As a parent of 3, this sentiment is exactly why I'm getting my kids on bikes as early as possible, and why we sold our 2nd car. Jamming all the kids into the car just sucks.
"That routine of corralling everyone into the car and buckling the carseats and just getting out the door is *effort*; it’s *friction*. It wears you down. It raises the cost of having kids, even if, given America’s predominant land use, it also lowers it."
I am a mom who loves being able to walk to school with my kids (I live in a Northeastern inner ring suburb a few blocks from our small downtown).
I can't prove this, but I think my kids are more social and independent because they have to walk lots of places and interact with people on the street.
I would also add the carseats are infantilizing for small kids - my four-year old can dress and bathe herself, but she still needs me to get in and out of the car.
My son starts kindergarten this fall and I am *beyond* excited that it's an easy walk or public bus ride away. And the ability to leave the house and walk *to* something is huge, we can do impromptu trips to the store or he can come with me to pick up takeout, or just wander around and end up at the corner store for ice-cream (definitely wasn't planned ;). When we inevitably leave the Boston area to move closer to family in the south, I've pretty much just accepted that the best we're likely to find is going to be a pale shadow of what I've got now on all these fronts....
It does seem frustrating to me that the right seems so resistant to this vision as a form of positive pluralism: the creation of a place where people with different goals can pursue and meet those *together.* The idea that one specific mode of quasi-sufficiency and isolation-except-when-I-specifically-choose-engagement feels empty and sterile to me, and while I'm fine with folks preferring that, it does bother me the degree to which it's lauded as being particularly American or somehow the embodiment of "freedom."
Anyway, I'm slowly working my way through Bill McKibben's The Flag, The Cross, and the Station Wagon and it touches on some of this (I'm not through the Station Wagon section yet, so I don't know the full extent). Definitely seems like it would be up your alley!
Thanks for articulating this - the left doesn't have a monopoly on forcing their own personal worldview on the rest of the world. Actual freedom is being able to live the way you want, without being forced into a certain mode by the state. The center-right, of all groups, should be able to understand that.
as a left-leaning pro-family urbanist, totally cosign the idea that this isn't ideological. it makes sense almost regardless of your political beliefs.
its a real shame that surburbanites, right left and center, tend to hear that theres another way that people like living and interpret that as an attack. in that way it feels much more like an identity issue than an ideological one
I always think about how kids need other kids, not just a big back yard. My family lives in a close-in suburb of Philadelphia on a train line that gets us into Center City in 15 minutes. We have walkable neighborhoods and a popular downtown. We do have one car for our family, but we do walk, bike, and take transit for tons of trips outside our home. Our kid has such confidence to walk and bike around because of it, and it's going to serve him well throughout his life. Car-dependent suburbia is just the natural world if you grew up in it, but as soon as you see how life can be in more of a people-centered environment, you can't unsee it, and any policy meant to deny it to people upsets you.
Many good insights here, but neither of the two points it kicks off with ring true to me.
The Venn diagram - This doesn't make sense to me unless you replace the word "places" with the word "cities." The country has no shortage of nice places to raise a family by all the usual criteria (low crime, decent schools, friendly neighbors) that are very affordable, but they're affordable because they are low-density rural areas far away from metro centers.
Relatedly, on "pro-family" conservatives - I don't have the impression that any of them have any negative attitudes about urbanism, nor, for that matter, any strong opinions at all on urbanist issues, and this is precisely because they're not likely to live in areas that are urban or even proximate to urbanity at all.
I would put myself in the categories of (1) conservative, (2) urbanist (anti-zoning, anti-modernism), (3) pro-family (though I split the difference on abortion), and... (4) pro-car. I love walkable cities as much as any other urbanist. But I cannot describe how liberating the feeling was when I moved from car-hostile NYC to car-friendly DC and acquired the ability to purchase more groceries than I was able to carry. With the various needs that children impose, any kind of imagining I do about what it would be like to live without a car terminates on the realization that the only thing that would make it feasible is copious use of delivery services -- i.e., somebody else's car. So cities have to be designed in a way to accommodate the car, one way or the other. I refuse to believe there is no way to do this that's compatible with walkability for purposes that *don't* require a car.
(I've said this before but there are many ways in which those cute European pedestrian cities are actually more laissez-faire about the car than our purportedly car-centric culture. In the US we are reliant on the car, but we are also obsessed with policing it and defining thousands of categories of misuse of it that can get it ticketed. In those walkable Euro cities, you're likely to find someone somehow managing to squeeze their Mini-mobile at 2 mph through the 5 feet of available cobblestone street between a couple sidewalk cafes and nobody seems to mind, they just assume he had a good reason for needing to drive there and they'll clear the street to let him pass instead of flipping him the bird.)
My wife and I were lucky (in retrospect) to buy a dilapidated 3 story row house in Boston (Charlestown) built in 1829 back in '98 for $129k. Shortly thereafter we had twins who grew up amid a 5-year long total gut job. When we sold it and moved in 2003, the $/profit we made allowed us to move a much bigger house in S. Orange NJ. We had a total 4 kids, which never would have been viable, space-wise, if we had kids 10 years later.
PS - Grew up in Milford, NJ, went to Del Val HS, first job out of college was in Flemington, and lived in DC & Arlington, VA (Clarendon) back in the early-mid '90s back when Wilson Blvd was just empty car dealerships being turned into bars and brewpubs. It's unrecognizable to me today.
I think characterizing this as a right/left conservative/liberal issue is a bit lazy. San Francisco, probably the most liberal city in the nation, also has a dearth of families with children (I believe that the "fun" headline for this is that there are more households with dogs than with children), and I expect that affordability is a key factor for this. Being a NIMBY and being car-addicted is not directly correlated with voting R or D. Here in NYC, some of the most liberal politicians are the most car-addicted, both in their personal lives and in how they implement policy (cough, De Blasio, cough).
Yes! This is something I have been thinking for a long time. When I lived in Europe the old style apartments seemed designed to have kids: such as having courtyards that are viewable form the kitchen, many rooms rather than all open planed and the only bathroom being an en suite etc etc. If the only property that millennials can afford is an apartment, can't we at least design them again so that a family can live in them?
We have a toddler and live in DC proper in 1 bedroom plus den condo. I can't imagine living anywhere else. We walk her to daycare. I walk to work. There are parks and playgrounds galore. The national zoo is basically our front yard. I can run errands with the kiddo in a stroller. The library is two blocks away. The metro means we can do fun things without ever getting into a car. All of our various doctors and such are nearby. I loathe driving. Living in a city with a kid is ideal.
Right-leaning (but with fiscally generous pro-family/urbanist leanings) 30 year-old (with third child on the way) here! We moved to Wisconsin for my husband's kind niche job, so we had to work with what we got when it came to house-hunting. Immediately, I was telling my husband how —as the stay-at-home parent— anything within walking distance would be amazing, for the reasons noted above.... because of how isolating and friction-filled the 'burbs are. But, all the homes toward the center of the (65,000 population) city were either...... 1) in a super dilapidated/actually crime-filled area 2) dilapidated, old homes/ones that were in our price range but for a reason: they needed so much work 3) old homes that were decent but out of our price range. It was discouraging to want the lifestyle in theory, but when it came to finding something, the options just weren't in our favor.
I built SFR in Atlanta (right politics) for 20+ years and then moved to Boulder (left politics), and it's not a left vs right thing. People move to a density that they like and then don't want it to change regardless of their politics.
Also, we would build subdivisions 100% aimed at young families so all the amenities they could afford were built into the neighborhood. Pool? Tennis? Sidewalks? Playground? donate land for a new elementary school? We made sure all of that is included. You can't quite afford this subdivision? Don't worry! We are starting another one just 10 minutes farther out! It's all so darn perfect as long as you embrace a car centric lifestyle.
Where do urbanists do the same for families? They don't. Urban living for families is all about sacrifices and compromises to make it work, and young families are already struggling to make it all work. Sure urban living for wealthy families is a thing, but not for the middle class.
For a middle class family it's just so f'ing easy to move out to the burbs instead of fighting it in the city.
I grew up in Queens, NY. At first, my parents sent me to expensive private schools on Long Island. These require about an hour of school bus travel each way. They were also overtly bad schools (one was sued by parents for bad academic standards and fraud), I was resistant and got kicked out of two. Then I was sent to a school in Manhattan, and my dad would drop me off there on his way driving to work in the city, and I'd get home by public transportation (also about 1 hour each way).
Passing through Manhattan every day was glorious. I visited all the museums regularly, went to art galleries and parks, availed myself of the rich(est?) urban context. Later, I got kicked out again but got into the special public school Bronx HS of Science, easily the best school I attended. I still passed though Manhattan going home and made the Bronx Zoo a periodic part of my itinerary. Cities can be great for kids, and affordable public transportation makes this more feasible.
My parents were liberal, I could be categorized as flexible traditionalist, appreciating some of the progressive intents.
Perhaps the blogger wasn't being political but was probing a sociological reality?
The reasons are so far unclear, but the DATA pretty clearly shows the stark reality that 3rd generation and later urbanites have a drastically below replacement lifetime total fertility rate. And curiously enough, this has been true for even longer than modern contraception has been available.
Meanwhile small town populations tend to be at or above replacement rates and true rural populations have higher than replacement rates.
As noted above we can and should ponder and argue about WHY this is true, but it's well past time that we stop refusing to notice that it IS true.
As a parent of 3, this sentiment is exactly why I'm getting my kids on bikes as early as possible, and why we sold our 2nd car. Jamming all the kids into the car just sucks.
"That routine of corralling everyone into the car and buckling the carseats and just getting out the door is *effort*; it’s *friction*. It wears you down. It raises the cost of having kids, even if, given America’s predominant land use, it also lowers it."
I am a mom who loves being able to walk to school with my kids (I live in a Northeastern inner ring suburb a few blocks from our small downtown).
I can't prove this, but I think my kids are more social and independent because they have to walk lots of places and interact with people on the street.
I would also add the carseats are infantilizing for small kids - my four-year old can dress and bathe herself, but she still needs me to get in and out of the car.
My son starts kindergarten this fall and I am *beyond* excited that it's an easy walk or public bus ride away. And the ability to leave the house and walk *to* something is huge, we can do impromptu trips to the store or he can come with me to pick up takeout, or just wander around and end up at the corner store for ice-cream (definitely wasn't planned ;). When we inevitably leave the Boston area to move closer to family in the south, I've pretty much just accepted that the best we're likely to find is going to be a pale shadow of what I've got now on all these fronts....
It does seem frustrating to me that the right seems so resistant to this vision as a form of positive pluralism: the creation of a place where people with different goals can pursue and meet those *together.* The idea that one specific mode of quasi-sufficiency and isolation-except-when-I-specifically-choose-engagement feels empty and sterile to me, and while I'm fine with folks preferring that, it does bother me the degree to which it's lauded as being particularly American or somehow the embodiment of "freedom."
Anyway, I'm slowly working my way through Bill McKibben's The Flag, The Cross, and the Station Wagon and it touches on some of this (I'm not through the Station Wagon section yet, so I don't know the full extent). Definitely seems like it would be up your alley!
Thanks for articulating this - the left doesn't have a monopoly on forcing their own personal worldview on the rest of the world. Actual freedom is being able to live the way you want, without being forced into a certain mode by the state. The center-right, of all groups, should be able to understand that.
as a left-leaning pro-family urbanist, totally cosign the idea that this isn't ideological. it makes sense almost regardless of your political beliefs.
its a real shame that surburbanites, right left and center, tend to hear that theres another way that people like living and interpret that as an attack. in that way it feels much more like an identity issue than an ideological one
I always think about how kids need other kids, not just a big back yard. My family lives in a close-in suburb of Philadelphia on a train line that gets us into Center City in 15 minutes. We have walkable neighborhoods and a popular downtown. We do have one car for our family, but we do walk, bike, and take transit for tons of trips outside our home. Our kid has such confidence to walk and bike around because of it, and it's going to serve him well throughout his life. Car-dependent suburbia is just the natural world if you grew up in it, but as soon as you see how life can be in more of a people-centered environment, you can't unsee it, and any policy meant to deny it to people upsets you.
Many good insights here, but neither of the two points it kicks off with ring true to me.
The Venn diagram - This doesn't make sense to me unless you replace the word "places" with the word "cities." The country has no shortage of nice places to raise a family by all the usual criteria (low crime, decent schools, friendly neighbors) that are very affordable, but they're affordable because they are low-density rural areas far away from metro centers.
Relatedly, on "pro-family" conservatives - I don't have the impression that any of them have any negative attitudes about urbanism, nor, for that matter, any strong opinions at all on urbanist issues, and this is precisely because they're not likely to live in areas that are urban or even proximate to urbanity at all.
I would put myself in the categories of (1) conservative, (2) urbanist (anti-zoning, anti-modernism), (3) pro-family (though I split the difference on abortion), and... (4) pro-car. I love walkable cities as much as any other urbanist. But I cannot describe how liberating the feeling was when I moved from car-hostile NYC to car-friendly DC and acquired the ability to purchase more groceries than I was able to carry. With the various needs that children impose, any kind of imagining I do about what it would be like to live without a car terminates on the realization that the only thing that would make it feasible is copious use of delivery services -- i.e., somebody else's car. So cities have to be designed in a way to accommodate the car, one way or the other. I refuse to believe there is no way to do this that's compatible with walkability for purposes that *don't* require a car.
(I've said this before but there are many ways in which those cute European pedestrian cities are actually more laissez-faire about the car than our purportedly car-centric culture. In the US we are reliant on the car, but we are also obsessed with policing it and defining thousands of categories of misuse of it that can get it ticketed. In those walkable Euro cities, you're likely to find someone somehow managing to squeeze their Mini-mobile at 2 mph through the 5 feet of available cobblestone street between a couple sidewalk cafes and nobody seems to mind, they just assume he had a good reason for needing to drive there and they'll clear the street to let him pass instead of flipping him the bird.)
My wife and I were lucky (in retrospect) to buy a dilapidated 3 story row house in Boston (Charlestown) built in 1829 back in '98 for $129k. Shortly thereafter we had twins who grew up amid a 5-year long total gut job. When we sold it and moved in 2003, the $/profit we made allowed us to move a much bigger house in S. Orange NJ. We had a total 4 kids, which never would have been viable, space-wise, if we had kids 10 years later.
PS - Grew up in Milford, NJ, went to Del Val HS, first job out of college was in Flemington, and lived in DC & Arlington, VA (Clarendon) back in the early-mid '90s back when Wilson Blvd was just empty car dealerships being turned into bars and brewpubs. It's unrecognizable to me today.
Great newsletter - huge urbanism nerd here!
I think characterizing this as a right/left conservative/liberal issue is a bit lazy. San Francisco, probably the most liberal city in the nation, also has a dearth of families with children (I believe that the "fun" headline for this is that there are more households with dogs than with children), and I expect that affordability is a key factor for this. Being a NIMBY and being car-addicted is not directly correlated with voting R or D. Here in NYC, some of the most liberal politicians are the most car-addicted, both in their personal lives and in how they implement policy (cough, De Blasio, cough).
Yes! This is something I have been thinking for a long time. When I lived in Europe the old style apartments seemed designed to have kids: such as having courtyards that are viewable form the kitchen, many rooms rather than all open planed and the only bathroom being an en suite etc etc. If the only property that millennials can afford is an apartment, can't we at least design them again so that a family can live in them?
We have a toddler and live in DC proper in 1 bedroom plus den condo. I can't imagine living anywhere else. We walk her to daycare. I walk to work. There are parks and playgrounds galore. The national zoo is basically our front yard. I can run errands with the kiddo in a stroller. The library is two blocks away. The metro means we can do fun things without ever getting into a car. All of our various doctors and such are nearby. I loathe driving. Living in a city with a kid is ideal.
Right-leaning (but with fiscally generous pro-family/urbanist leanings) 30 year-old (with third child on the way) here! We moved to Wisconsin for my husband's kind niche job, so we had to work with what we got when it came to house-hunting. Immediately, I was telling my husband how —as the stay-at-home parent— anything within walking distance would be amazing, for the reasons noted above.... because of how isolating and friction-filled the 'burbs are. But, all the homes toward the center of the (65,000 population) city were either...... 1) in a super dilapidated/actually crime-filled area 2) dilapidated, old homes/ones that were in our price range but for a reason: they needed so much work 3) old homes that were decent but out of our price range. It was discouraging to want the lifestyle in theory, but when it came to finding something, the options just weren't in our favor.
I built SFR in Atlanta (right politics) for 20+ years and then moved to Boulder (left politics), and it's not a left vs right thing. People move to a density that they like and then don't want it to change regardless of their politics.
Also, we would build subdivisions 100% aimed at young families so all the amenities they could afford were built into the neighborhood. Pool? Tennis? Sidewalks? Playground? donate land for a new elementary school? We made sure all of that is included. You can't quite afford this subdivision? Don't worry! We are starting another one just 10 minutes farther out! It's all so darn perfect as long as you embrace a car centric lifestyle.
Where do urbanists do the same for families? They don't. Urban living for families is all about sacrifices and compromises to make it work, and young families are already struggling to make it all work. Sure urban living for wealthy families is a thing, but not for the middle class.
For a middle class family it's just so f'ing easy to move out to the burbs instead of fighting it in the city.
Thank you for this thoughtful piece.
I grew up in Queens, NY. At first, my parents sent me to expensive private schools on Long Island. These require about an hour of school bus travel each way. They were also overtly bad schools (one was sued by parents for bad academic standards and fraud), I was resistant and got kicked out of two. Then I was sent to a school in Manhattan, and my dad would drop me off there on his way driving to work in the city, and I'd get home by public transportation (also about 1 hour each way).
Passing through Manhattan every day was glorious. I visited all the museums regularly, went to art galleries and parks, availed myself of the rich(est?) urban context. Later, I got kicked out again but got into the special public school Bronx HS of Science, easily the best school I attended. I still passed though Manhattan going home and made the Bronx Zoo a periodic part of my itinerary. Cities can be great for kids, and affordable public transportation makes this more feasible.
My parents were liberal, I could be categorized as flexible traditionalist, appreciating some of the progressive intents.
Perhaps the blogger wasn't being political but was probing a sociological reality?
The reasons are so far unclear, but the DATA pretty clearly shows the stark reality that 3rd generation and later urbanites have a drastically below replacement lifetime total fertility rate. And curiously enough, this has been true for even longer than modern contraception has been available.
Meanwhile small town populations tend to be at or above replacement rates and true rural populations have higher than replacement rates.
As noted above we can and should ponder and argue about WHY this is true, but it's well past time that we stop refusing to notice that it IS true.