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Comment by BigTTYGothGF | Hacker News Reader

15-minute neighborhoods with bike lanes are exactly the kinds of places good for raising kids in.

In theory. In practice, dense urban neighborhoods have very low birthrates, and always have. Cities are population sinks

This is what the policy wonk idealists say, but the undeniable evidence going back hundreds of years is that dense cities are fertility shredders.

They're talking about raising kids already born, not conditions for having one in the first place. We should separate discussion of the environment from the cost which is the really the main factor for why parents decamp for the suburbs. Causality goes the other way - it's not the compact nature that reduced fertility but the fact that dense neighborhoods are rare and pricey in the US.

> Causality goes the other way - it's not the compact nature that reduced fertility but the fact that dense neighborhoods are rare and pricey in the US.

They're unfortunately not rare. And dense housing is ALWAYS pricey in the developed countries.

No, they're not. They are places where cities go to die.

Walk in Tokyo and try to find children there.

there's a new urbanist community, walkable, bikelanes, etc.. in my part of the midwest and it's teeming with children.

> Walk in Tokyo and try to find children there

There might a few more things going on there than just density, perhaps operating on a national level.

There really, really are not. Tokyo is the prime example of the urban density runaway spiral.

Japan has a declining population, yet Tokyo prices are skyrocketing. Some people now live in "microapartments" where you can cook while sitting on a toilet.

Yet spacious houses are literally sold for nothing but transaction fees, just 2-3 hours away from Tokyo.

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