A city has 100 homes. Local homeowners vote against any new construction to preserve taxpayer-funded parking welfare (aka neighborhood character)
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.
I don't follow, can you elaborate? People making more efficient use of a scarce resource doesn't suggest falling demand. How are steps 1-3 akin to that?
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.
The cycle doesn't always repeat. The cycle only repeats if fertility rates stay where they always have been... the elk continue to attempt procreation at the rates they always have.
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.
To be fair, my wife and I were both "definitely no children MAYBE 1" for a long time, but now that we live in an area with lots of 4+ children families (middle of Ireland) it doesn't seem so outlandish to have 3. We won't, because 1) we're old and 2) We should really view 2 as a hard max if we're going to try not to destroy Earth (though since it looks like we will anyway you might as well just have as many as you want I guess. More soldiers on your side for the food wars).
You described effect observed in population that grew up in, and descended exclusively from generations living in singular over-crowded space with full living necessities supplies.
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.
I don't doubt that increasing their own home values is part of it, but here in the North East where I live when I hear co-workers making the case for restricting housing development they're concerned about one of two things. Either that if their town was more affordable the wrong sort of person would move in, they'd go to school with their kids, and either harm their kids or teach them bad habits. Or that more people would mean more cars and more congested streets.
Anecdata, but when I went to community planning boards it was very much:
"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.
Do you then remind them that they might need to check their biases?
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.
That opens a fun argument. "Don't worry about your white child mixing with other races, because if he ends up dealing drugs to them, it will be OK because prosecutors will blame the black kids".
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.
We're also concerned that there may be too many kids for the existing school, especially higher density residential construction, and then existing homeowners will be asked to pay for the expansion / new school.
Adding facilities can be a condition of planning permission for new homes. A growing population of kids means more schools, so whether they're in infill or in suburbia can be addressed through similar mechanisms.
kind of on the right track. the reality is the ratio of minorities is directly correlated to how hard the incumbents try to keep them out. people are desperately trying to keep them from taking over the cities. at the same time making them take all the tax and social burdens. these minorities could spread out but probably the best thing for them is to target the smaller cities. take them over and finally change their antiminority policies.
Such a bad take. The actual "elite" in urban centers are the ones walking around with strollers.
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).
“violent downtowns typified by the ‘mean streets’ of the 1970s became clean and safe in the 1990s”
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.
I don't know if this has ever been hypothesized, but HIV infection rates, and AIDS mortality among IV drug users in the 90's before the advent of medications?
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.
Well, good point, but you should be more precise: strollers with HUMAN KIDS in them. I swear that at least one in two, perhaps even more, of these strollers today tend to have dogs in them. At least in San Francisco.
On reddit's frontpage, the word choices people use for posting/commenting about pets is worthy of some sort of proper study.
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've seen one person do it in my neighborhood (a suburb outside of Chicago) and I believe it's because it was an older dog. I am guessing it either had trouble walking, or because of the heat.
If you leave those few neighborhoods that techies never leave? The Sunsets, West Portal, Portala, Hayes Valley, the Outer Richmond, Noe, Glen Park, the Excelsior, the Outer Mission, Bayview / Hunter's point? The areas where brogrammers don't venture are filled with screaming children, obnoxiously so.
That's the most ridiculous thing I've seen anyone on HN say, and I've seen people defending rapists.
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.
I have lived in Toronto most of my life, and I’ve seen plenty of people with dogs in strollers. But before we climb up on stage like a smug comic and bond with the audience by ridiculing people we don’t understand, let’s ask ourselves this:
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.
> So, are you telling me that 50% of all strollers in Toronto have dogs in them? You would be lying as much as the op.
I'll tell you something else in response:
Starting a response by suggesting that someone is acting in bad faith is not a productive way to engage people in discussion.
You may misunderstand something about the subject. You may misunderstand the person's comment. The comment may have several interpretations, and you may have picked one that differs from the person's intent. The other person may misunderstand something.
There are lots of reasons you may feel a comment misrepresents your perception of reality, and going right into the sewer to suggest malicious deception is a terrible way to participate in a social group.
People come to San Francisco, and just lie about what they see. They don't really observe anything, they just repeat the myths and paranoid lies that they read on reddit and HN!
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.
It exists if you want to find it. Hint: It doesn't exist inside of a startup's office space. I've been to 60 countries, and there's nowhere in the world that has SF's diversity of music, art, food, cultures, peoples, points of view, businesses, and climates. The underground warehouse scene is still alive and well, as is the underground/aboveground bdsm/sex scene, the world music scene, hip-hop, bluegrass, techno (ugh).
If you know who to talk to, you can go to an illegal, underground restaurant where guest chefs like Michael Minna cook. The are no less than 5 hacker warehouses focused solely on robotics development. Two of the old goth warehouses are still available. Sure, and there are bars/night clubs, hundreds of music venues. The closeness to natural beauty combined with all of this is almost unfair. 45% of the city is public parkland.
That's just San Francisco, not mentioning the rest of the bay area. If you can't find a niche in the bay, you would be happier living somewhere that you can find a niche. Why be unhappy just for money?
Nowhere in the world is even close. Maybe Berlin, but I'm not a big fan of Germany.
Considering how expensive underground warehouses are getting (to the point where only techies can afford those warehouse loft apartments, even the illegal ones), I find it hard to believe that the culture is thriving. Just look at what happened to Burning Man for an example. Now the art projects aren't built in SF by attendees and driven over they are purchased and imported.
The culture still thrives, but not how it was, for sure. The older guard of the tech community keeps it alive, but for the most part, the brogrammer wave we got hit with in 2007, when everybody "did social", definitely sucked the life out of the area.
One side effect is that you are a lot less likely to find out. Spaces I used to attend which were generally "if you can find it, you can come" now have guest lists and sometimes vouch lists with the intent of keeping the bros out.
Hey, despite your virulent reaction to my comment - which I think was exaggerate - I would like to hear more about this.
To give you context: I live in SF since 2012, and I try to bring my own experience and observations, rather than "stuff I read on Reddit". But of course I'm not perfect, and I am certainly biased in some ways.
You sound like someone who knows much more than me. Share it with us. That's what HN is for. Not for flame wars.
Birthrates are also declining outside of cities at similar rates [1]. It may be a little more apparent in expensive cities because childless people tend to not like suburbs and choose density if they can afford it, but I don't think cities are the root cause.
I've got my money on the "We spend twenty years telling adolescents that children are terrible and having them will ruin their life, so when the time comes they have to climb over a mountain of conditioning to even consider the idea" space.
Could the internet, and the idea of things like "bodily consent" training that result in things like antinatalism be a cause for this? Or maybe that sort of reasoning about how we fit into this world is a result of that conditioning?
>There are many reasons New York might be shrinking, but most of them come down to the same unavoidable fact: Raising a family in the city is just too hard.
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.
Yeah seriously. We're Catholic (the crazy kind who eschew birth control and have tons of babies). We live in the SF area and are moving to Portland and plan on buying in the city. We have lots of friends in SF who have large enough families (3 - 8 kids). These are not super wealthy people. Well, I mean, they save their money and spend wisely so they have enough. They are not hotshot doctors, lawyers, or software engineers. Many are construction workers and other 'blue-collar' jobs, with wives who stay at home, and lots of kids. The difference is that they see their vocation as having and providing for children, and my other colleagues at work... do not.
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.
The problem is that we live in a highly materialistic and consumerist society. Indeed, the paradox where poor families have more children than those with means like middle and upper middle class families is unique to consumerist societies. The reason should be clear. Having the extra income relative to the poor, many prioritize spending what they've made on goods and services that contribute to their comfort, pleasure, and "status" (keeping up with the Jones') over children who often require sacrificing comfort and pleasure. Having children is no longer seen as a demanding privilege, but a pointless burden.
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.
Not sure subjugating women to be home makers is going to win a lot support for your point. 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.
I would not describe these women as 'subjugated'. First of all, most can work if they choose, because they are all college educated. In at least one family I know, the wife is college educated and capable of earning more than her husband. They just choose not to, and their families take whatever hit that means. I mean, I tell my wife all the time she should work if she feels like it (she is a software engineer actually, and, for when she was working, a quite well paid one I might add), but she doesn't want too, and that's okay by me. I also don't want to work, because it'd be more fun to be with babies all day and make more of them. Ultimately, the most precious gift you can give a child is both their parents at home most of the time, but in the absence of that, having one parent home is good.
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 also don't want to work, because it'd be more fun to be with babies all day and make more of them.
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.
Can you explain how OP‘s wife is subjugated? I’m ex Microsoft. My wife is a better programmer than you and me put together. She stays at home with the children voluntarily. I told her if she wanted to switch places, I would stay at home with the children. Is she subjugated? Would I be subjugated if I stayed at home instead?
It's the obnoxious, upper middle class hyperfeminist careerist rhetoric that we've been taught to believe. Funny, Chesterton once wrote that he found the feminist clamoring for women in the workplace rather intriguing. Most people, most men, perform rather boring and menial jobs. Why a woman would trade the privilege of raising her kids, shaping the future generation of mankind, for 8+ hours of twisting screws and hammering nails, he could not say. The reason the men were doing it was primarily to support their families.
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.
Some women want roles other than those historically performed by men. They are not subjugated. The ideal for women should not to be indistinguishable from men.
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.
> Same-sex couples also became legal, adding even more two-income households.
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.
I don’t think this is entirely true. Keep in mind that while earners have increased, households used to be much bigger, with more children and more extended relatives living together. And children and even young unmarried women used to work. So purely single income households weren’t a particularly long time.
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.
It's also no longer socially taboo for single roommates of mixed genders to live together. And of course people are staying single longer, meaning that there are now more urban singles.
that may be a part of it, but I doubt it's the whole story. people don't just need a small room and a bed; they need kitchens, bathrooms, etc. these can be shared across a floor or a small building, but there's only so many strangers that can share a kitchen before it isn't useful to anyone. it's hard to imagine this being better than at least having the chance to find 3-4 people to split an apartment with.
> "Women entered the job market due to birth control and legal changes..."
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.
> the argument that dual-income households becoming necessities for home ownership and raising a family is plausible, if unsupported.
"Elizabeth Warren’s book, The Two-Income Trap, explained
Before she was a politician, Warren wrote a controversial book about family life and economics.
The “two-income trap,” as described by Warren, really consists of three partially separate phenomena that have arisen as families have come to rely on two working adults to make ends meet:
* The addition of a second earner means, in practice, a big increase in household fixed expenses for things like child care and commuting.
* Much of the money that American second earners bring in has been gobbled up, in practice, by zero-sum competition for educational opportunities expressed as either skyrocketed prices for houses in good school districts or escalating tuition at public universities.
* Last, while the addition of the second earner has not brought in much gain, it has created an increase in downside risk by eliminating an implicit insurance policy that families used to rely on."
> 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.
Regardless of why, increased labor participation from woman joining the workforce in greater numbers than previously [1] was going to drive inflation for inelastic goods and services like housing, childcare, and education. It now has become a prisoner's dilemma: participate in the treadmill or find a way off.
A Two-Income family also is a significantly less mobile family.
When you want to move, both partners need to find better jobs at roughly the same time. And that just doesn't happen very often. And, if you are already established with support networks because you already have kids, rebuilding those networks can be almost insurmountable without one of the parents literally taking time off to put that support network back together.
yah, that's good supporting evidence for the 2-income trap.
incidentally, my first foray into student loans made me realize a similar trap formed by government guaranteed student loans combined with the inability to discharge them via bankruptcy. those factors practically guarantee rising educational costs due to risk-free money flowing to both educational and financial institutions.
As a Northern European it does seem a bit of a bad deal that women are expected to work but there isn't much of a guarantee for parental leave, affordable child care or even vacation. But I guess there isn't that much precedent for such things.
That expectation is rather cruel. For decades, women who make motherhood their "careers" have been looked down on as somehow inferior to women who pursue careers. Even the terminology used to describe such women is disparaging and loaded with shame and disappointment, as if the woman in question had chosen or had been forced to choose an inferior option. That she is in some sense a failure for prioritizing her children over her career.
EDIT: Anecdotally, it seems that equality was strived for and it's not turning out as great as a lot of folks hoped for. Educated women don't date down like men did/do which makes finding a partner in itself much more difficult [1], women want the same career opportunities as men while also taking leave that puts them at a disadvantage, which is unavoidable; you will be at a disadvantage to someone who is willing to not take their leave to focus on their career, regardless of gender, and men usually take less or no paternity leave even when offered [2]. A lot of people raced to find success and actualization in the workplace, and it is turning out poorly [3]. We have housing, childcare, and education cost inflation due to more dollars chasing the same amount of those necessities. [4]
I want to be absolutely clear that I support woman having equal rights, equal pay, and should never, ever be discriminated against. I shouldn't have to say that, but you know, the Internet. The above paragraph are my observations as an armchair anthropologist.
That's how everything turns out, though. Once you achieve all the things that you thought will make you happy, you'll find new things to be unhappy about, usually in the details of the stuff you just achieved. That's the nature of emotions - they couldn't actually cause motion if you just sat there content with your lot in life. Only thing that'll do that is drugs, and even then you tend to build up a tolerance to them.
The real test for whether something is good or bad isn't whether people are happy, it's whether they would choose to go back. And I think you'll find that most women are not all that eager to go back to the 1950s. If they are, there are subcultures within the U.S. that can provide that, but those subcultures aren't really flourishing in terms of growth rates.
Yes, race equality is measured against the standard of "white" - people advocate for blacks to become richer and less harrassed by the police, not for whites to become poorer and be harrassed more (btw, both would achieve the same amount of "equality").
Same for men vs. women - the drive wasn't/isn't to make men work less (and stay at home more, i.e. like women used to be and like my ideal world would look like), but to make women work more.
> Same for men vs. women - the drive wasn't/isn't to make men work less (and stay at home more, i.e. like women used to be and like my ideal world would look like), but to make women work more.
Indeed. My wife is not a stay at home mom because I force her to be. It it her voluntary choice (and I am happy to support her decision and be the sole income earner in the family) that she gets more happiness and joy from raising our children than as a drone at a desk job or climbing an unfulfilling and meaningless career ladder (her words, not mine).
I think what isn't reasonable is when both parents want to work and expect to achieve similar results. You can't have it all, and you're going to be deeply disappointed when you try and fail.
I apologize. I don’t understand. My understanding was women were fighting to be equal, but men were the bar. What rights are being fought for by women that men don’t have (“people”)? What is the “baseline” for “people”?
I think that the point being made is that in a world with true equality, there is no bar, because each person's perspective is as valuable as any other's. The existence of a baseline necessarily requires choosing a perspective and enshrining that as an ideal to be aspired to, which is a power play on the part of the person setting the standard. There's nothing inherent about reality that requires that: the alternative is that you do your thing, I do mine, each of those things is as valuable as the other, and if our things conflict we work out our differences amongst ourselves (or if necessary, bring in a neutral third party to adjudicate that is mutually acceptable to both of us).
This whole "equality" thing is a big pickle. IMO governments should actively subsidise kids, both via parents (e.g. paying for childcare, school, etc.) and via companies (e.g. giving a company extra money/tax cut for each worker on parental leave, to equalize the amount of value (to the company) of a worker on leave vs. a worker actually working).
All of this assuming we (as a society) actually want people to keep having kids (which, at least in the West, societies/governments seem to want).
None of those things ("guarantee for parental leave, affordable child care or even vacation") seem to help. If anything, the evidence suggests the opposite: there are very few births in the European countries with the greatest amount of those things.
Making it easier/possible for women to join the workforce doesn't necessarily mean that married women will in addition to their spouse, so what made them do that?
I think answering that is more important than focusing too much on what made it possible. Making it possible and easier for women to join the workforce is overall a good thing, it means that single women can compete (hopefully) equally with single men in terms of income and as a result enjoy the same economical freedom without being forced into marriage. But going from that to having homemakers suddenly decide to also work in addition to their spouses is the missing connection, because theoretically just because it was possible/easier doesn't necessarily mean that they needed to. Was it because now couples wanted to earn more money? So it was "greed" that in the end created the inflation and the prisoner's dilemma?
When few women are working, it’s attractive to some because it adds an incredible amount of disposable income. When most women are working, it becomes a necessity in order to get by (because the cost of housing, which is the single largest household expense, depends on what other households are willing to pay). It’s a ratchet that only goes in one direction.
> Women entered the job market due to birth control and legal changes
>> women entered the job market because they wanted to realize their ambitions and support their families
From a historical perspective, women entered the job market because a world war (ww1) consumed the pool of available men through drafting them to die on the front line and having a war engine that increasingly needed more and more resources.
We are talking about a change from ~20% to almost 50% over the time span of 4 years. Neither birth control nor cultural ambitions has that fast effect on society. War does.
sure, women worked during the world wars out of necessity, but they didn't enter and stay in the workforce because of it.
while women working during war helped to unveil the value and abilities of women in the workforce, war didn't drive the shift to 2-income households by itself. if women had no other ambitions, they would have just gone back to "home economics" after the wars and the economy would have stayed the same.
It is indeed true that there are many reason why society continued with both women and men in the work force after the war. One of those were political, as it is difficult to argue first that women and men should shoulder equal responsibility during the war and be included in the military draft and equal right to vote, only to do a 180 degree turn a few months later because the war ended. The writing was on the wall and Women's right to vote got voted in 2 years later. The women military draft however was dropped as the emergency of the war died down.
The president said a month before the war ended: We have made partners of the women in this war; shall we admit them only to a partnership of suffering and sacrifice and toil and not to a partnership of privilege and right?
It is hard to find a stronger sign of a cultural change. 20 years later the second world war started so even if there had been a movement to return to "the old days", it would not have had time. The second world war saw again an major increase in women participation in the work force, including major initiatives for equal pay. Men were being sent to the front line and the factories needed people.
The world wars was the period where the cultural change occurred. Trying to revert the culture back to pre-1914 mindset would had been about as impossible then as it is now. Instead people continued on the cultural path that had been established.
It's not the full story but is definitaly part of it. Without birth control and legal changes, women would not have been able to follow their ambitions; it's difficult to work when you're pregnant for the 8th time and anyway are not legally allowed to without your husband's permission.
For you, perhaps. But for me and my family, raising children in the densest urban core is a highly enjoyable experience. Imagine never being in traffic again. Having your choice of activities, parkland, and restaurants. Hundreds of friends within a single square mile. That’s what draws many of us to the city over the suburb. But to each their own.
I think it's highly dependent on your area. In my smaller town I never have traffic. I have plenty of restaurants and activities and more "parkland" and nature than a city dweller could dream.
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.
Well, are you in support of a suburb or a small town? A suburb is wildly distinct from a small town. Most would agree that a suburb solely exists to house people that work in a nearby city, whereas a small town is self-sufficient (in the sense any area can be "self-sufficient").
This is where the conversation tends to break down. What you would call a suburb, I would probably call part of the city. What I would call a suburb, you would probably call rural.
I do think hit the nail on the head with the self sufficiency. I have absolutely no need or desire to commute into the nearest big city (big it is fun for day trips every once in a while).
The area directly outside the urban core that contains only housing and bad traffic is definitely not somewhere I would want to live, although owning a proper house instead of renting an apartment is very important to some people.
> Also, many small towns have higher crime rates per capita than cities.
Per capita crime rates do not matter. What matters is the question "How likely am I to be the victim of a crime if I live in area X?".
Depending on the type of crime, you are around 4x as likely to be the victim of a violent crime if you live in a city[1].
Per capita rates is a statistical curiosity. Being 4x more likely to be shot is what people actually care about. When the population density is 10 - 100x different, a small difference in per capita rates is meaningless.
OK, I'll try to imagine it. I'll assume you don't mean living like Trump did, in a personally owned tower with lots of servants including chefs and drivers. Note that I actually do have 12 kids. Imagining...
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.
how do you go on errands with your kids in the suburbs? did you buy a used schoolbus? also, your oldest children must be somewhere between 15 and 20. assuming they haven't moved out yet, are they totally incapable of helping your shepherd their youngest siblings?
Well 1stcity3rdcoast is "raising children in the densest urban core" and asks us to "Imagine" being in his situation. I did imagine it.
In reality, of course I don't live like that. I'm in a big house in a non-urban city, I almost never go out to eat, and there is no subway here. We drive a Ford E350 with 15 seats in 5 rows, and the vehicle title or registration does actually say "bus". The kids usually surprise other people with good behavior, but they are still kids. They aren't the sort to throw tantrums, but spills and other accidents will happen.
Much of it is unique to an urban city: the existence of a subway, the need to use one because there is no parking, the apartment (including kitchen) being small, the cost of food, the use of elevators, the people in tents.
Much of the rest is in your statement of what to imagine: using a restaurant, not being in traffic.
Yes, I think we can agree that there are trade offs, as with everything in life. In a world of scarce resources, we all place different value in different things. I’m not lambasting your choices just as I’d expect you not to deride mine.
But on your last throw-in dig, that’s disingenuous. Poverty is not unique to large cities. I’ve lived in rural towns as small as 7,000 and poverty there is just as visible and acute.
Hormonal birth control wasn’t widely available until the 1960’s.
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.
Six kids and two parents surviving on one regular income could buy a 3 bedroom house in the past. Not great living conditions for those 8 people, but housing did not used to be such an expensive proposition to buy or rent.
The arguments in this article seem extremely dramatic, simplistic and unsupported.
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.
> Do the lower costs of living outside big cities not offset the lower wages?
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.
>Does having a bit less paying job mean you have nothing? Do the lower costs of living outside big cities not offset the lower wages?
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.
I look at it a little differently. The urban cores in the USA are actively hostile places for anyone to be. You step outside your door...into an empty hallway of doors. You take an elevator or stairs down to a place with a few mailboxes, then step outside.
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.
I’m raising a child in NYC right now. What is this dystopia you are describing? It’s the opposite of my personal experience. NYC is such a kid friendly place to raise kids: Museums, zoos, aquariums, free events for kids, concerts just for babies, parks, swimming pools, little league, soccer league, skate parks, etc… we have it all. I can’t fathom how people raise kids in the suburbs. They must be so bored…
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 both earn large professional salaries but decided to go to the suburbs for kids. We have 2 beaches within 20 minutes of us, we have parks, cinemas, out door water parks, outdoor pools, skate parks plus half an acre of garden and a big house where the kids can have a music room, a playroom, separate room for computer games and we get a very nice home office. I don't know why anyone would want to stay in the cramped city making their kids live indoors.
We used to do apartment living, it sucked, especially when the neighbours kids started learning instruments.
Driving. We could move beachside but then that extra 40 mins each day adds too much to our commute (I go to the city / office 3 days per week). If I go 100% remote then I can live 30 seconds walk to the beach.
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.
Depends on the number of kids and what they do. Playing drums in the same room as someone trying to focus on a high-adrenaline multiplayer FPS would never work (at least not very well). Separating into multiple rooms also allows kids to bring friends over and do stuff without disturbing the other kids. Also; kids needs time to be alone, multiple rooms allows them to do stuff by themselves without having be with others.
The music room has dampening mats on the walls to stop too much sound from escaping. It also has amps, drums, guitar stands etc. A purpose built room is awesome.
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.)
You know it's okay that other people don't want the same thing as you, right?
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.
So other than call me afraid or claim I want to monopolize opinions in the universe, have you addressed the point that a good train system is much less deadly and much less stressful than single occupant vehicles?
Trains are objectively less deadly than cars. I wouldn't dispute that. However, I have zero fear of being in a car. You can reduce the risk of being in a car substantially by either driving the car, or having someone drive the car, who isn't impaired, isn't distracted, and is driving defensively.
Stressfulness is much more subjective. To me, city train systems are higher stress for me than the majority of the driving I do. Granted, I rarely drive in heavy traffic, which is more stressful. Since I don't encounter that while driving, I find subways more stressful since 1) I have to plan around their schedule 2) their schedules are always subject to delays 3) I have to be around strangers in close quarters and 4) you expose yourself to a higher risk of being victim to a crime
However, I have no problems riding the NYC Subway, Chicago's L, etc. when I visiting there.
There are also other ways to avoid miles besides living in a city. For example, I have a remote job, so I don't have a daily commute.
It's always weird how people in the suburbs complain everywhere about how crappy cities are and yet if you turn around and say you like them they get all defensive...
OK, but road fatalities per capita and per automobile are higher in the US than in Europe. As is obesity. I believe that our obsession with motor vehicles even for small tasks plays a role in this.
His comment generalizes to other forms of transit. The point isn't that he/she's driving downtown, it's that it's not convenient enough to go on a whim but that's not a problem for his/her use pattern. The fact that he/she chose to use a car is immaterial to the point being made.
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.
Fine sir or madam, I don't care what you think of my virtue or lack thereof. But the health affects are real. Example: I was obese. I largely quit driving, or drastically reduced it. I am no longer obese or overweight; my BMI is 21, down from 33. If you want to live worse because you decided that is "virtue signalling", go ahead and ignore the suggestion. But the benefit will exist whether you believe in it or not.
> 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.
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.
Just for the heck of it, and because I have a thing for Google Earth, I counted the number of baseball diamonds (easy to spot from the air) within the city of Boston but gave up once I got over one hundred. Not counting Fenway Park :)
> I can’t fathom how people raise kids in the suburbs.
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.
I grew up in a suburb and was bored shitless. I had one friend that lived within walking distance, and everyone else was too far away to get to without a car, which meant that I didn't get to see my friends unless it was convenient for one of my two parents (who both held full-time jobs). Cycling anywhere outside of the local neighborhood was out of the question, since the roads connecting neighborhoods were full of fast-moving traffic and no bicycle lanes or pedestrian walkways.
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.
I lived in that kind of place. I also had my one nearby friend.
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.
> 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.
Nowadays I am a cyclist and I feel comfortable riding alongside traffic for any distance. Even if it had occurred to me that riding five miles to a friend was possible (cycling is currently enjoying a surge of popularity, but at the time it was somewhat unfathomable even to adults that you might ride a bike for such distances), I'm not sure that would have been a practical or reasonable thing for an eight year old to do. By the time I was fourteen or fifteen I felt comfortable riding my bike farther distances, but at that point I was nearly able to drive a car alone anyway.
The "woods" I mentioned were small enough that there was no point away from easy eyesight from some neighbor's living room windows. Sure, we played in them. But there was no actual sense of isolation. There were no train tracks anywhere nearby. There were some tiny lakes, but they were clearly on other people's property.
It's great that you seemed to live in somewhere more rural than me and that was an area you were able to thrive in. Still, if you look at populations of people as a whole I suspect you'll find orders of magnitude more bored and unhealthy kids (who start getting into real trouble) in suburbs than you find in cities where there are actually plenty of opportunities and things to do.
Same here. I don't get this trope where we're pretending that a car with a parental chauffeur is the only method of transportation. I roamed all over the place as a kid with my first bicycle. Shorter distances when I was very young (6-7) but up to dozens of miles as I got older. I was raised by a single parent who was often working, so there was no car available, but using this great miracle machine, I could still visit friends, explore nature, build forts, etc. Suburbia just means you need to ride your bike a little further to get to your friends' houses.
There is an alternative. Don't live in a big city! There are plenty of 2nd & 3rd tier cities where you can get both a house and land for a reasonable price and still have good schools and a vibrant cultural environment. Of course you won't have some things (international airport, professional sports teams, top rate museums), but you'll make up for it in "free" QoL for your family.
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.
For a lot of people, the city is automatically Manhattan or downtown Chicago. They can't fathom anything but that or a suburb, and to be fair America is very bad at making anything else.
This is such a west coast bubble mindset. Basically everywhere west of the Missouri river is littered with 2nd and 3rd tier cities. Many of them are even within a reasonable commuting distance of the nearest major economic hub (though the southeast definitely has a lot of sprawl going on).
Eh, I kind of have all that, depending on where you draw the line for distance and seriousness. I'm in Brevard County, FL. So not counting Orlando? OK...
There is an international airport. It has seasonal flights to Ottawa, Toronto–Billy Bishop, and Windsor. Those are in Canada.
There is a professional sports team, the USSSA Pride women′s professional fast-pitch softball team. Another is the Brevard County Cocoa Expos, a member of the Women's Premier Soccer League.
There are top-rate museums. One has a Saturn V, a Space Shuttle, a Saturn 1B, the Apollo 14 Command Module, space suits, moon rocks, and related stuff. Another has the Gemini 2 spacecraft and a bunch of missiles. Another has spacesuits and Sigma 7, the fifth manned Mercury spacecraft.
Woosh. So to the parents point, let me just explain that if you have kids and bring them up in the city, there’s a good chance they’re back on 2050s version of hackernews posting the suburban-centric viewpoint of how bleak city life is.
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?
My early teenage years were in the city, my later teens in the suburbs.
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 ;-)
We raised our daughter from 0-5 in big cities, and there is definitely a huge appeal to that. But on the flip side, kids don’t need to “go anywhere.” They just need other kids around. When I grew up, we just roamed the neighborhood causing trouble. That element is missing in most cities today. You can’t just count on having a mess of kids on your block. Parents are the minority, so they have to more consciously get together and schedule activities with other parents.
At least in NYC, growing up, there were always playgrounds and parks full of kids. And I could go there by myself and meet my friends there. If we got bored of the nearby park we could always go use public transportation and go to a different one. And when I got older I could go to restaurants by myself, or go to museums and shows by myself, etc.
There isn't that much within safe walking distance of a suburban home. Especially now that anchor tenants and the attached malls are starting to thin out. Anecdotally when I went to college, the kids from the suburbs definitely drank and did drugs much more heavily, and I suspect it was because that's all there's left to do if you get bored of video games and whatever little is actually at your fingertips.
I am glad you are giving your kids more opportunities than you had. I did not have the same experience growing up in a suburban environment, and my kids aren't the least bit lacking for activities, so to each their own. My suburban neighborhood also has transit service, so there's that.
Then why do people from suburbs flock to the cities for their entertainment? Or build their suburbs right on the edge of cities?
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.
Nobody I know flocks to the city for anything. Sometimes we drive in to the urban center, most of the time we do not. There are lots and lots of things to do without going downtown. Lacking for entertainment, or being bored, neither is something I've ever had a problem with.
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.
> Then why do people from suburbs flock to the cities for their entertainment?
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.
No worries this is a common topic - city folks can't comprehend what the heck is so great in non-city life, and folks that grew up close to nature, open places and good old lack of concrete everywhere can't see an appeal in living in city.
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.
>city folks can't comprehend what the heck is so great in non-city life, and folks that grew up close to nature, open places and good old lack of concrete everywhere can't see an appeal in living in city.
And all the "muh school district" types can't see that the inner suburbs are the worst of both worlds (IMO).
I had all that and I could pretend I was doing any of it in my backyard at any time with my imagination and the free space to roam I was given. Kids need to pick up sticks and pretend they are tools or imaginary things, kids need to run free and climb trees unsupervised.IMO
I second your experience. 3 kids, NYC. Outside of the building a street with light traffic. The back exit leads to a little park, with a nice slide and sandbox (actually 2). Within 200 meters we have literally everything: school, grocery store, cinema, pharmacy, restaurants, shopping mall, bookstore, caffe, 2 libraries (one public, one privately funded, but open to public), a ballfield, a larger park with a pretty serious playground, some quite impressive gym that has a semi-olympic pool, and where the kids can also take music lessons (piano in our case), etc, etc.
Oh, and our kids have hundreds of other kids to play with.
My wife and I did the unthinkable by moving back to the city (Boston) when our son was about to start kindergarten. Our friends and neighbors acted like we were moving to the moon. Parents we connected with in the city prior to moving looked at us like we were idiots for even considering NOT moving to the city. It all depends on your perspective.
Growing up, I had several of those in the suburbs in the suburbs too. And even then, my parents would take me into the city on weekends to visit the zoo and museums (I don't remember going to the aquarium, but we had one too).
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.
> Museums, zoos, aquariums, free events for kids, concerts just for babies, parks, swimming pools, little league, soccer league, skate parks, etc…
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!
You don't need "low rise cohousing communities" to have families in cities. Japanese cities are extremely dense, yet people raise families there just fine. On my trip to Japan, I was really struck by how many children I saw in the middles of cities (moreso in some districts than others, of course), whereas I never see children in downtown American cities.
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.
Japan has one of the lowest birthrates in the world, well below replacement rates. Their society is also consists almost entirely of Japanese that all share the same culture. It would be very hard to emulate what they do and even so, no real guarantee that it would change anything.
Japan does have a low birthrate, but it also has a rising birthrate. Since 2005 Japan has seen a long general trend of increasing birthrates since the ‘60s. This turnaround coincides with efforts to make housing cheaper and cities more kid-friendly. They’ve gone from 1.26 to 1.44.
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.
I think this nails it on the head. The writer is conflating the affects due to socioeconomic conditions with the affects he wishes to perceive as it strengthens the arguments he brought forth in prior essays. This seems like an exercise of mental gymnastics as marriage age and birth rate have been pretty correlated with the cost of living throughout the world. When I left London during its peak costs, the average age for marriage was 36 for me and 32 for women. The displaced rural American worker clinged to both Sanders and Trump in the last primary. This isn’t some massive conspiracy. Home owners in SF and NYC have discouraged development through NIMBYism. Meanwhile, magnetic schools and private school options haven’t really grown their pupil base. If you are making a million a year, the equation works out, but if not, you need to make sacrifices, and, for many millennials that means sacrificing reproduction over lifestyle.
Exactly. My family moved from an American city core to a Japanese city core specifically because we don’t want to live in our cars but American cities aren’t suited for children. Japanese cities are dense and walkable but wonderful places for families and children.
Because they have a high trust, homogenous culture. How many people feel comfortable taking children on public transportation or allowing to roam the middle of cities?
Culture matters, and quite frankly Japanese culture is different.
This is almost exclusively a Millenial/Homelander thing (with Boomer or Gen-X parents). My mom took the elevator train in from Jackson Heights to Manhattan every day for school from the time she turned 12. That's a 50 minute train ride with 2 connections. This was in the early 60s.
I feel like there's basically a two-generation swath where kids were treated like they'd break if you breathed on them, which coincides with the first generation that's never known real deprivation (Boomers) raising kids in an environment where their leaders are trying their hardest to create an environment of fear to maintain social control in the absence of war and real deprivation. It's slowly reversing itself as Millenials are themselves having kids and realizing all the ways that they were screwed over by not being forced to face risk & adversity in their formative years. (There's a big selection bias, too, in that Millenials who buy into the culture of fear are just not having kids because they think the world is hopeless, meaning everyone who has a next generation tends towards the un-anxious population.)
From my reading of your link, it looks like the incident that brought her fame/infamy happened in 2008. That's right during America's obsession with helicopter parenting, so the timeline makes sense.
If you go back to the 1980s, what she did wouldn't have been that remarkable. In that time, kids like me were gone from home for hours, walking or riding bikes for miles away from home, and we didn't have cellphones for our parents to keep tabs on us. Statistics show that crime rates were much higher (they peaked in the mid-70s, and have been falling since); the difference is that Americans just weren't paranoid back then the way they are now.
The problem, of course, is that in America a driver will kill your four year old, and it will somehow be your fault for letting your kid walk to the metro station.
At the worst, public transportation and city centers are biohazards (needles, urine, feces), with mentally-ill people (who are unable to get help) screaming at the top of their lungs. I'm not sure which is worse, when they're screaming at somebody, or when they're screaming at something we can't see.
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.
> How many people feel comfortable taking children on public transportation
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.
Americans cry child neglect when 10 years old play alone outside in residential are with no traffic and last crime 20 years ago. People being uncomfortable with 7 years old playing on playground without direct supervision is literally a thing.
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.
So my moms parents had three children and my dads five. So not huge families but large. They grew up in a city in a third world country and frankly their childhood was a lot more dangerous than your imagined paranoia.
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
Well no. Most of the time she screams honestly. She actually screamed the entire time we were giving our marriage prep talk at church and screamed for another two hours while my wife and I read articles to each other
> Parents who put their kids in front of the TV are lazy.
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...
There is great appeal for sure, but the better long-term solution is to get the kids helping with cleanup, laundry, and dinner prep, even from an age where they can’t do anything yet.
You might be surprised how interested they are in helping out.
> 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.
| Parks exist in most urban areas and are perfect for kids to play in.
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.
Where do you live that you're seeing "used needles littering many of them"? This was something that I often heard talked about by teachers and parents, but I only ever recall seeing ONE used needle laying around when I was a kid and it wasn't at a park - it was on the campus of an Ivy League college!
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.
This is something I hear about a lot. And yet when I walk through places reputed to be full of them, like Denny Park in Seattle, which I walked through today on my way from my office to the library, the worst that I saw was a candy wrapper on the ground.
Singapore solved this problem, and we should probably follow their example
> 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."
Portugal didn’t solve the drug problem. Portugal has stratospherically high rates of drug use before it’s change in policy. At one point fully 1% of the population was addicted to heroin. That has come down, but drug use rates are still much higher than in China, Japan, and Singapore.
In fact, heroin use was the only drug the use of which went down in Portugal after the decriminalization. Use of other drugs went up, especially MDMA. At the same time, heroin use also went down in other European countries in which no decriminalization happened. It blows my mind that some people believe that change in Portugal’s policies was some kind of a huge success.
If you find a country with fewer needles on the streets and fewer people using drugs, we are happy to listen to their policies and how they accomplished it
Alcohol consumption has purposes other than mere intoxication. Likewise I wouldn’t execute a pharmacists who sells opium for legitimate reasons.
But sure, if you have an alcohol executive cutting their wine with methanol, pushing it to middle school kids and breaking interstate laws shipping laws to evade enforcement, like you did in prohibition... screw him.
If alcohol was as illegal as the drugs are today, sure. Even during prohibition the actual laws against alcohol were much more lenient than today’s laws against opiates.
If it was legalized and sold retail (out of liquor stores), all these problems would go away.
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.
Needle disposal boxes and injecting clinics are pretty good at cleaning that up. Not to mention modern needles that kids can't accidentally prick themselves on make it a much lesser issue than decades ago. Not to mention having a lot of other responsible adults around keeping an eye out for stuff like this.
Your description doesn't really sound like any actual city that I know of, although it sounds a little like how someone who's never been to New York City might describe it. Do you have a particular city in mind? Because "car-centric and pedestrian hostile" sounds more like most suburbs than most urban areas.
I've lived in several cities including Boston and DC (and the urban cities that surround them both). It sounds like every wealthy city I've ever lived in or been to and sounds nothing like the 2nd tier cities that I've been to and now live in.
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.
I don't agree with the dystopian view in the OP, but I will say that I notice far fewer people outside in wealthier areas where I live than in poorer areas. I attribute it to most low income jobs not really being bound to the 9-5, so people might be out and about at all hours, especially now that school is out for the summer. It makes these areas feel warmer and closer knit vs. some of the sterile luxury apartments I've seen.
>Your description doesn't really sound like any actual city that I know of, ... Do you have a particular city in mind?
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.
I lived in Manhattan, so I'm pretty clear on my description. And it's true, the suburbs are hostile, too. You just use your lot and single family home to try to reconstitute a usable environment.
I don't see how much different this is from suburbia, but with even more car intermediated isolation from other people? I hated suburbia as a child, since you were stuck in the house and needed your parents to get you to anywhere.
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.
I think the pros/cons shift very quickly once the children get into their teenage years. when they are young and there are other children in the neighborhood, it is much easier for the parent to relax and let them go play together in the cul-de-sac. rough deal for the kid though if they don't manage to make friends on their street.
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.
I currently live in SF and could not imagine having kids here. I’m sure some people do, and have a great time. But it’s not a life that I would want, nor would I want for my kids. This narrative captures pretty accurately why I would not want to raise kids in this city. Now, some other city? Maybe. Probably in Europe. US cities though are just hard places to be. Hard people. Aggressive homelessness. Dirty. Unfriendly. Generally just unpleasant places to be. I would want my kids to grow up with more community and green space and also not have them walk through human feces on the way to school.
I am not sure what part of town you are in. Can you open google maps and tell me how much "green space" you see? More than I grew up with. Hint, there is a rather large rectangular one on the west side of town.
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.
Sure, but good luck easily getting to Golden Gate Park if you're, say, coming from Mission Bay. And if you can afford to live in the hillier parts of town the odds are good you probably have decent (albeit small) neighborhood parks. The problem with SF is that the public schools suck, the streets in a lot of the "urban" parts are rife with squalor, and the city is a lot bigger than it looks when you're trying to get from one side to the other. I mean, if you live in the Outer Sunset you may as well be in a "suburb".... I think SF requires a pretty specific mentality for one to intentionally raise children there [for people of such means to be able to choose to stay or go].
Most of SF west of the Mission is actually pretty good for raising kids - Noe, Twin Peaks, Forest Hills, Sunset, Richmond, and Lake Merced are all pretty family-friendly if you can afford them.
You're right that they're practically suburbs though. Somebody did a transit-scaled map of SF and it actually takes longer to get from the Outer Sunset to downtown than from Mountain View, 50 miles to the south. One of the biggest problems with SF is that the public transportation system sucks, since it's such a patchwork of independent agencies. (Residents of these areas might consider this a feature rather than a bug, though, because it keeps the homeless, poop, drugs, etc. out of their neighborhoods.)
I know hundred-millionaires raising kids in San Francisco and Oakland. They, of all people, have a choice of where they could raise their kids. And they do it in the cities.
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.
Bulldozing entire blocks of cities and replacing the mixed developments that were there with towers surrounded by isolated green space was attempted in the US during the middle of the century, under the guise of being "urban renewal". These projects were broadly considered failures, creating isolated communities with the net effect of displacing many more people in the "bulldoze" phase than they could attract in the "rebuild" phase. Many of these projects ended up as low-income public housing, developed huge crime problems in their isolation, and eventually got bulldozed themselves, in turn.
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.
In the large city where I live, green spaces and parks are flourishing. There are many cultural amenities for children (zoos, museums, libraries). There is also a large ecosystem of for-profit child care/play spaces. Cars are everywhere, but bike sharing, bike lanes, and public transportation are also available. I'm not sure that the city is an unfriendly a place for small children. The biggest problem with all of this is cost in dollars and supervision time. I'm sure with the right priorities, those problems could be solved also. Suburban sprawl isn't inevitable.
Yeah I was thinking this as I read the parent comment. Everything they said is true, but it's also true that there is a lot for kids to do in those places. The comment about plopping kids in front of screens applies more so to the suburbs than to downtown! What are kids supposed to do in their neighborhood? Letting kids wander and play outside is seen as basically criminal, and there's nothing else to do.
> Letting kids wander and play outside is seen as basically criminal, and there's nothing else to do.
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.
This feels like hyperbole. Instead of saying you are wrong objectively, I’ll say instead that my subjective experience of “the city” is in stark contrast to this. Green spaces and the ocean abound. My neighbors are wonderful people. The businesses around me are owned and operated by local people. I can’t walk down the block without running into good folks with smiles on their faces. I try to bring the same energy to my neighborhood. I couldn’t imagine not living here.
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.
My life in Glen Park is quite similar. Recently, I've taken to running to BART for a warm up before I take it to the Equinox and one of the first times I did, a neighbour stopped to ask me if I was in a hurry and if he could give me a lift. I accepted, obviously, and we chatted.
Honestly, most of SF is rather friendly and nice. I like it. First moved here 6 years ago.
CA, USA. To be fair it’s not like everyone is smiling all the time! But I genuinely feel that my neighborhood is a great community mostly consisting of interesting and friendly people.
I don't know how to capture the hostility of suburbia any more perfectly than a walk down the El Camino in Sunnyvale. Try this on street view for a few blocks. Imagine yourself on the sidewalk. This is the world that the "urban cores in the USA are actively hostile places to be" consensus has given us. Maybe the cities this was built in response to really were some kind of unimaginable horror. But I'm pretty sure the cure is worse than the disease.
https://www.google.com/maps/@37.3655957,-122.0294912,3a,75y,...
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?
A lot of older suburbs have a main street like this, including the one I grew up in. They're grandfathered from before the zoning code, not allowed anywhere else in the municipality, and sometimes illegal to replicate even on the same lots [0]. Sunnyvale is what's allowed to exist at scale and to grow all across America.
I mean that’s not really true, right? Here’s a residential neighborhood in Chicago: https://images.app.goo.gl/o9crCx8EYGJcz7NcA. Another view: https://images.app.goo.gl/2AFgALbMTH3KsxYbA. Not exactly the hellacape you describe. And homier than many new suburban subdivisions. (None of the suburban neighborhoods I’ve ever lived in have even had sidewalks.)
You can get a surprising amount of density from low rise buildings, with narrow tree-lined streets and generous sidewalks.
I thought of replying, thought better of it. But it's true that you can get a lot of density from low rise buildings. My old neighborhood of 100 year old two story town houses is about 18,000 people per square mile. Friends of mine with older kids just let them roll around the city. There's a lot to do.
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.
I don't understand. What would your reply have been? Rayiner posted an image from a high density part of Lakeview, which is an inner urban neighborhood of Chicago, about a mile further from the (significantly larger) commercial core of Chicago than 16th and Mission is from 2nd and Market. I could give you pictures of the same neighborhood with mixed 2-3 flats and single-family homes on streets with total tree canopy and parks at the end, and Lakeview is one of the more urban parts of (residential) Chicago --- go to Avondale or Humboldt Park and and find more parks, more trees, and smaller houses, all in inner ring neighborhoods.
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.
I think the places your parent comment was characterizing are the ones with mixed use zoning. Think Manhattan, shops on the first floor, office and housing space above. All of the parent's points stand.
I prefer to call it "respecting people's property rights", "mixed use" and "European style zoning" are too vague leave way too much room for curtailment of freedom which when they run their course bring us basically back to the status quo.
Every bylaw and city planning initiative "curtails freedom" for the sake of engineering a better, more efficient community and better quality of life. The issue with (in particular) single family residential zoning isn't that it limits what land owners can do with the land - in the city, this is unavoidable and very much desirable. It's that it artificially incentivizes inefficient, unhealthy and socially disconnected car-centric suburbia.
I'm not sure what it can mean to respect people's property rights with respect to residential-only zoning. A zoning decision is not written into the original deed and can be changed with an exception by the zoning board or a general change in the city/county code. However, the residential-only zoning makes it difficult for one person to use their property as they see fit, for example, building a duplex or rentable apartment onto their house, or opening a small store or tiny school.
I'm sorry, but... have you actually lived in a city? Actually spent time in a public park? Dined at an urban restaurant? Actually been (???!?) unable to reach a public library? This sounds just crazy to me. Literally everything you do in the suburbs, absent long hikes and home gardening, is more conveniently available in an urban center. You don't have to like it, but... that list of complaints just reads as nonsense to anyone actually living in these places.
This mirrors my sentiment prior to moving to Boston. It turned out to be the opposite. It took more time to get to most places in the city than it took to get to equivalent places when I lived in New Hampshire. You name it: grocery stores, restaurants, pubs, cafes, shopping, parks, markets, etc. My wife and I moved back to NH after a year due to our quality of life dropping so drastically. Two of my childhood friends recently moved back from San Diego and Los Angeles for exactly the same reason.
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.
> Now I can get to [grocery stores, restaurants, pubs, cafes, shopping, parks, markets, etc.] via car in under 5 minutes
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.
He's in New Hampshire. It sounds legit for a place like Concord or Manchester.
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.
> replace them with low rise cohousing communities
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.
Probably one of two things, one of which I believe is a mistaken correlation:
* 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.
When I saw low rise, I mean about four stories, maybe up to six. The height of Copenhagen, say. It produces a much more humane built environment and much less interior hellscape.
It's actually completely opposite from my experience. The kids on the low-rise neighborhoods and burbs are stuck in the house unless there's a parent present whose full time job to haul them around. My nephews are growing up in the burbs, and they can barely walk to a gas station without the risk of being hit by a fast moving vehicle, and cannot reach even e.g. a park without driving. Sure, they can play baseball in the backyard. How exciting is that?
I grew up in a major city... I was walking to play soccer on my own starting perhaps at 7yo (short walk to a field on streets with tons of foot traffic and hence slow cars), went to school on my own since around the same time, took the subway by myself starting perhaps at around 10; around the same time (very short, and safe walk), or a little later when I could be trusted with money I could go buy bread or whatever, all by myself. A friend of mine transferred to a specialized middle/high school around 8th grade and took a subway for 40 minutes every day to get there, by himself; if one of my nephews in the low-rise neighborhood wants to do that, that will throw his parents' day in complete disarray.
Sounds like the words of someone who didn't grow up in a city, currently/recently lives/lived in one they dislike, and hasn't found happiness somewhere else.
I currently am raising two kids in the suburbs and the only reason we are not in the city is that rents are too expensive for a reasonable sized house/apartment.
> I look at it a little differently. The urban cores in the USA are actively hostile places for anyone to be. You step outside your door...into an empty hallway of doors. You take an elevator or stairs down to a place with a few mailboxes, then step outside.
> 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.
GP:
> Outside, you have a narrow strip of concrete, possibly with a few trees, that you are allowed to inhabit.
You:
> Step outside your door into a narrow strip of concrete, possibly with a few trees, and a shortly cut lawn
It doesn't have to be low rise housing. Look at Singapore for an example of how high density, high-rise housing can coexist with plentiful public spaces.
Have you tried being a kid or raising a kid in the city? This description does not match my experience or my general impressions of other people’s experiences at all.
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.
I am raising a 2.5 year old in SF and my experience is very similar to yours. We're looking at moving out to the East Bay soon to be closer to my parents, but SF - outside of housing - is not a bad place to be raising a child.
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
Exposure isn’t a bad thing. Eventually, kids have to learn. Growing up first in the city and then in the adjacent suburb, I would say kids who grew up solely in the city were much more mature by the time they were 18. Many kids who grew up in the suburbs were “looking for the thrill” versus being cognizant of reality. Too often in the US, parents seems to try and shelter kids form near-term dangers at all costs versus giving them exposure to situations, and letting them learn from it and grow.
Children have to be children. Yes, you have to make them responsible, to have chores, to start treating them like adults early.
But the necessity for exposure to "near-term dangers" is a very American thing to say and I believe that it is wrong.
Yes, children growing up in big cities are more mature. And cynical. And depressed.
The irony of the situation is that big cities are so dangerous nowadays that parents no longer allow their children to play outside unsupervised or to go anywhere by themselves until adolescence.
I grew up in a small city in the eighties and nineties (not in the US) and was walking home or to school, by myself, since I was 7 years old. The mentality back then for raising children was basically "make sure they do their homework and feed them once in a while". I now live in a big city and I couldn't do that with my son, because the environment is not the same. We live in a big city, but I still have to drive him everywhere, even though he's 9 years old.
I think you two are not talking about the exact same thing. In my understanding GP isn't at all opposed at kids being kids. Their point sounded more like being about autonomy.
Due to the mobility restrictions of the suburbs (everything can only reached by car) you as a parent are automatically managing more of the time of your kids: Picking them up at school, driving them to organized event 1 or 2 (sports for example) etc.
In the city it's easier for kids to do those things themselves: My kids went to school by themselves after a few weeks in first grade (school is only a few hundred meters away from home, though). This has a bunch of other consequences: They can autonomously meet peers earlier, so they have more free and unstructured time together etc. All in all less parental involvement, and the kids have to (and want to!) organize more by themselves.
Anecdotally the people I know who grew up in cities have less psychiatric problems then people I knew who grew up in suburbs. They also don’t seem more cynical, just more competent.
Do you have any evidence? Or just a personal hunch?
> big cities are so dangerous nowadays
Big cities nowadays are dramatically safer than they were a few decades ago.
> parents no longer allow their children to play outside unsupervised
This is due to the parents’ paranoid fears, not the inherent danger involved.
> but SF - outside of housing - is not a bad place to be raising a child
You can't discount housing, because it's what gets you to live in a really small space, possibly in a dangerous neighborhood and with so much street noise that you can't sleep with your window open.
So yes, if you can't afford a nice place with plenty of room in a nice neighborhood, then SF is a terrible place to be raising a child.
> more small shops of all kinds, more coffeeshops, more live music, more social clubs, more classes, more playgrounds, more museums
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".
There is more of pretty much everything within a kid-accessible distance in the city, including tons and tons of free stuff. There are more and better parks and playgrounds. There are more publicly accessible athletic facilities. There are more and bigger free public libraries. The amazing museums have regular free days for residents, and zoo/aquarium/museum passes can often be checked out for free from the library. There are more free art exhibits. There are more cultural festivals. There are more special-interest meetup groups....
Plenty of city kids play pick-up (or organized) sports outside for fun for free every day.
Coffee houses are often free to sit in. Social clubs also often hold free events. Live music is often outside. Playgrounds and museums tend to be free or low cost
>I look at it a little differently. The urban cores in the USA are actively hostile places for anyone to be. You step outside your door...into an empty hallway of doors. You take an elevator or stairs down to a place with a few mailboxes, then step outside.
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.
You might dislike cities, but please don’t narcissistically project your personal preferences into everyone else and claim that they are unpleasant for everyone.
I don't live in a big city or an urban area. I live in a small midwestern town, population 10,000. I paid $40,000 for my 4-bedroom house. I don't have a mortgage. I have TWO gigabit optical Internet connections for which I pay less than $70 per month - since the 1990's! I work remotely only occasionally visiting the fancy places you all speak of, wondering why you put up with what you put up with. I employ several programmers, including very talented folks from Russia and Colombia. I have taught open source full stack development for a few years now, with graduates getting positions at the top silicon valley firms. You'd be amazed how many start-ups have succeeded from towns like this. I only recently put a lock on my house - not because I did not feel safe - more an IoT thing. I have raised 5 kids here. My town has a village square, and yes a Walmart. My town has more than 30 miles of bike/hiking/skiing trails. Parks everywhere. There is a sportsplex less than 1,000 steps from my house with 3 full size basketball courts, indoor pool, outdoor pool, hot tub, 200m indoor track, comprehensive weight/exercise/fitness facilities, etc. Less than 1,000 steps in another direction is a modern library with a great kids section. This is not an unusual town. There are many like it in America. Do they have problems? Sure. They are the places that teenagers used to grow up to move away from. Those kids are coming back now and having families of their own, with "actual births".
Yes there are jobs. I have clients in small towns all over the midwest and there are plenty of jobs in all those towns. It is so very hard to find employees willing to work! I think my point though is that given the nature of this HN space, most of the "readers" have the skills to work remotely from anywhere. Make yourself a valuable and treasured resource and employers will want you to work, even if it is over a connection. I think the key metric is not whether jobs are available in a small town, but rather the nature of available Internet access - thanks to the decades old USDA Broadband initiative, many small towns across America have better Internet than larger cities, especially cities monopolized by multiple-system operators (MSO's). Many small towns do not. That is where one needs to be selective.
I've found it quite easy to freelance on the countryside. There are businesses out here, and since most IT people live in cities there's a lack of them out here. Easy jobs, that pay less than a top job somewhere else, but living is so much cheaper that it doesn't matter.
A major problem in American cities is what's called "contraception zoning." It's a de facto and sometimes de jure ban on large (as in 4 or more bedroom) apartments.
Similarly cities often have overly restrictive minimum housing sizes as well, often induced by low-density zoning, parking requirements, or other laws. That makes economical, tiny apartments for singles/childless couples scarce; so naturally you end up doing what me and almost all my friends in SF do, which is rent out a much larger apartment than you need (3+ bedrooms), probably under rent control because only old buildings are built that way and that's what SF rent control law applies to, and split it between a bunch of roommates.
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.
Could you expand on this? I've never met a couple that could afford a 4 bedroom apartment on their own, so I'm not sure how allowing even larger apartments solves anything?
The reason you can't afford a 4 bedroom apartment when you can afford a HOUSE is that large apartments are rare in American cities, because municipal governments do everything to prevent them from being built. The few that exist were built mostly before WW2, and are rented to students.
In other countries, large apartments are plentiful, and they are cheaper than houses the same size, because of economies of scale.
See that column of "white college grad, no kids" -what do you think happens demographically to that column in 10/15 years time? Sure, some people move on. But, also, some people stay and have kids.
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.
I agree especially if "living in the city" selects for someone career focused who is already putting off kids or even marriage until they are more financially stable.
The white category in the US has always been shrinking and childless. The only way that it isn't 5% or less or the population is that every generation another group get a added as white. Be they Irish, Swedes, Germans, Poles, Jews, Ukranians or currently Asians.
Japan is a decade or so "ahead" of USA in population decline, so it's worth looking at for hints about what might happen. They're starting to encourage immigration; a big change for that country.
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.
You know, your point of "better infrastructure, can only lead to less hectic lives for city-dwellers. That will lead to more sex and more kiddos." rings really true. I wonder if all these reasons/explanations given in this article and that I see floating around boils down to free time. Like how when NYC had that summer blackout a few years ago there was a mini baby boom ~9 months later. The lack of power meant everyone was board and hot and in the dark so they decided to bone. The frenetic pace of life without support systems (e.g., close extended family) has just pushed sex down as a priority. So the way to get people to make more babies is to give them more free time. I bet this is an evolutionary thing too. If you're constantly on the run from predators and stuff, you shouldn't be making children. Only when things calm down would it make sense to procreate. So sex drive is probably directly related to free time...
Many, many opinions here presented as “unavoidable facts”. One man’s observations presented as evidence when the points he makes small right but don’t hold up to deeper inspection.
When I lived in San Francisco, during the aftermath of the first dot-com boom, it was not uncommon to find used syringes at the playgrounds in GG Park. I was living in an apartment in the Inner Sunset, and every could of days the building manager had to hose down the steps to our building because someone was using them as a public toilet. By all I have heard, the situation in SF has only gotten worse. I don't know, it's not where I would want to raise kids.
I think it's moved. GG Park, when I've visited recently, has been delightful - I let my 18mo play freely in many of the open areas. The Mission, Tenderloin, Civic Center, and much of Market Street looks like a warzone. Or an outhouse. Or an outhouse that got bombed in a warzone.
SF is weird in that you can have very nice areas that are literally just a couple blocks away from hellholes.
The less advanced a society, the less options for adults with gainful employment. Making babies is one option pretty much always available, so when you introduce more options it makes sense that making babies would get pushed back among all the other options, right?
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.
It’s not quite so simple. Both men and women state the ideal number of children they want to have as about 2.7: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/13/upshot/american-fertility.... Our society doesn’t just introduce more alternatives to having kids, it introduces more factors that get in the way or having kids. We’ve structured our society around this extended adolescence, where young people aren’t even really done with school until well into their adulthood. By the time they get their feet under them and settled down, they’re rushing to have a couple of kids before the clock runs out.
You may be surprised to learn, men need women to have children. If women are waiting later to have children, it doesn't mater how old the man is. Further, even if it were a problem only for women, that doesn't make the problem moot.
It's a problem for women over 30. If men merely have to delay reproduction by 40 years to their 70s you can quite easily kick the can down the road for the next generation to deal with. Given how much worse each next generation is doing this may well seem like a great deal in 2060 to the women who are born in 10 years time.
It confuses the matter to talk about household earnings, which obscure the increase in two-income households. (Two-income households have more income and expenses for a given standard of living, since homemakers are contributing to household earnings and expenses in a shadowed form.)
Except most men marry women who are about the same age. The gap in average age at first marriage is just two years, and has steadily decreased over the past century.
Ok, this is just bad logic. Setting aside the actual figures. If "most women" are waiting until late in their life to have kids, the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd wife you marry, regardless of your age, is waiting until later in life to have kids.
Most women today yes. Most women in 30 years? Depends on a lot of factors. Given how poor genz is at 20 to the next generation the stability of living in a one family house vs working a minimum wage clerical job could well be worth giving up the idea of a career.
The US is optimized for corporations. It’s not news that while company profits are at all time highs, individual income has stayed stagnant. Family growth won’t happen without societal factors reinforcing families.
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.
> Okay, you might be thinking, but so what? Happy singles are no tragedy. Childlessness is no sin. There is no ethical duty to marry and mate until one’s fertility has exceeded the replacement rate. What’s the matter with a childless city?
It’s relatively recently that anyone would take these assertions as a given.
I’m just surprised to see the assertion in print. I’m not that old, and I don’t think you would’ve seen it stated so matter of factly when I was a kid.
Well, yes. Most of the developed countries have birth rates below replacement rate.[1]
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.
This is an unpopular opinion but one that seems to be self evident, at least from a demographic and perhaps cultural “win”.
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?
I've known so many young couples who loved being in the city, and then they had kids. Once they realized the schools were terrible and that there was no chance of improving them, they moved to the burbs. It was either that, or mom got mugged and there was no staying after that.
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.
I live in Manhattan, and I can't imagine having a kid here. There's barely enough space for my wife and I. Plus the waiting lists, zoning drama, and crazy daycare situations. Plus the whole place is so dirty. A lot of people do it and are perfectly happy with it and it gives the kid more freedom, but I'm definitely moving to the suburbs before starting a family.
It is all about cost everything is about money. All I can say is if you are middle class, want kids and not struggle financially wait till you have a huge nest-egg in your 40-50s and then find a much younger girl.
- 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.
Not my offspring since I'm quite well of myself in my country, but you should support others rearing their children in your country since the economy that will pay your pensions relies on younger people you did not raise.
I agree, and I'd like to pile on with a more specific proposal.
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.
Good ideas but too high minded. Any policy that actually gets implemented will be “progressive” and favor the lowest common denominator individuals. Well off people need to figure out smarter workarounds like remote work, etc.
It might be worth considering that there are non-punitive ways to encourage having children - universal provision of child care seems to work. Carrots tend to be more popular than sticks.
Sure, but realistically that money has to come from somewhere, I never considered that explicitly calling it a childless tax would be thought as punitive.
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.
Fairness aside, the question of if it works seems reasonably well-studied. Among other things it can really decrease the disruption to someone's professional life from becoming a parent, which is something that leads a lot of people to delay or avoid doing so.
I'm all for free child care/free education, I was not saying that doesn't work, I know it helps a lot.
I was making the point that tax deductions don't work because poor people don't pay a lot of taxes and their tax deductions won't cover the costs of day care.
If we want to promote upwards mobility, free education is a must.
I can think of several arguments for or against this, but the two important (and somewhat independent) questions to ask first are "is our target population larger than present?" and "what do we want our age distribution to look like?".
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.
Can you expand on that? Because it comes off as "since I have become a parent I want other people to pay more taxes so I can pay less", because y'know more money for me is good.
I guess not enough?
I don't want to sound like an asshole, I only have one child myself and I'm seriously considering stopping at one, I don't think childless people should be punished, but taxes should be steadily increased over time and incentivise child rearing until birthrates become sustainable again.
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.
This sounds like a poor idea for environmental conservation. There's already enough people reproducing, beyond the replacement rate (that is to say, faster than the rate of people dying). Maybe not the in the USA, but elsewhere in the world. The global population is growing.
Sustainable as in 2.x births per woman if you want to keep a population steady, or a lower number at first, but eventually you will want that 2.x births per woman because otherwise we go extinct as a species.
What's the purpose of keeping our current population steady? Is the goal just to never drop below a certain amount of people since we already reached that number?
Is there some sort of universal duty to have a certain amount of people alive at the same time? And if so, is it based on any sort of science?
Maybe my english is not that great, but I thought I clearly exained that you will EVENTUALY need 2.X children per women, otherwise we will go extinct as a species, do you dispute that?
Wether it's 20 years from now or 100 years it's irrelevant.
Is there an universal duty to keep your weight constant at all times?
No, loosing or gaining a couple of pounds is ok, but dieting by cutting of your hand is not ok.
For one, that's just wrong. You need to be only above 1.0 children per couple on average in order to maintain population growth. You don't need 2 children per woman and mandating that sort of thing would be absurd, not to mention sexist (in the way that it reduces the autonomy of women and removes the choice of having children).
For two, humanity has no innate value that makes maintaining infinite population growth somehow good or even sustainable. We're more likely to go extinct as a result of unsustainable population growth and resource exploitation than a result of reversing population growth globally.
And finally even if that was the case, this is something that would be literally hundreds of years away barring some sort of global extinction event.
Your goal a 2-child (minimum) policy?? Our current population isn't environmentally sustainable. Historically, humans have had no problem increasing their population. I just don't understand the concern.
In earnest, I do not believe that a lack of population is the biggest hurdle in ensuring that people won't go extinct. I would suspect that climate change, geopolitical tensions, and poverty are larger factors.
Okay, how does this work realistically? What about people that are sterile? Or people who choose to not have children due to their genetic history? Or what if they literally cannot afford to have children?
And what does sustainable mean in this context? Is every nation supposed to have a positive growth of population into perpetuity?
That's a regressive tax that punishes people who are unable to have children due to health problems, sexual identity, living conditions, or even failure to get laid. People who do have children should be taxed more instead because they're more successful, and they're the ones who benefit from higher taxes anyways due to publicly-funded education and social programs.
it's probably a bad idea for a lot of reasons, but it's not a "regressive" tax. lower income families tend to have more children, so this tax setup would shift tax burden higher up the income ladder. it would hurt some low income individuals, but it would help low income families as a group.
Where I live everybody pays the same % of their income as taxes.
I am not a government, I don't know how much more childless people should pay, you could start with a low,arbitrary number percentage wise(say 2% more if you are childless) -- and alocate those taxes to free childcare or other baby services.
> Where I live everybody pays the same % of their income as taxes.
Do you not live in the US? The article is about the US so that's what everyone is assuming from your previous comment, which is really confusing because it's already the way you want it to be.
They already do. The EITC (Earned Income Tax Credit) applies primarily to filers who are head of household -- which, by definition, requires having at least 1 dependent. Childless people are filing single.
Urban real estate is as small as the market allows and gradually shrinks as each iteration of smaller becomes normal.
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.
> Nobody wants open offices or six hundred square foot apartments.
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.
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?