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Comment by secabeen | Hacker News Reader

It will be interesting to see how millennials preferences change once they have kids. I lived for a few years in a large city without a car, and loved it. However, once you have kids, things change. Kids often have lots of accessories that you don't want to be dragging around with you everywhere (stroller, diaper bag, toys, books, etc). A car is a great place to store those. Kids also result in more multi-stop trips that aren't necessarily on the Metro lines.

I think millennials probably won't adopt their parents' car-based solutions to these problems, but what they do choose will be different than what they're choosing now.

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It's not just he car... most of these cities are not affordable to live in when you have kids. A 1 or 2 bedroom is fine for a young & single worker or a young couple. But bigger apartments have been converted into dorm style living in many cases since rents have shot through the roof.

Many cities like Boston, NY and SF are trying to add affordable housing but that seems to be either a few units for very low income people or micro-units that are just a couple hundred square feet. Unless you make a huge amount of money I think most families get pushed to the suburbs to try to find somewhere they can afford to live.

I'd like to see better designed suburbs that combine dense larger housing with public transit to connect the suburb communities with each other and the city they encircle. We need a size of home between the micro-apartment and the 2 million dollar mini mansion.

I'd love to be able to take public transit into Boston from my place in the suburbs but train stations only have a few dozen parking spots and the bus service is limited to the city areas. So I drive for now.

most of these cities are not affordable to live in when you have kids

This, however, is primarily a policy choice: http://www.amazon.com/Rent-Too-Damn-High-Matters-ebook/dp/B0... .

I'd like to see better designed suburbs that combine dense larger housing with public transit to connect the suburb communities with each other and the city they encircle

Me too. But suburbs have all the political veto problems described at the link above, but worse.

>I'd like to see better designed suburbs that combine dense larger housing with public transit to connect the suburb communities with each other and the city they encircle.

This is a good point. Even if we increase public transit, almost all of these plans only improve connectivity between the suburb and downtown. When you need to get from one suburb to another to see a friend from work or school, that can take hours, even if both families are close to transit. Increased options between suburbs is important too.

When my wife and I lived in the NYC suburbs with our infant, we never drove my car. Who wants to wake a sleeping baby to get her in and out of a car seat when you can just walk into the train with her stroller? But in New York, even in the suburbs, you can get everywhere you need to go on the train.

The bigger problem is schools. Big city public school districts are a total disaster. Though not for any inherent fact of geography, just politics and demographics.

Plus the stroller serves as an easy way to store books, bottles, snacks, etc while walking.

Many public transport options have rules against open strollers. It'd be a pretty big pain to take sleeping baby out, fold up stroller, then clamber onto a bus. I guess a subway would be different, but still probably has the same rule somewhere.

Open strollers are okay I'm Chicago, both on trains and buses. They're okay I'm the DC Metro, NYC subway, and Metro North. They're ok on the DC circulator but not DC buses.

I'll keep an eye out for those rules - wasn't aware. About to visit the US for 8 weeks with a toddler and a baby, so we have our work cut out for us getting around.

I've done it many times when travelling in Europe (though with one baby). Unless the stroller is overloaded, you can kinda fold it up awkwardly in the event that the carriage is quite full.

I've taken full luggage, a stroller and a baby on the Paris metro in peak hour. Never again!

Extensive big city stroller experience here. The only circumstance when I have been asked to fold up the stroller was busses, and that's pretty universal. Light rail, subway, regional rail trains, etc. were all fine with it, and if you take any Amtrak, pay for a Red Cap to get you on early and seat you in one of the wheelchair seats so that you can leave the stroller open in front of you.

Most of my Generation–X friends surprisingly stayed in their respective cities on having kids (almost all have had kids in their late 30s or early 40s). Combination of improved schools in NYC, improved living conditions, desire to not spend hours commuting, or to live in a walkable neighborhood. Even know a couple who moved to lower Manhattan from suburban Chicago (Naperville) entirely over walkability + livability vs. long commute times.

One issue I rarely see addressed in these articles is how difficult we've made it to get a driver's license in the US. I started driving when I was 14 (rural midwest roads) and got a license within a month of turning 16. In contrast my cousins (early millenials or very late GenX) couldn't even get permits until they were 15 1/2 and had to drive for nearly 2 years under adult supervision before they could get a license. That has to have some sort of negative impact on the interest or desire to drive.

It's funny that you bring up licensing being hard to get; sometimes I wonder if we're not actually (still) too lenient in who we give drivers licenses to. Maybe it's just that I'm past the point where my pre-frontal cortex is fully developed, but I can't imagine that continuing to tighten the training and requirements needed to get a license is a bad thing (and this is coming from someone who really enjoys his cars).

I tend to agree. It was interesting comparing the experience of getting a license in California in 2001: very few restrictions if you were 18, which I was, a laughably easy practical test with no training required, no waiting period after getting a permit - you could take the test the same day if there was a slot available;

to getting one in Ireland in 2014 (12 hours of instruction required regardless of your age, must have had a permit (or foreign license) for at least 6 months, and a test with a 40% pass rate where you have to bring a standard transmission vehicle if you want to drive stick legally).

Even after 13 years of driving, those 12 hours of training were actually pretty helpful. Not just for cleaning up bad habits, but for techniques I'd never properly learned in CA, like stick shift starts up steep hills with a stiff clutch. My city driving has improved as well.

I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing (that I survived my teen driving years is entirely out of luck) but when we've built up a culture (suburbia) entirely dependent on being able to drive from point to point, we can't be surprised that making it more difficult to drive turns teens and 20 somethings off from staying in that culture.

If you can't drive or your driving is restricted as a matter of law, would you rather be stuck in suburbia or in a more urban area where mass–transit or cycling is possible?

I'm seeing the same among my Gen X and Millennial friends. Unlike most of our parents, we're staying in the city to raise kids despite having the option of moving to the burbs. The sidewalks in my neighborhood are choked with strollers on weekends. And apparently little league and soccer leagues are turning away a large portion of families who want to register and still having trouble finding enough fields for all their teams to play.

This is happening to the degree that preschool admissions are now hypercompetitive because so many upper middle class parents want to give their kids the best possible chance to get into a magnet or private elementary school so they can go to a good high school and get into an Ivy League college.

I wonder if part of the reason this is happening is that kids in the suburbs are now allowed to roam and play unsupervised so much less than our generation was that it doesn't seem to make a difference whether they're in the city or the suburbs since they're going to be indoors most of the time anyway. If you're going to supervise all their outdoor time anyway, might as well just take them to the park.

Besides, you can argue that for younger teens the city is much better than the suburbs. Instead of those too young to drive themselves hanging around in bunches and making trouble out of sheer boredom, those groups walk around the (actually interesting) neighborhood, go to the park, take themselves to a movie or poke around in their favorite stores. They can get to their friends' houses without having to pester their parents for a lift, and they don't put themselves at risk getting in a car with a 16-y/o driver and multiple rowdy passengers.

Yep, people always talked about how the small town was "a great place for raising kids", except that is was so unimaginably boring that teenagers really had nothing much to do but a bunch of drugs and sex.

The outer suburbs are pretty much the same: the supposed bucolic safety of the cul-de-sac becomes a deathtrap if you move onto the arterial roads. I've seen plenty of fourteen-year-olds riding dirt bikes without lights on high-speed roads feeding onto the interstate, because how else are they supposed to get anywhere interesting?

Yes. It always seems like these analyses of millennials don't account for our delay in starting a family compared to past generations.

Certainly a generation living like man-children for the entirety of our 20s before starting a family will have lasting impacts on our outlook, but I predict that in 5 years we see most millennials transitioning into being the suburban boomers they all hate.

I'm 31, right on the leading edge of millennials and I have been seeing it among people my age for several years now (partially because of the coincidence with economic recovery).

We sold our cars and moved (back) to Portland. Kids much prefer being in a cargo bike than in a car.

humans have been dealing with babies since long before the invention of cars. maybe its not such a good thing that we haul around so much child-paraphernalia that we can't even carry it without a freight wagon.

also consider that it might not be such a great thing for a parent to become a glorified chauffeur for their children. something is out of balance with the suburban lifestyle. there is an awful lot of driving around, with your kids in the backseat, in a big hurry to get to the next place to spend money on some junk for your kid.

Humans also had lots more kids and invested less in each one because they died frequently. When we only have 1-3 kids rather than 6-10 (of which 4 live to adulthood), it makes sense to put more energy into improving the ability of each one.

It's not always some place to spend money. It can be the park that you're meeting your kid's best friend at, or the natural history museum you go to every day after school, or just your friend's house or the field that your soccer practice meets at. Sure, you can stay in the area within a few miles of your home/school and get around exclusively by bike or walking, but lots of kids and parents want more than that.

Millenial here. I have a kindergarten and a school (although I don't need it yet) in a walking distance. You may assume that that is a by-accident result, but it isn't! When it was the time to look a new place to stay in, having near-by a kindergarten, a school, a pharmacy store, a green park, and a lot of other smaller things were deemed as important. It's also important to understand that these things won't happen if are not asked for.

In the rare cases when I absolutely need a car, I rent one.

P.S.: I live in Europe.

My sister ('81) and I ('79) both have 1 kid; I'm in a one-car household. Everyone told my sister she'd have to buy a car b/c of the baby, but she never has.

We're not big cell-phone people either, I just hate being locked in a mobile refrigerator for hours. Not to mention that not having a car (or a second car) is just money in the pocket. We cycle instead, or carpool, use the bus. The bus is not a great option in a mid-sized city, but cycling is fine in inner-ring suburbs and downtown.

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