I had to check for pubs, because I don't use them. There are some within 5 minutes. In that distance I also get a beach on the Atlantic and a fishing dock on the brackish intercoastal waterway. It's 8 minutes to Walmart and 11 to a commercial airport. My workplace is only 3 minutes away.
Near me, 3-bedroom homes of about 1200 to 2000 square feet on 0.25 acre lots are going for $120,000 to $240,000. For 4-bedroom homes of about 3000 to 4000 square feet on 0.35 to 0.65 acre lots I think you'd pay $350,000 to $650,000. To get up over a million you'd need to be on the beach (sand and waves in your yard) or on the intercoastal waterway (with a dock for your yacht).
It can't be helped if you insist on going to the far-away restaurant and the far-away park. There is always something better, so you'll end up traveling the farthest that you tolerate.
I agree with almost everything you say but this. Why low rise? With high rises, we can use less space for housing and we would have more space for parks, libraries, and greenery.
* High-rises block more of the sky, making it not seems as worthwhile to go outside.
* Mental detachment from the local area.
The second one is what I've only in the past year or so realized myself. I used to live on the 3rd floor of a 3-floor building, and my apartment had a front and back entrance. The front entrance went to inside stairs out to the front of the building, but the back entrance when straight outside to a wooden porch, then had wooden steps down to ground level. Where I am now, only on the 5th floor of 24, there's only one entrance, to a hallway where I take the elevator to go down and outside.
At my old place, I regularly went outside to do whatever on a whim. Nowadays, it's a really rare thing. And while there is a low-rise/high-rise correlation, I think it's the patio and the stairs, vs the hallway and the elevator that actually caused it. Having so much more distance between inside and outside creates an emotional distance where you don't even think about the outside, let alone decide whether or not to bother.
I've yet to live in one, but I'm thinking if the high-rises have balconies, it would create the same effect as that patio did for me.
> Outside, you have a narrow strip of concrete, possibly with a few trees, that you are allowed to inhabit. Beyond it is as asphalt with two ton steel contraptions whizzing past at speeds that will maim or kill you.
> There are a few places you can go from here. There are a few parks, where you can have some green space, along with the sound of the steel contraptions. There are other strips of concrete throughout the city between the contraptions' domain and the buildings. There are places you can pay to be allowed to occupy for a time. There are places you are paid to be for some number of hours each day. And there's the public library if you can reach it.
You've actually described the typical suburb. Step outside your door into a narrow strip of concrete, possibly with a few trees, and a shortly cut lawn, that you, at great expense of time, and money are allowed to maintain and inhabit (As long as you maintain it to the asinine, often environmentally-harmful expectations of your HOA/Municipality). Beyond that is a frequently sidewalk-less asphalt road, with two ton steel contraptions that are either stationary, or moving at speeds that will maim you.
There is nowhere you can go without getting into a car. (Corollary: Your neighbour will be driving home from the bar, every other Friday, drunk as a skunk.) The nearest park is a mile away. You have some green space you can look at, but its all owned by other people, and if you spend too long gawking at a stranger's yard, somebody might call the cops. [1] If you drive far enough, you may find dreary places where you can pay to be allowed to occupy for a time, called stripmalls. A few may even contain a library.
[1] Because only a criminal or a lunatic would be walking around in a suburb.
So they're the same in that they're different?
People just don't want to have children anymore, fertility rates have dropped a lot post-2012(smartphones and social media)
Indeed, car-intermediated everything and complete dependence on parents is a much better description of suburban life for children than city life. I grew up in one of the most pleasant and active suburbs in the US, in a little college town, and it was still incredibly child-hostile. The city is IMO much friendlier to children.
In the city people can and do walk all over, with longer trips made by transit. There are more small shops of all kinds, more coffeeshops, more live music, more social clubs, more classes, more playgrounds, more museums, and in general more regular human contact of all kinds. Kids can be independent at a younger age, and can pursue a wider range of interests with community infrastructure and support.
> you have small children, this changes. Intellectual pursuits? They can't read yet, so your only option is parking them in front of videos.
I have one 3-year-old kid and one 5-month-old kid in San Francisco. Neither of them watches significant amounts of videos (occasionally we watch kids’ movies or old Mr. Rogers episodes together). The other kids we meet at the playground don’t seem to do excessive amounts of video watching.
Kids absolutely can do “intellectual pursuits”, but at their own level. First and foremost they play with all manner of physical objects – blocks, other construction toys, folded paper, empty cardboard boxes and yogurt containers, balls, sand, clay, water, their own bodies, ... Then kids love having stories told to them or books read to them. They love singing, using random household objects as percussion instruments, playing rhyming games, recognizing and naming objects, learning new words, counting random stuff, drawing with chalk and crayons, .... They love helping with household chores (not the most helpful at first, but they try), watching people do physical work of all kinds, play-acting all sorts of grown-up activities, ...
By far the biggest problem for small kids here in SF is the high cost of housing and childcare and the distance from grandparents. Many families we know have moved away to find places with cheaper housing (e.g. they were previously living in a rent-controlled 1 bedroom apartment and decided they wanted a 2-bedroom place, but couldn’t afford to pay current market rent for it) or more help with childcare.
> One false move and some yahoo in a steel contraption has killed them.
It would be great to ban cars from more streets, and get the remaining cars down to 15–20 miles/hour. This is not really a city problem per se; our whole society is built around cars, and suburbs are generally worse than cities at putting pedestrians in harm’s way.
So I have to tell my kid to ignore a syringe on the ground at a muni stop once in a while - like dangers don't also exist in suburban and rural areas - but poop barely phases us... it's like some of these folx have never woken up to their kid having taken a diaper off and smearing poop all over the crib
Suburban playgrounds are way better than urban ones and the rest of your examples require a lot of money. I'm biased because I grew up in the suburbs, but playing sports outside for free like I did as a kid sounds much better than having to get job because the only thing you can do in the city outside of your house is pay for "culture" at "coffeeshops, more live music, more social clubs, more classes, more museums".
I'm sure such places exist, but I've lived in a city (Boston) for many years and this description doesn't apply to the areas I've lived.
Somewhat ironically, the places in Boston that are closest to your description are the ones where they bulldozed large swaths and tried to remake things in a more people friendly way.
This constricts the larger apartment housing stock for families, and especially if you're living in the same room as someone else, probably makes your ability to cultivate a romantic relationship harder, too.
This adds up to - American cities ban units both large and small that allow a city to function properly; they simultaneously tend to dramatically underbuild housing altogether for the demand to live in these cities; and then we wonder why, given how prohibitively expensive it is to live in an American city, that they tend to have serious social problems and only the most tolerant/flexible to stressful situations—i.e. the most privileged—can afford and profit from living in them.
One thing I'm struck by living in Tokyo recently, aside seeing way more children than I ever do in SF (against all odds given the low birth rates), is that you can get a small studio for not much money - you'd be lucky to find one in SF within 30 minutes of the city for less than $2,500, but you can get one 15-20 mins from the hottest neighborhoods in Tokyo for like $500-$700. They'll be much smaller, but the lifestyle is also more space-efficient, so I find it to work for my needs as a 27 year old.
In other countries, large apartments are plentiful, and they are cheaper than houses the same size, because of economies of scale.
Come back in 50 years and say if this was a glitch in a trend or not Demographics is sometimes a story which is only really told in hindsight.
Up until 1832 England's Industrial Revolution cities had severe under-representation in their Parliament: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_Act_1832. (In the USA, by comparison, the state of Massachusetts was a Calvinist theocracy until 1833: England was ahead.) So the USA's allocation of electoral power followed England's example as the industrial revolution was just emerging, not when it was mature. USA's myth of one person one vote isn't the truth: it has the same problems as early 19th century England in that respect.
An inexorable positive (unstable) feedback loop makes rich crowded cities get richer and more crowded. We hackers know this: startups locate in the Bay Area even though it's the highest of high-rent districts and makes us burn through investor money faster. Tech needs tech (Bay area). Finance needs finance (New York). Beltway bandits need beltway bandits (DC).
But this effect doesn't last forever. Detroit (cars) used to be that way: no more. Lowell, Massachusetts (textiles) used to be that way: no more.
The big cities need more housing. To make that happen they need more robust infrastructure. That means they need bigger budgets. USA's rural politicians have propagated the myth that taxation is theft for a long time now, so it's hard to pay for that infrastructure. California's starting to escape the Proposition 13 trap laid for it by Howard Jarvis 45 years ago. It's possible other jurisdictions can escape too.
More housing closer to work, and better infrastructure, can only lead to less hectic lives for city-dwellers. That will lead to more sex and more kiddos. But, by the time that happens, it's possible that software work will have moved to less crowded places and something other industry will dominate.
SF is weird in that you can have very nice areas that are literally just a couple blocks away from hellholes.
So why are we continually surprised that non-agricultural societies have declining birthrates? I feel like we should have all gotten used to this by now.
Again this is a problem for women, not men.
The US just went through the Great Recession. It took a world war and a national initiative pro-household building to birth the baby boomers after the Great Depression. There’s been nothing like that following the GR.
Meanwhile, many factors are against family building:
Income being stagnant to negative.
Record setting real estate prices. Tract housing projects provided affordable housing after WW2.
Poor job prospects - people were getting CAREERS after WW2. Complete with PENSIONS. People in 2019 are lucky to have full time work with health insurance and benefits. Pensions are unheard of outside of select few positions.
Carbon level increases tend toward more violence.
Warming climates tend toward societies that are more hostile, less expansive.
There are other factors, but I’ll stop there.
It’s relatively recently that anyone would take these assertions as a given.
Recency has little to do with it.
Over the next century, the poor countries and the ones that keep women home and pregnant win. Within countries, the groups that keep women home and pregnant win.
[1] http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/total-fertility-r...
Many articles, including this one, champion the cause of immigration as a positive to society, a reason of which is making up for the low birth rate of said societies existing members. And I’m not refuting that.
But since immigration tends to occur from undeveloped countries to developed countries, what happens when you apply this trend across many generations and across many developed parts of the world?
And what does this, or should this, mean for a society and culture in present time?
In either case, poorly conceived and run city government institutions were the primary cause. The single party system of special interests that controls most cities is ridiculous.
Here are some counter arguments:
- having children means you will likely receive support in your older age that childless couples won't, how will you account for that?
- having children gives you purpose, realization and satisfaction and forcibly links you with younger generations, which childless people must try to find in other places (making it easier for the childless to be depressed, become disconnected from modern technology and society, etc)
- there's the ecological argument of course: as we increased in numbers the number of species has decreased, pollution, carbon output, destruction of habitats, etc has increased, it rather seems that having children should be taxed to account for these externalities (but arguably that's already done so through the additional costs associated with it)
And last but not least: it is very unlikely that you were forced to have children. As an adult you made a decision knowing fully well what it carries with it (and if you didn't know there's no excuse in the Internet age to not have been able to research it). You are fully responsible for the decision and it seems unfair to me that now after having committed to it, you want to change the game rules so it goes against those that have decided different from you.
The child tax credit is $2000/child in 2019, which is laughable. I spend more than $12,000/child/yr for childcare alone for two kids (ages 8mos and 3yrs). These early years are terrifying to potential parents - it's gauntlet to reach public school age where property taxes disproportionately taxes the childless.
I think that there should be a deduction for 100% of tuition for children under age 5 (not to exceed $20,000/yr/child). I.e., in the 24% tax bracket, $24,000 in tuition for two children would reduce my tax burden by $6,000. Those in higher brackets would receive a greater refund. In lower brackets, AGI would become negative and not function as a credit.
In effect, the more you make, the more you get back. I think this is an elegant incentive to encourage well-earning people to make babies and continue working. There's no risk of gaming the deduction either: money will by definition go toward childcare tuition. (If there's a risk, it's that childcare will go up. I assume it would, but not 24%.)
We want tax-paying parents to put more future taxpayers into the system so that we don't become Japan. The parents benefitting from a policy like this are making a significant contribution to the economy. Consider their earnings, their patronage of the childcare facility, and the promise of a preschool-educated person to become a future taxpayer.
If all that sounds too convoluted, it could be more straightforward. Let's extend public education down to 3-month-olds. Or we can give parents five years paid leave from work to raise their children to public school age.
Every idea I can imagine is polarizing.
Free childcare is why I don't think tax exemptions for parents actully work or are fair -- because low income people don't really benefit from it, the costs of raising children are pretty much fixed at a given age.
making childfree adults pay more taxes is essentially a subsidy towards having children. in general when you apply a subsidy to something, you get more of it. in the west, we already face significant sacrifices to our standard of living over the next couple decades if we want to even approach a sustainable usage of our planet's resources. if we actually grow the population, we have to make even larger sacrifices. from this perspective, your tax proposal seems like a bad idea.
on the other hand, we also have a looming demographic crisis as the ratio of retired to working adults increases. if nothing changes, the working population will bear a much greater burden in the future to support retirees, or we will have to drastically cut retirement benefits. from this perspective, it does seem beneficial to increase the incentive to have children (or at least blunt the disincentive a bit more).
yet another perspective: childless people (in the US, at least) already pay more taxes than parents. they are ineligible to take the per-child tax deduction that you probably take every year. they also pay for services like schools which their (nonexistent) children will never consume or benefit from. there is also a negative correlation between number of children and income. because of this correlation, people with few or no children are more likely to already pay more into the system than they receive in services/benefits. they are also more likely to have adequate savings for retirement and depend less heavily on government retirement benefits.
I think in an ideal world, some well-meaning experts would convene and establish a target population and age distribution for a country (or the world, but I'm trying to keep at least one foot grounded in reality). then if we're on track to meet the target, no special benefit for parents. if we're below target, a proportional tax advantage for parents. if above, a proportional penalty tax. the the tax benefit/penalty would be locked in for the next twenty years so that parents wouldn't have the rug pulled out from under them. actually maybe the penalty could be removed, seems unnecessarily punitive otherwise.
I realy think the situation described in the article is somewhat akin to colonialism/slave trade where you have poor regions of high birth rate providing meat for the big-city grinders.
Nobody wants open offices or six hundred square foot apartments but zoning laws and the real estate economy are engineered to promote space per human trending towards zero.
Who wants to raise a child like that.
I grew up on more acres than some apartments I've lived in had square feet and the transition has been miserable.
Maybe if you hadn’t grown up on a 1000 acre lot in the middle of nowhere you would have interacted with more people different from you and come to the realization that not everyone shares your lifestyle preferences.
> zoning laws and the real estate economy are engineered to promote space per human trending towards zero.
This is utterly factually wrong. The vast majority of the land area of most cities are zoned single-family only. The size of the average new construction has also trended dramatically upwards over the past couple generations.
Some people definitely want and enjoy these things.