Cities Aren’t for Families

...But They Should Be

When the pandemic broke out and the lockdowns began, I was operating a private Montessori school in San Francisco. The majority of our students were younger than six years old, and we very quickly saw that (1) Zoom “learning” did not work for toddlers and (2) parents could not work full-time jobs and babysit their kids. Out of sheer necessity and temporary insanity, we figured out how to partially reopen within six weeks of lockdown, and we fully reopened, with some city-mandated Covid caveats, by September 2020. Already by then, a number of students had decamped with their families for the suburbs or elsewhere. Meanwhile, San Francisco public schools would not fully reopen for another year. 

If you wonder why San Francisco lost 7.5% of its pre-Covid population, its prolonged school closures finally made urban life untenable for many young families.

They flocked to the suburbs, a phenomenon that my fellow

The Roots of Progress

fellow

Connor O'Brien

documents in a report published last year. As Connor explains, “young families’ migration trends post-2020 mirrored (and contributed to) movements of the overall population in key ways, but with a much faster relative rate of flight from urban counties and into the suburbs and exurbs.” While remote work may have untethered knowledge workers from their physical locations, it wasn’t the main factor that drove out young families.

It’s not hard to imagine why they left: the pandemic put the tradeoffs of urban living in stark relief. Cramped apartments, exorbitant rents, deteriorating public spaces—that was the situation before Covid closed schools, crammed work and family life into the same four walls, and ushered in a wave of homelessness and crime. Even before the pandemic, San Francisco had the lowest percentage of school-aged children of any major US city.

If San Francisco seemed family-unfriendly before 2020, the pandemic did nothing to dispel that notion. But San Francisco was not really unique in this respect. Cities from New York to Austin had been losing families with young children to the suburbs for years; the pandemic only accelerated the rate.

The flight of families to the suburbs won’t strike a lot of people as particularly odd. To many, the American dream is at root a deep-seated desire for suburban life, sprawl and all. The tendency of young middle-class families to leave cities for greener acres only reflects that. But what if the growth of the suburbs is instead explained by necessity, not desire?

What if families leave cities because cities are just not built to be family-friendly?

Seeking relief from their cramped urban quarters, many families sought out more space for living and working-from-home, driving much of the Covid real estate boom. Most of them found that space in the suburbs, because in most cities we don’t build the types of homes that accommodate families—by design.

Part of the problem is that, particularly in Austin, large, suburban-style lot sizes have led to a proliferation of large, and therefore expensive, single-family homes within city limits. Starter homes, which tend to be comparable in size to larger apartments, are virtually nonexistent within city limits. The experience of Houston, which has produced huge numbers of lower-cost townhomes since reducing its minimum lot size to 1,400 square feet, shows that it doesn’t have to be this way. But at the current minimum lot size of 5,750 square feet, Austin City Council has a lot of extra lot size to cut to unleash a similar wave of starter homes here.

But not everybody wants to buy a house, starter or otherwise. Many families love the benefits of living in apartments in denser, more walkable neighborhoods, but we don’t build apartment buildings that accommodate them. Due to zoning and building code strictures, the housing typology we call “multifamily apartments” is not actually built for families.

For instance, the building code in most cities requires apartment buildings taller than three stories to be built with a double-loaded corridor, rows of apartments along a long hallway with staircases at either end. Such apartments only have windows along one side, but because most cities also require every bedroom to have a window, double-loaded corridors lead to narrow, dark apartments with inefficient layouts—gigantic closets and bathrooms fill the windowless spaces. These may be fine for singles or couples, but they don’t work well for families.

American apartment buildings are built this way ostensibly for fire-safety reasons, but in Europe, where a typical low-to-medium rise apartment building only has a single staircase, the fire death rate is actually lower. Since single-stair buildings are not bisected by long hallways, they allow for better space utilization, a lot more windows, and layouts that are more conducive to family life.

Heike Larson

has a great explainer here. 

Top views of (left) a double-loaded corridor building vs (right) single-stair buildings. (Source: San Francisco Chronicle)

While single-stair code reform would allow developers much more flexibility in apartment design, thoughtful developers could still better design multifamily apartments with actual families in mind. As developer

Bobby Fijan

explains in an episode of the (highly recommended) Odd Lots podcast, developers should “build something…that will actually delight families.” Urban space is at a premium, so good, family-friendly design should be oriented to how families actually live, with building amenities that they can actually use.

For instance, most two-bedroom apartments are built for roommates, with two equally-sized bedrooms, each equipped with a large, walk-in closet and, often, en-suite bathrooms with stand-up showers. Little princes and princesses don’t need rooms sized for king-sized beds. That walk-in closet might be better used as a nursery or a work-from-home space—and, as anybody who’s watched Sesame Street knows, rubber duckies are much more fun in a bathtub. And then there are the building amenity spaces. Billiards rooms and rock-climbing walls might be sweet amenities for you and your bros, but few toddlers are going to be pool sharks or rock jocks. 

Better rules could lead to better design, but of course there’s more that Austin could do to be better suited to families. With so much of the urban core zoned for single-family houses, legalizing so-called “missing middle” housing—fourplexes or sixplexes and small apartment buildings built to the scale of those neighborhoods—could also open up new housing opportunities for families near existing schools, parks, and services.

Meanwhile, housing affordability remains a real problem, but rents and home prices have been coming down, reflecting a huge increase in the supply of apartment buildings but also a softening in demand from higher mortgage rates. Rents still remain well-above pre-pandemic highs, and higher mortgage rates mean monthly payments are still more expensive despite lower prices, but the trend is unequivocally good news. 

Austin rents and home prices have come down from pandemic-era highs but remain elevated (Source: The Wall Street Journal)

So with Austin’s suburbs still providing families with more affordable and spacious options outside the city, one might ask, does any of this actually matter?

To many families, it matters a lot. A report published last year by the City of Austin found that areas near the boundaries of the city had more children—and more growth in the population of children—than those in the core, implying that families were flocking to areas within city limits that had more affordable housing or a greater variety of housing types. That so many families are clinging to home along Austin’s edges suggests that, perhaps, they don’t (or didn’t) want to leave Austin. 

Which makes sense: moving is not necessarily the first or an easy choice for many families. Especially if you grew up within a city, if your roots are there, leaving is a hugely consequential decision. Dislocating from the community in which you live means taking your kids out of schools and moving away from family and friends, churches and community groups, from a manageable commute. It’s a loss of a social network, and of course a loss of home.

But I also think a city loses something when long-time residents and their children leave. A city geared only toward entertaining tourists and the rich is inherently not a city that is built for middle-class families. Such a city—a city without children—becomes a playground for adults. Fun perhaps, but not necessarily fulfilling.

Call me old-fashioned, but I believe cities are more than places to spend money. They’re places to experience, in the words of urban economist Edward Glaeser, the “joys of human interaction.” And I think a city is more joyous when it is filled with the laughter of children than the rusty squeaks of empty playgrounds.

Notably, the Census Bureau’s most recent population data suggests some families might be thinking the same way. While the counties surrounding Austin grew mostly from in-migration, still in line with the pandemic trend, Austin’s home county, Travis County, saw something of a mini baby boom, with 10,000 more births than deaths. So although more people moved out of Travis County than in, the population still grew.

During the pandemic, a lack of housing affordability and availability gave many young families good reasons to leave cities like Austin for good. Although Austin is becoming more affordable again, the city must undertake the reforms that would enable family-friendlier housing to be built if it wishes to see all those new babies grow up here.

Will Austin grow up with them?