Urbanism And Natalism

Some table-setting for exploring these ideas more thoroughly

I’ll be writing more about this general question Monday, and probably after that, too. But I’ve been thinking a lot lately about housing advocacy, family policy, and pronatalism. Yes, because of the whole JD Vance row, but also because I think about these things in general, for example here. I’ve always found it odd that conservatives, of which by some definitions I would consider myself, typically haven’t concerned themselves very much with housing or the broader issue of the built environment.

They—we—like to think that people have agency, that they have to exercise personal responsibility, and I think the idea that our built environment can meaningfully shape our behavior can sound like determinism to some people. Asking for the right tool can sound like asking for a handout.

Odd example though it might be, here’s an analogy: think of the sneering you’ll get from right-leaning folks if you suggest that terrorism is caused or exacerbated by drought or smartphone connectivity or climate change. What conservatives hear is, They’re not really evil. Trying to explain a behavior can be too uncomfortably close to excusing it.

If you take determinism, or whatever social scientists or political theorists call it, too far, you define free will out of existence. But if you take agency and individual responsibility too far, you end up abstracting people and their choices: you define the world people live in out of existence.

What does this have to do with anything? When you don’t treat housing and the built environment as a primary issue, you observe human behavior as if it doesn’t take place in a context.

So maybe you can see where I’m going with this: one of the important contexts of childlessness is insane housing costs. I understand in some countries there are programs to help new parents financially, and these haven’t seemed to have mattered statistically very much. But maybe America really is different. We are more religious, we have a stronger commitment to free enterprise, we have a history of getting big things done. Plus, housing is a problem in a lot of advanced economies, pronatalist policies or not.

Economics isn’t everything, but it’s a lot. Economic problems, when they persist long enough, can become cultural problems. I wrote this, when I wrote in favor of New York City’s congestion pricing plan:

People think of congestion pricing or housing advocacy or YIMBY as these novel, newfangled, technocratic things, but there’s really a reinvigorating of the old American spirit here, a yearning for a country that can say “Let’s do this thing” and then actually do it. It feels like there’s some invisible barrier, some force, that just stops it all. And over time, people absorb that spirit—nothing ever gets done, nothing ever gets completed, everything is delayed and over budget, big things always get bargained down and cut back or scrapped—doing things gets filed away in your brain in the same slot as not doing things.

I can’t help but think about the other big things people are increasingly not doing—getting married, having kids, buying houses, building houses—and I can’t help but wonder how much of our cultural malaise could evaporate if a few big things could just get done.

The feeling that things—our towns and cities, our lives—are often just sort of stuck, without an unfolding story, a trajectory, a future to look forward to that also seems attainable—how could that not be subtly corrosive to the drive to do things like get married and start a family?