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America’s urban rebirth is missing actual births

196 points by laurex 7y ago

jseliger 7y ago
Further good reading on this subject: Empty Planet https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/545397/empty-planet-by-darrell-bricker-and-john-ibbitson/9781984823212/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/545397/empty-planet...
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
coldtea 7y ago
>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.
- tropo 7y ago
  That'll do it though. 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.
  - helen___keller 7y ago
    >The homeless scare away families This applies to a narrow subset of urban locations
  - clairity 7y ago
    > "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.
    - nickserv 7y ago
      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.
      - d1zzy 7y ago
        Right, but that's like saying "without women we wouldn't have women entering the workforce". Technically true, but not an argument against it.
    - toomuchtodo 7y ago
      > 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." https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/23/18183091/two-income-trap-elizabeth-warren-book https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/23/18183091/t... > 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. [1] https://www.bls.gov/spotlight/2017/women-in-the-workforce-before-during-and-after-the-great-recession/pdf/women-in-the-workforce-before-during-and-after-the-great-recession.pdf https://www.bls.gov/spotlight/2017/women-in-the-workforce-be... (PDF, page 2)
  - malandrew 7y ago
    I don't understand why this is getting downvoted. IIRC it's the entire data-backed thesis of Elizabeth Warren's 2003 book the Two-Income Trap. CityLab recently documented the rise and fall of the SRO: https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/02/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-american-sro/553946/ https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/02/the-rise-and-fall-of-...
    - tropo 7y ago
      If you don't know about Elizabeth Warren’s book, it probably sounds like something from the Proud Boys or the Promise Keepers. It'd be great to agree on the facts, even if people can't agree on how they feel about the facts or if anything should be done to change the facts.
  - bobthepanda 7y ago
    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.
    - bcoates 7y ago
      Roommates are mostly a side-effect of banning SROs. If the NIMBYs had their way they'd be illegal too. Urban singles needing housing isn't new.
      - bobthepanda 7y ago
        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.
      - leetcrew 7y ago
        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.
  - leetcrew 7y ago
    > 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.
  - watwut 7y ago
    > Women entered the job market due to birth control and legal changes Legal changes is fascinating euphemism for "not being punished for it anymore".
- qserasera 7y ago
  Nobody wants to "try harder" and be similarly poor
  - metildaa 7y ago
    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.
    - InitialLastName 7y ago
      What kind of monster would put more than one child in a bedroom though \s.
- tathougies 7y ago
  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.
  - georgeburdell 7y ago
    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.
    - deogeo 7y ago
      How did you get 'subjugation' from staying at home?
      - bobthechef 7y ago
        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.
- dahfizz 7y ago
  It's harder than ever relative to living in the suburbs. Every day the suburbs get cheaper, more spacious, and more enjoyable relative to the city.
  - 1stcity3rdcoast 7y ago
    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.
    - souprock 7y ago
      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.
- munificent 7y ago
  > 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. What choice did they have? Birth control wasn't widely available until the 60s.
  - mercutio2 7y ago
    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.
madhadron 7y ago
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.
- vidanay 7y ago
  And eliminate US style separate zoning. European mixed use zoning is much more "social" allowing shorter commutes to work and shorter trips to retail.
raducu 7y ago
Unpopular opinion I've held since before I became a parent: childless people should pay more taxes.
- esoterica 7y ago
  They already do pay more taxes, you get extra exemptions for each kid.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- save_ferris 7y ago
  Dependent tax exemptions?
- kaesar14 7y ago
  But...we do?
  - raducu 7y ago
    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.
    - antisthenes 7y ago
      > taxes should be steadily increased over time and incentivise child rearing until birthrates become sustainable again. How exactly do you define sustainable here? Sustainable what?
      - raducu 7y ago
ggm 7y ago
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.
- jayd16 7y ago
  Agreed. Isn't this just showing that the larger Millennial generation has entered the cities but only just started having kids?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- thrwayxyz 7y ago
  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.
- asdff 7y ago
  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.
OliverJones 7y ago
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 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.
- DrAwdeOccarim 7y ago
  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...
jayd16 7y ago
What if we look at this another way and ask why young people can't or won't start their careers in rural areas to begin with?
- asdff 7y ago
  People work in the city because they get hired there.
ocschwar 7y ago
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.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- fountainofage 7y ago
  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?
  - ocschwar 7y ago
    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.
- osdiab 7y ago
  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.
rayiner 7y ago
> 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.
- voxl 7y ago
  It's relatively recently that slavery was outlawed. Recency has little to do with it.
  - rayiner 7y ago
    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.
    - harryh 7y ago
      FWIW, I read that passage as being presented somewhat ironically.
- bobthechef 7y ago
  There is no moral obligation for everyone to have children, but for the species to continue, someone has to and that means most people. I wouldn't use that to determine whether you should, only that human nature naturally moves us to have children and the few who choose not to marry can legitimately say they have not done so for the sake of a higher purpose, thus making it a sacrifice. Refusing to have children because it would take time away from indulging in vacuous consumerist pastimes is not a sacrifice, just a sign of developmental immaturity. Quite an accusation since I do not think all of our ancestors were the most mature of people. Part of the reason we have a difficult time seeing this is because of contraception. We've essentially divorced the procreative end of sexual intercourse from the pleasure. But the pleasure is an incentive to procreate and bond, not an end in itself. Even bonding vis-a-vis marriage versus non-martial friendship is ordered toward procreation. We've unmoored sex from its purposes and engage in little more than mutual masturbation.
jonknee 7y ago
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. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2018/10/19/us-fertility-rates-collapse-finger-pointing-blame-follow/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2018/10/19/us-fertilit...
- war1025 7y ago
  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.
  - downrightmike 7y ago
    No, people just grow up and see that people are assholes, progeny double so.
    - patrickaljord 7y ago
      You're saying kids are assholes? What?
  - samhain 7y ago
    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?
Animats 7y ago
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. [1] http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/total-fertility-rate/ http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/total-fertility-r...
- rmuesi 7y ago
  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?
CptFribble 7y ago
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.
- rayiner 7y ago
  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-is-falling-short-of-what-women-want.html 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.
  - thrwayxyz 7y ago
    That sounds like a problem for women. Men can happily have children in their 70s as the current president has shown.
    - rayiner 7y ago
      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.
      - thrwayxyz 7y ago
        Yes, then for their second and third marriage they choose younger women. The average marriage lasts o my 8 years currently. Again this is a problem for women, not men.
rmuesi 7y ago
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.
- closeparen 7y ago
  >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.
- alltakendamned 7y ago
  > 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.
thomas 7y ago
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.
colechristensen 7y ago
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.
- whymauri 7y ago
  >Nobody wants open offices or six hundred square foot apartments Some people definitely want and enjoy these things.
- esoterica 7y ago
  > 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.
tempsy 7y ago
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).
- pmart123 7y ago
  “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.
  - peanutgal2600 7y ago
    20 years after Roe vs Wade.
    - dralley 7y ago
      And, simultaneously, the removal of lead from gasoline
      - wcfields 7y ago
        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?
        hollerith 7y ago
Sojuwa 7y ago
Excellent news, the fewer white babies, the faster we displace Nazis from the gene pool.
whyenot 7y ago
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.
- nostrademons 7y ago
  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.
deleted 7y ago
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stevenjgarner 7y ago
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".
- nikanj 7y ago
  Are there jobs in that town? That seems to make or break a small town.
  - stevenjgarner 7y ago
    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.
tomohawk 7y ago
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.
lumberingjack 7y ago
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.
CalRobert 7y ago
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?
- dexen 7y ago
  >Not sure what comes after step 3 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.
  - CalRobert 7y ago
    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.
ianai 7y ago
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. There are other factors, but I’ll stop there.
chronotis 7y ago
This entire thread is a perfect example of confirmation bias.
jdlyga 7y ago
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.

196 points by laurex 7y ago

Further good reading on this subject: Empty Planet https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/545397/empty-planet-by-darrell-bricker-and-john-ibbitson/9781984823212/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/545397/empty-planet...

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

coldtea 7y ago

>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.

tropo 7y ago
That'll do it though. 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.
- helen___keller 7y ago
  >The homeless scare away families This applies to a narrow subset of urban locations
- clairity 7y ago
  > "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.
  - nickserv 7y ago
    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.
    - d1zzy 7y ago
      Right, but that's like saying "without women we wouldn't have women entering the workforce". Technically true, but not an argument against it.
  - toomuchtodo 7y ago
    > 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." https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/23/18183091/two-income-trap-elizabeth-warren-book https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/23/18183091/t... > 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. [1] https://www.bls.gov/spotlight/2017/women-in-the-workforce-before-during-and-after-the-great-recession/pdf/women-in-the-workforce-before-during-and-after-the-great-recession.pdf https://www.bls.gov/spotlight/2017/women-in-the-workforce-be... (PDF, page 2)
- malandrew 7y ago
  I don't understand why this is getting downvoted. IIRC it's the entire data-backed thesis of Elizabeth Warren's 2003 book the Two-Income Trap. CityLab recently documented the rise and fall of the SRO: https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/02/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-american-sro/553946/ https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/02/the-rise-and-fall-of-...
  - tropo 7y ago
    If you don't know about Elizabeth Warren’s book, it probably sounds like something from the Proud Boys or the Promise Keepers. It'd be great to agree on the facts, even if people can't agree on how they feel about the facts or if anything should be done to change the facts.
- bobthepanda 7y ago
  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.
  - bcoates 7y ago
    Roommates are mostly a side-effect of banning SROs. If the NIMBYs had their way they'd be illegal too. Urban singles needing housing isn't new.
    - bobthepanda 7y ago
      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.
    - leetcrew 7y ago
      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.
- leetcrew 7y ago
  > 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.
- watwut 7y ago
  > Women entered the job market due to birth control and legal changes Legal changes is fascinating euphemism for "not being punished for it anymore".
qserasera 7y ago
Nobody wants to "try harder" and be similarly poor
- metildaa 7y ago
  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.
  - InitialLastName 7y ago
    What kind of monster would put more than one child in a bedroom though \s.
tathougies 7y ago
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.
- georgeburdell 7y ago
  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.
  - deogeo 7y ago
    How did you get 'subjugation' from staying at home?
    - bobthechef 7y ago
      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.
dahfizz 7y ago
It's harder than ever relative to living in the suburbs. Every day the suburbs get cheaper, more spacious, and more enjoyable relative to the city.
- 1stcity3rdcoast 7y ago
  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.
  - souprock 7y ago
    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.
munificent 7y ago
> 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. What choice did they have? Birth control wasn't widely available until the 60s.
- mercutio2 7y ago
  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.

madhadron 7y ago

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.

vidanay 7y ago
And eliminate US style separate zoning. European mixed use zoning is much more "social" allowing shorter commutes to work and shorter trips to retail.

raducu 7y ago

Unpopular opinion I've held since before I became a parent: childless people should pay more taxes.

esoterica 7y ago
They already do pay more taxes, you get extra exemptions for each kid.
- deleted 7y ago
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save_ferris 7y ago
Dependent tax exemptions?
kaesar14 7y ago
But...we do?
- raducu 7y ago
  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.
  - antisthenes 7y ago
    > taxes should be steadily increased over time and incentivise child rearing until birthrates become sustainable again. How exactly do you define sustainable here? Sustainable what?
    - raducu 7y ago

ggm 7y ago

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.

jayd16 7y ago
Agreed. Isn't this just showing that the larger Millennial generation has entered the cities but only just started having kids?
deleted 7y ago
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thrwayxyz 7y ago
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.
asdff 7y ago
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.

OliverJones 7y ago

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 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.

DrAwdeOccarim 7y ago
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...

jayd16 7y ago

What if we look at this another way and ask why young people can't or won't start their careers in rural areas to begin with?

asdff 7y ago
People work in the city because they get hired there.

ocschwar 7y ago

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.

deleted 7y ago
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fountainofage 7y ago
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?
- ocschwar 7y ago
  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.
osdiab 7y ago
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.

rayiner 7y ago

> 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.

voxl 7y ago
It's relatively recently that slavery was outlawed. Recency has little to do with it.
- rayiner 7y ago
  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.
  - harryh 7y ago
    FWIW, I read that passage as being presented somewhat ironically.
bobthechef 7y ago
There is no moral obligation for everyone to have children, but for the species to continue, someone has to and that means most people. I wouldn't use that to determine whether you should, only that human nature naturally moves us to have children and the few who choose not to marry can legitimately say they have not done so for the sake of a higher purpose, thus making it a sacrifice. Refusing to have children because it would take time away from indulging in vacuous consumerist pastimes is not a sacrifice, just a sign of developmental immaturity. Quite an accusation since I do not think all of our ancestors were the most mature of people. Part of the reason we have a difficult time seeing this is because of contraception. We've essentially divorced the procreative end of sexual intercourse from the pleasure. But the pleasure is an incentive to procreate and bond, not an end in itself. Even bonding vis-a-vis marriage versus non-martial friendship is ordered toward procreation. We've unmoored sex from its purposes and engage in little more than mutual masturbation.

jonknee 7y ago

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. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2018/10/19/us-fertility-rates-collapse-finger-pointing-blame-follow/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2018/10/19/us-fertilit...

war1025 7y ago
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.
- downrightmike 7y ago
  No, people just grow up and see that people are assholes, progeny double so.
  - patrickaljord 7y ago
    You're saying kids are assholes? What?
- samhain 7y ago
  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?

Animats 7y ago

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. [1] http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/total-fertility-rate/ http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/total-fertility-r...

rmuesi 7y ago
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?

CptFribble 7y ago

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.

rayiner 7y ago
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-is-falling-short-of-what-women-want.html 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.
- thrwayxyz 7y ago
  That sounds like a problem for women. Men can happily have children in their 70s as the current president has shown.
  - rayiner 7y ago
    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.
    - thrwayxyz 7y ago
      Yes, then for their second and third marriage they choose younger women. The average marriage lasts o my 8 years currently. Again this is a problem for women, not men.

rmuesi 7y ago

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.

closeparen 7y ago
>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.
alltakendamned 7y ago
> 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.

thomas 7y ago

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.

colechristensen 7y ago

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.

whymauri 7y ago
>Nobody wants open offices or six hundred square foot apartments Some people definitely want and enjoy these things.
esoterica 7y ago
> 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.

tempsy 7y ago

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).

pmart123 7y ago
“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.
- peanutgal2600 7y ago
  20 years after Roe vs Wade.
  - dralley 7y ago
    And, simultaneously, the removal of lead from gasoline
    - wcfields 7y ago
      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?
      - hollerith 7y ago

Sojuwa 7y ago

Excellent news, the fewer white babies, the faster we displace Nazis from the gene pool.

whyenot 7y ago

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.

nostrademons 7y ago
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.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

stevenjgarner 7y ago

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".

nikanj 7y ago
Are there jobs in that town? That seems to make or break a small town.
- stevenjgarner 7y ago
  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.

tomohawk 7y ago

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.

lumberingjack 7y ago

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.

CalRobert 7y ago

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?

dexen 7y ago
>Not sure what comes after step 3 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.
- CalRobert 7y ago
  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.

ianai 7y ago

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. There are other factors, but I’ll stop there.

chronotis 7y ago

This entire thread is a perfect example of confirmation bias.

jdlyga 7y ago

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.