In the US the cities with the highest birth rates are where military bases are located. Members of the military recieve free childcare, free healthcare, subsidized housing, and incentives to get married (moving out of barracks and into off base housing for those who are married)
Great point even beyond cities. Fort Leonard Wood in Central Missouri props up an entire micropolis region of what would otherwise be sleepy-eyed backwoods towns time forgot between Rolla, Lake of the Ozarks and Springfield.
But don't you dare mention socialism to any of them. Or dare to take away their VA benefits.
When my city was at its most walkable and urban, between 70-100 years ago, it was full of large families and tons of kids. The same is basically true of every city in the world, if you zoom out.
What we have today is this bizarro world we’ve created of really bad options, and people tend to choose the least bad option. The idea it’s this way naturally is rather absurd.
I think another issue here is that the urban underinvestment of the 70s and 80s is deeply ingrained in the American psyche. Many Americans simply can't imagine what it means to have clean, orderly, safe, and conveniently located public spaces, the sorts of spaces that are absolutely crucial to family life if you live in a city. Not to say these places don't exist in America (NYC is full of them), but after decades of news stories about park kidnappings, homeless camps and needles in parks, etc, it's hard to shake the feeling that public spaces are unsafe and private spaces are necessary to raise a family. This is partly a real issue (many cities are still underfunding their parks) and partly a perception issue (parks, and cities in general, are far safer than most people assume)
The other factor, which you have written about extensively, is the misconception that the choice is binary. Either we build single family housing on large lots, or we build high rise apartments. There is still very little space in American discourse for the sort of mid-rise housing that characterized pretty much every pre-war city. Look at a picture of nearly every pre war city and it's a vast web of detached single family homes on 30'-50' wide lots, townhomes, "perfect 6s", and other relatively low density housing, interspersed with corner stores and plazas. This is, in my opinion, the obvious middle ground, the best of all worlds. But now most people I talk to see this sort of middle density as a gateway drug to high-rises. I'm not sure how to fix that.
Just taking a quick glance at the graph, it seems like the trend line is being impacted by a cluster of Chinese and Korean cities at the bottom right with ultra-low fertility and high rates of apartment living. But both of those countries have their own peculiar reasons for the way they are, which may not apply to everywhere. China literally banned people from having too many kids until recently, and South Korea has uniquely dysfunctional gender politics, which brings down the birth rate. If you remove the Chinese and Korean cities, the correlation between fertility and apartments seems a lot weaker.
I mentioned the same thing to Hess, that this is more a geography graph than density graph. And Paris, a big outlier, may be the clue to understand the phenomena.
I think I have a very good perspective on this question because I
1) grew up miserable in NJ suburbia (which fed my interest in new urbanism),
2) moved to NYC as soon as I could,
3) moved out of NYC because we couldn't raise kids there.
I think the new urbanist critique of suburbia is fundamentally correct, and the suburbanist critique of the realities of contemporary urbanism is also fundamentally correct. So to me the question is not which side has the better argument, but which set of problems is easier to solve.
It might even be tempting to say that since both suburbs and cities exist, it doesn't even matter which side has the better argument, because everyone can just live in the one they prefer. Except the problem is, everyone can't. People who would like to stay in cities are forced out of them, usually on account of expense. But expense is just a supply-and-demand problem. And people who would like *some* density that's neither suburban sprawl nor the concrete jungle - something in line with new urbanist principles - don't have many places to choose from at all. Call me crazy, but it sounds like we'd all be happier if we just followed the principle of: Let People Build Things.
I agree mostly, but building more in cities won't make them more affordable, most probably. Or it may work in tier A/B cities like Austin (data won't let me lie), but not in tier S cities like NYC. The argument goes down to this: Ferran Adrià may triple the size of his restaurant and still charge the same high prices. It will make life better for those on the waiting list, though.
Building in existing cities is fine, but it's not really what I had in mind. Certainly Manhattan is already maxed out. We should be building new cities (and towns) from scratch.
That's the "Strong Towns" way, and I agree with their stance. However, we must strike a balance between decentralization and supporting people priced out of opportunity areas.
A Tokyo addendum: yes, Tokyo is a tier S city and inexpensive. However, neighboring prefectures can compete with Tokyo's (older and smaller) housing market given the amazing transit. Living in a "suburb" will not cause a terrible commute (in time, you will still have to squeeze a lot), so it's attractive to people wanting more space or newer construction.
>More broadly, what I’m saying is, it’s a cultural change more than a land use change that right-wing pronatalists really want, and attacking cities and density is mistaking a snapshot data point for a metaphysical truth.
A good counterargument to snapshot data is broader data. As far as I remember, cities have been population sinks for most of history.
I've read and re-read this post several times this morning and it (it as shorthand for Hess' glib arguments) keeps leaving me disquieted:
Yes, supply and demand in housing is an issue, but it's not an inherent prophylactic to childbirth. No one is choosing to have sex, procreative or otherwise, based on whether or not there are enough listings on the MLS or for rent signs in multi-family complexes. The historical and economic context dictates what's going on: the Baby Boom Hess references as a salient lesson happened after a decade of economic meltdown and years of thousands of men at war. Birth rates are dropping now as the working and middle classes are stretched to their breaking point.
Hess looks at data while utterly failing to consider the context which provides it, or makes sweeping statements assuming their validity ("...excessively high immigration hurts fertility by creating a housing shortage," might be one of the silliest and least-thinly veiled xenophobic if not outright racist statements I've seen this week.). Housing isn't a commodity by which communities can grow and thrive and hasn't been for a long time; properties are an investment vehicle for [typically wealthy] people to build [more] wealth.
Immigration (or, let's be real, genuine upward mobility) in a healthy society with a functional and properly regulated market economy provides access to self-determination for people, which gives them the means to establish themselves and build lives for themselves and their families. Immigration (or, 'the rest of us') in any other framework is necessarily viewed as a threat.
I'm sure there are urbanist elements to consider, too, but I can't move past the unbaked data analysis Hess passes off as insight.
I'm not sure the division between farms and cities is so precise. Medieval English peasants generally had separate houses with yards. Native American villages had separate dwellings with yards. Texas ranches generally had tenant houses for the farmhands, with a garden for each. Big farms with only one house are modern, only possible after tractors and combines minimized the need for hands. I'd say separate dwellings with some kind of yard are the historical norm.
Yes, but those are still not suburbs. They are farms, just separate dwellings part of the same farm. You didn't have workers living 30 minutes away galloping on their horses to their workplace.
I wonder how much of this is downstream of a vague cultural memory of cities having much higher *death* rates, and hence lower population growth even with similar natality.
That is, from Sumer until maybe the mid-20th-century, cities really were less healthy than the countryside because density made it easier for infectious diseases to spread in an age before good sanitation, antibiotics, and vaccines.
This is basically no longer the case (although see NYC in April 2020 for a brief throwback). But memories are stubborn things, and a general association of rural areas with health persists.
In the US the cities with the highest birth rates are where military bases are located. Members of the military recieve free childcare, free healthcare, subsidized housing, and incentives to get married (moving out of barracks and into off base housing for those who are married)
Great point even beyond cities. Fort Leonard Wood in Central Missouri props up an entire micropolis region of what would otherwise be sleepy-eyed backwoods towns time forgot between Rolla, Lake of the Ozarks and Springfield.
But don't you dare mention socialism to any of them. Or dare to take away their VA benefits.
Funny enough, one of the towns in South Korea on the DMZ also have one of the highest birthrates for the same reason
When my city was at its most walkable and urban, between 70-100 years ago, it was full of large families and tons of kids. The same is basically true of every city in the world, if you zoom out.
What we have today is this bizarro world we’ve created of really bad options, and people tend to choose the least bad option. The idea it’s this way naturally is rather absurd.
I think another issue here is that the urban underinvestment of the 70s and 80s is deeply ingrained in the American psyche. Many Americans simply can't imagine what it means to have clean, orderly, safe, and conveniently located public spaces, the sorts of spaces that are absolutely crucial to family life if you live in a city. Not to say these places don't exist in America (NYC is full of them), but after decades of news stories about park kidnappings, homeless camps and needles in parks, etc, it's hard to shake the feeling that public spaces are unsafe and private spaces are necessary to raise a family. This is partly a real issue (many cities are still underfunding their parks) and partly a perception issue (parks, and cities in general, are far safer than most people assume)
The other factor, which you have written about extensively, is the misconception that the choice is binary. Either we build single family housing on large lots, or we build high rise apartments. There is still very little space in American discourse for the sort of mid-rise housing that characterized pretty much every pre-war city. Look at a picture of nearly every pre war city and it's a vast web of detached single family homes on 30'-50' wide lots, townhomes, "perfect 6s", and other relatively low density housing, interspersed with corner stores and plazas. This is, in my opinion, the obvious middle ground, the best of all worlds. But now most people I talk to see this sort of middle density as a gateway drug to high-rises. I'm not sure how to fix that.
Just taking a quick glance at the graph, it seems like the trend line is being impacted by a cluster of Chinese and Korean cities at the bottom right with ultra-low fertility and high rates of apartment living. But both of those countries have their own peculiar reasons for the way they are, which may not apply to everywhere. China literally banned people from having too many kids until recently, and South Korea has uniquely dysfunctional gender politics, which brings down the birth rate. If you remove the Chinese and Korean cities, the correlation between fertility and apartments seems a lot weaker.
Yes. Very good point.
I mentioned the same thing to Hess, that this is more a geography graph than density graph. And Paris, a big outlier, may be the clue to understand the phenomena.
I think I have a very good perspective on this question because I
1) grew up miserable in NJ suburbia (which fed my interest in new urbanism),
2) moved to NYC as soon as I could,
3) moved out of NYC because we couldn't raise kids there.
I think the new urbanist critique of suburbia is fundamentally correct, and the suburbanist critique of the realities of contemporary urbanism is also fundamentally correct. So to me the question is not which side has the better argument, but which set of problems is easier to solve.
It might even be tempting to say that since both suburbs and cities exist, it doesn't even matter which side has the better argument, because everyone can just live in the one they prefer. Except the problem is, everyone can't. People who would like to stay in cities are forced out of them, usually on account of expense. But expense is just a supply-and-demand problem. And people who would like *some* density that's neither suburban sprawl nor the concrete jungle - something in line with new urbanist principles - don't have many places to choose from at all. Call me crazy, but it sounds like we'd all be happier if we just followed the principle of: Let People Build Things.
I agree mostly, but building more in cities won't make them more affordable, most probably. Or it may work in tier A/B cities like Austin (data won't let me lie), but not in tier S cities like NYC. The argument goes down to this: Ferran Adrià may triple the size of his restaurant and still charge the same high prices. It will make life better for those on the waiting list, though.
Building in existing cities is fine, but it's not really what I had in mind. Certainly Manhattan is already maxed out. We should be building new cities (and towns) from scratch.
metro lines before everything!
That's the "Strong Towns" way, and I agree with their stance. However, we must strike a balance between decentralization and supporting people priced out of opportunity areas.
A Tokyo addendum: yes, Tokyo is a tier S city and inexpensive. However, neighboring prefectures can compete with Tokyo's (older and smaller) housing market given the amazing transit. Living in a "suburb" will not cause a terrible commute (in time, you will still have to squeeze a lot), so it's attractive to people wanting more space or newer construction.
That last paragraph!!
>More broadly, what I’m saying is, it’s a cultural change more than a land use change that right-wing pronatalists really want, and attacking cities and density is mistaking a snapshot data point for a metaphysical truth.
A good counterargument to snapshot data is broader data. As far as I remember, cities have been population sinks for most of history.
I've read and re-read this post several times this morning and it (it as shorthand for Hess' glib arguments) keeps leaving me disquieted:
Yes, supply and demand in housing is an issue, but it's not an inherent prophylactic to childbirth. No one is choosing to have sex, procreative or otherwise, based on whether or not there are enough listings on the MLS or for rent signs in multi-family complexes. The historical and economic context dictates what's going on: the Baby Boom Hess references as a salient lesson happened after a decade of economic meltdown and years of thousands of men at war. Birth rates are dropping now as the working and middle classes are stretched to their breaking point.
Hess looks at data while utterly failing to consider the context which provides it, or makes sweeping statements assuming their validity ("...excessively high immigration hurts fertility by creating a housing shortage," might be one of the silliest and least-thinly veiled xenophobic if not outright racist statements I've seen this week.). Housing isn't a commodity by which communities can grow and thrive and hasn't been for a long time; properties are an investment vehicle for [typically wealthy] people to build [more] wealth.
Immigration (or, let's be real, genuine upward mobility) in a healthy society with a functional and properly regulated market economy provides access to self-determination for people, which gives them the means to establish themselves and build lives for themselves and their families. Immigration (or, 'the rest of us') in any other framework is necessarily viewed as a threat.
I'm sure there are urbanist elements to consider, too, but I can't move past the unbaked data analysis Hess passes off as insight.
I'm not sure the division between farms and cities is so precise. Medieval English peasants generally had separate houses with yards. Native American villages had separate dwellings with yards. Texas ranches generally had tenant houses for the farmhands, with a garden for each. Big farms with only one house are modern, only possible after tractors and combines minimized the need for hands. I'd say separate dwellings with some kind of yard are the historical norm.
Yes, but those are still not suburbs. They are farms, just separate dwellings part of the same farm. You didn't have workers living 30 minutes away galloping on their horses to their workplace.
Interesting piece thanks for sharing
I wonder how much of this is downstream of a vague cultural memory of cities having much higher *death* rates, and hence lower population growth even with similar natality.
That is, from Sumer until maybe the mid-20th-century, cities really were less healthy than the countryside because density made it easier for infectious diseases to spread in an age before good sanitation, antibiotics, and vaccines.
This is basically no longer the case (although see NYC in April 2020 for a brief throwback). But memories are stubborn things, and a general association of rural areas with health persists.
Japan has higher TFRs than other East Asian countries and an increasing amount of European counties for a reason