Designing Cities for Families
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
* Neighborhood schools over 90% of people walk to. Builds community.
* Lots of parks, both near the schools and elsewhere. Gives kids a place they can go by themselves and have some independence.
* Dense neighborhoods so it's easier to go play with your friends rather than play video games over the internet (they still do the latter sometimes of course)
* Nearby shops. Kids and parents can walk to the grocery store, movie theater, bookstore, pharmacy (ie candy store for the kids)
* Wide sidewalks and relatively safe streets for kids to walk to these things.
* Bonus: we've got a trolley that stretches the neighborhood and goes into downtown Boston for the older kids.
You can find pockets like this (sans the train) across the US, but they're just that: pockets. I don't know of any city or town that has all these traits in its entirety (South Brookline for example doesn't cut it, for example). However, as long as they're scarce they'll be expensive. I hope we see a move towards building more neighborhoods like it so that more kids can grow up in them.
I think the biggest difference in the price between the two neighborhoods is the schools. Once you cross over the border (either into JP, or the less segmented allston) the prices drop. Brookline's got well-regarded schools (though they've been coasting), whereas Boston is a mixed bag with a lottery system.
It’s easy to create a city that works for families as long as you use economic redlining to exclude everyone who suffers from the social problems that affect every major U.S. city.
Differences breed contempt, or just displays the inability to empathize with a different way of life.
A sad fact of life. People with kids tend to regress back to their familiar mothership when the kids arrive. It's instinctual protection mechanism for their children.
Apart from that, cultural differences become much more salient when you’re a parent. Because culture is how we transmit our values—what we believe about how to live a good and successful life—to our children. Culture is also highly correlated with demographics and also is a source of conflict. My kids attend a private school with affluent white and black kids (about 2/3 and 1/3). The neighboring supermajority-black county is richer than our supermajority-white county, so there are no socioeconomic divides. But there’s quite a bit of racial conflict nonetheless. A couple of kids in my daughter’s friend group wanted to kick her out of a running group chat because they wanted to make it black-only (she looks fully south asian though she’s half white). My daughter is far more accepted by her white friends who aren’t socialized from an early age to have a sense of racial identity/group solidarity.
White/asian places like Brookline have cultural problems as well. My high school was about 30% asian, the remainder white (all affluent and educated). There was a lot of conflict over cheating and the school being a “pressure cooker” that boiled down to conflict between the asian immigrant proclivity of academically grinding to get ahead and the WASP mentality of raising “well rounded” students with diverse interests. Studies show that white families move out of school districts as asian families move in: https://www.the74million.org/article/fear-of-competition-res.... This is true even though, statistically, asians are more affluent than whites, much less likely to be arrested or imprisoned, etc.
Parenthood is where the rubber really hits the road in terms of any sociological preconceptions people may have. It’s the time when you’re faced with applying those ideas in practice in a situation that will have consequences for what you hold most dear.
This has happened over as little as a kid walking home alone or playing at the park while the mom is at an interview.
I've partially chosen to raise my family in a place with people like me because I know the neighbor kids drive trucks, work in construction, explore the backcountry on dirt bikes, etc from a very young age and I don't have to worry about the local nazi mom sending the child snatchers for the sin of a child having some independence.
Suburbs in the 50's used to be filled with children all about the same age, but a modern suburb is filled with a very wide spread of ages. The number of children on each block the same age as your children is likely to be very low.
OTOH, apartment buildings filled with immigrants and poorer people seem to have a much higher density of children than suburban blocks.
Yes, the immigrant communities tend to have lots of kids, but nobody outside those communities wants to move into them. Heck, the people in those communities want to move out. My Bangladeshi immigrant family all noped out of Queens (where there’s a large Bangladeshi enclave with recent immigrants) to Long Island the minute they could afford it.
They aren't poor immigrant families, though. That might make a substantial difference.
You have to remember that high SES immigrants are an extremely small self selected and culturally distinct slice of their home population. Culturally distinct in ways that are hard for Americans to even understand because they don’t have a rigid class system where higher status people culturally diverge from lower status people to the degree, they do in other societies. One major difference is the pre-existing exposure to Western culture.
Extensive exposure to western colonial governments, western non-profits, and western businesses is common among the class of people who emigrate as high-SES immigrants. My family was quite Anglicized even back in Bangladesh. My grandfather’s house was a former British property (my mom comments half a century later about how solidly the British built the tennis courts). At the time I was born my parents weren’t planning on leaving Bangladesh, but my dad adopted the western practice of having a family name (instead of two given names as is our system). My first name is misspelled German, and I never had the nickname Bangladeshis universally use instead of their legal name. I went to a pre-school for British expats (“Catherine’s Playgroup”). After we immigrated, I grew up in a 90% white and asian town in the U.S., spoke English at home, have never set foot in a mosque, etc. My dad was very deliberate in forcing us to assimilate, at least in outward appearances. That’s my particular story, but if you press your high-SES immigrant friends you’ll likely learn about the ways in which they’re very distinct from others in their country—and were long before coming here.
My aunt and uncle, by contrast, live in a Canadian publicly subsidized high-rise that’s entirely low-SES immigrants. Those Bangladeshis are completely different. They’re very religious, socialize primarily within their community, practice arranged marriage and primarily marry within their community, etc. And they were very different from us even when we were all in Bangladesh!
East Germany was also interesting in that it wasn't some patriarchal, ultra conservative society.
GDR = German Democratic Republic (East Germany), FRG = Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany), Numbers indicate total fertility rate (TFR).
1950s–60s | GDR: 2.3 | FRG: 2.4 | Similar postwar boom
1970s | GDR: decline to 1.5 by mid-70s, then rise to 1.85 | FRG: 1.55 | East introduced pro-natalist policies (childcare, housing, maternity leave)
1980s | GDR: 1.85 | FRG: 1.35 | East stabilized; West kept declining
1990s (post-reunification) | GDR: 0.8 | FRG: 1.3 | Economic/social upheaval hit East hard
2000s–present | GDR: gradual recovery | FRG: slight rise | Gap narrows but regional differences linger
GDR: Socialist, collective responsibility for families | FRG: Conservative, traditional nuclear family model
Women's Role:
GDR: Encouraged to work and have children | FRG: Expected to choose between work and motherhood
Maternity Leave:
GDR: Up to 26 weeks paid leave + 1-year partially paid "baby year" (from 1976) | FRG: Shorter leave (14 weeks), limited benefits and job protection
Childcare Availability:
GDR: Universal, heavily subsidized childcare from 3 months old | FRG: Scarce childcare, especially for kids under 3; long waiting lists
Financial Support:
GDR: Birth grants, scaled child allowances, housing priority for families | FRG: Modest child benefits (Kindergeld), no housing incentives
Career Impact:
GDR: Mothers retained jobs and career paths with little penalty | FRG: Mothers faced career setbacks; part-time work common
Contraception & Abortion:
GDR: Free contraception; abortion legalized in 1972 | FRG: More restrictive laws; abortion controversial
Cultural Messaging:
GDR: Motherhood seen as patriotic duty; state actively promoted it | FRG: Emphasis on family values, but less direct messaging on fertility
Also, for those who don't remember the official names:
GDR = German Democratic Republic = East Germany
FRG = Federal Republic of Germany = West Germany
* Bedrooms, bedrooms, bedrooms! Families with 2-3 children need 3-4 bedrooms. I estimate over 90% of the housing stock is < 3 bedrooms in my nearby city of over 500,000 people.
* Noise insulation. Babies cry a lot. Being neighbors of a family with a new baby will degrade your sleep quality. Thick walls with noise-cancelling features greatly help.
I'd love to see data on a city that has such housing stock available for families not in the top 10% of income, where crime is not 50% higher than its suburbs.
You can design cities for families all you want, but if you keep lying to people and telling them having children is bad, and it's better to live alone, then they won't do it. Not to mention crime and taking money from families and paying people who are tax leeches.
Why would you go through the trouble of kids when you can just mostly offload the time and cost of that on someone else then tax those kids when they're grown for your own retirement and get about the same size slice as the person that actually raised them?
Joy!
That calculus totally changes if the childless neighbor can just send armed men to collect the neighbor child's income and redistribute it to themselves.
Contraception (especially the pill), has eliminated this trade-off. Now people can have their cake and eat it too.
Are you using “modern society” as a synonym for whichever country you live in? There are countries who directly tell their citizens that having kids is good and offer them financial incentives to do so. For instance:
> PM Lee urges Singaporeans to have more children, and to do so earlier
— https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/politics/pm-lee-urges...
> Nearly $7 billion will be spent on marriage and parenthood initiatives in financial year 2026, up from over $4 billion in 2020.
— https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/politics/7b-to-be-spe...
And even with great child-raising policies, Finland has a fertility rate as bad as the rest.
Problem is always money. Why society is going to subsidize 2 year of paternity leaves for everyone? Better and easier to complain about "kids nowadays".
It's not just telling people what having kids is or is not, it's that the MONEY spent on family promotion is laughable. Countries with those policies are just putting a bandaid. People is already NOT having children.
The reason all this is "mostly okay anyway" is that everyone normalized being selfish. So money and time and resources are spent on oneself, and that's okay, who's going to require anything different from the government?
Kids are tomorrow's most valuable infrastructure asset. We're just poisoning the water supply.
What tomorrow is there with +4°C in 2100, and what happens in the meantime?
(greenhouse gases emissions are not slowing down, we're closer to 2100 than we are to the invention of the transistor).
The kids will solve it if we give them the right tools. Education, time to learn, confidence.
We're on a trajectory that is not solvable before several centuries at least, probably millennia. It spans more generations that we've had since the fall of the Roman Empire. We're only 2-to-3 generations away from 2100/+4°C.
Our kids can merely adapt to, with immensely reduced liveable and cultivable surface area on the planet.
The whole culture they'll have to invent/live in to find a "solution" barely exists today, if at all.
That's a solution, no?
The original comment said:
> Almost everything in modern society is anti-family, by design
These are two very different statements.
My thinking is that growth-based economics is eating itself.
For me is a contradiction. House prices are high too, but I definitely don't want to spend the savings of my life buying a tiny apartment with neighbours up and downstairs, even if that means I have all the places mentioned above at a walkable distance.
So, these walkable cities are designed for not necessarily poor families, but for families that cannot afford a bigger places. For young people without families, though, walkable cities are great!
If the only response to crime is repressive without managing/anticipating things way ahead, that do favour crime, it's not going to foster peace, neither a family/youth-friendly environment.
As the article series suggests, architecture alone _does_ influence individuals and groups experiences and behaviours. It's been studied and worked on for a long time [1] and it's worth studying further, reporting and repeating as the OP does very well.
1: see Jane Jacobs (The Death and Life of Great American Cities), Oscar Newman (Design Guidelines for Creating Defensible Space), C. Ray Jeffery (Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design), Alice Coleman, among others.
This article and your comment makes me think of Lawrence Lessig's "Code 2.0" book where he writes that (at least) four things can shape human behavior:
* rules
* norms
* prices
* architecture
Hopefully we could do so in a "Kaizen" approach of incremental improvement and usually small steps within existing cities? But we likely need a lot of new cities too with more housing (perhaps by upgrading towns on existing transit lines). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaizen
https://www.phillymag.com/news/2025/03/19/tot-lot-ardmore-lo...
But it is strange that, if the park rules say that only children up to Age Five are allowed, why the father thinks this is so unjust and so horrible. It certainly makes sense to me, that keeping small children safe could involve restricting the age group. So many things are restricted to narrow age-groups for children. Because of different maturity and physique and needs.
If these parents deliberately chose an Age Five park to go play in [and they knew exactly what its name is before they even arrived], then they should've made themselves aware of the Park Rules (which are not too far away to read if you walk up to the sign. Park Rules are usually posted near every entrance and every main walkway!) And they have no right to be angry that the police intervened and had a chat with them, even if the "football toss" was an extreme red herring.
I don't see anything wrong in a community wanting parents to know and abide by those rules. They aren't difficult or obscure or unjust.
No, the children are not criminals. A minor is subject to their parents' responsibility, and the parents are the ones who placed their children into the park, and they are responsible for their children being there. Any liability or criminality is going to fall on the responsible adults.
Calling on the cops because one person in an undercrowded park, toss a ball? The cops actually acting on that report?
Maybe if the police had different narrative, they would have answered; from the article mentioned: "I reached out to the township and the superintendent of the Lower Merion Police Department on Monday and heard back from neither."
So it was likely a ludicrous report, and a ludicrous reaction for the local police department, that doesn't stand the light of a local newspaper.
Crime in cities is seriously over reported. Any concentration of population will have higher total crime, particularly if there's poverty.
Relieve the poverty, improve the education, crime drops.
How about we pay people enough so they don't have to steal and gut the police.
Stop crimes and prevent them
Put criminals behind bars
Rehabilitation for those who can rejoin society
Gotta do all three or it’s not going to work
It's important, and there's a whole sub-conversation in how to do it, but it's not a totally overriding concern.
The real issue is that the Right campaigned mostly on security since the 1980s and successfully convinced everyone that hordes of migrant criminals are patrolling the streets to mug you, in spite of the data clearly showing that crime levels are at their lowest.
Ironically, Republicans are also the one wishing for a "high-trust society" while simultaneously acting paranoid against their neighbors.
- Underfunds mental health services & makes them nearly inaccessible, for decades.
- Starts wars and treats its soldiers as disposable.
- Rewards the bankers who created the housing crisis.
- Decouples wages from productivity for 50+ years.
- Treats drug use as a character deficiency rather than a societal one.
Newsclues, when the results of these actions (which they were warned about by progressives the entire time) become impossible to ignore: 'Damn progressive activists! Why would they do this?'.
Note I’m Canadian and our government and NGOs have been giving safe supply opioids to addicts who sell them for fentanyl and the safe supply goes to kids who get addicted and the cycle of addiction continues thanks to pro drug activists.
I say this as a former drug dealer and current drug user.
There are a ton of cities where culturally no matter how rich the people are there is a big cultural divide in certain areas and where there is an othering people are less likely to be kind to those families.