“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.” - PREACH
I’m a family man myself, but can you elaborate on why childless cities might be more entertaining but less fulfilling? Especially for the many of us who increasingly are foregoing parenthood?
Personally have a bit of a 'grimmer' view of whether this trend is at all reversible. I think the outcome you're describing is inevitable under the wider national preferences of the country and market forces. Some examples and my thoughts of these issues below:
If we take schooling which is based on local area funding, parents, especially richer parents will agglomerate in areas to have a stronger, well funded school. That means they won't have an incentive to live in the core.
The really good example, you mentioned, of the houses/apts designed for roommates is an example of market forces at work - a landlord needs flexibility to be able to rent to any type of consumer. Betting on a family restricts your potential pool of candidates.
Additionally, we also have the issue of family friendly amenities - no private company will build a park in a high value area as the opportunity cost of not building a residential house/apt is far too great. So this would need to be city funded (but now we're entering city centralized planning).
Another issue is daycare - running a daycare business in the core of a city will be expensive (opportunity cost again - the business that could be in there is a law firm). That means you need to charge a lot for day care, meaning parents will want to move out.
Lastly, a car based country. If you want to go on a vacation in the US, it's predominantly by car. Car ownership in a city will again be more expensive. But there's no other option for many. For example, getting to the airport in almost all cities is almost impossible by public transport (and Ubers/taxis with child seats are not popular).
A lot of things would need to change to have parents with kids stay in the city - I personally don't think that can happen.
Thanks for the comments! If we're doing anything here, it's to make an optimistic case for cities by examining the policy choices that hold back better possibilities. Nevertheless, I agree this is a multifaceted issue, and there are more factors to consider than I could cover in any depth in a limited article length (I try not to write screeds here, and this one already clocks in at 1,500 words!).
Schools matter a lot, which is why I opened with that; when we took those out of the equation during the pandemic, basically nothing else mattered. But, there's a sort of circularity to your point: if wealthy families agglomerate in the core, they would have a better-funded school, which incentivizes them to stay. Wealthy New Yorkers, for instance, certainly agglomerate in the city, but mainly for its best-in-class private schools.
Similarly, with apartment design, I think you could equally make a case that a landlord is limiting their flexibility by only designing apartments for roommates. The market for apartments is therefore potentially smaller than it might be if the layouts were more flexible. It may also increase turnover since most people don't want to live with roommates forever.
I agree that daycare costs matters, but urban parents with higher incomes will also be willing to pay more (up to a point), especially for alternative programs like Montessori. Regulation makes childcare more expensive than it might be through zoning, excessive credentialism, arbitrary group size and ratio requirements, among other things. There's a whole article I plan to write about that topic, based on running childcares in cities for almost 10 years.
I know lots of people who have raised (or are still raising) their kids in San Francisco, New York, and Austin--and they all find ways to make it work, to send their kids to school, to go on vacations, etc. All of it is easier with more money. A longer but less pithy title for this article might have been, "Cities aren't for poor and middle-income families." I know many middle-class families who would have stayed in cities, but couldn't because a panoply of bad policy choices left them with limited livable options. There's no single silver bullet that will reverse things, but cities should try, and land use reform is a good place to start!
Appreciate the response! Completely understand the issue of including every facet (my articles often grow well past a reasonable word count).
Regarding the wealthy families point - there is an issue that this again is a natural consequence of market forces and people's choices. Any potential policy change can face the issue of the Lucas Critique (i.e. people respond to policies - in this case land reform - in ways we may not have observed previously in the data. They do not have to sit by and 'accept' the policy change). I wrote about this research paper ( https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0166046221001204, and others similar to it) on the idea of 'secession of the successful'. Basically, if some of the current amenities and control in an area are changed (such as land reform), the impacted wealthy individuals can push back (creating land reform rules via HOAs), secede (like the Eagle's Landing vote), or leave the city entirely (which is I suppose what is happening most of the time).
A fragment from the paper:
"HOAs may represent an alternative approach to wealthy residents providing localized public goods which can improve their standard of living at a much lower cost than secession without as substantial of a negative externality imposed on others. Our question is whether the existence of this HOA option might blunt the desire of wealthy city residents to exit a city. If so, the HOA may offer a way to increase city cohesion by giving wealthier residents an option to improve their own welfare at much less of a cost to the other city residents than the wealthy segments seceding. The HOA option would therefore be working as a safety valve to relieve some of the pressure from the inequality and allow the cities to stay whole.3
Given that many city secession attempts fail anyway, one might not see this as much of a benefit. We disagree. Ahn, Isaac, and Salmon (2008) and Ahn et al. (2009) show, there can be substantial negative consequences from denying high contributing group members from being able to exit from a group they have decided they wish to leave. If the formation of an HOA can prevent these high contributors from wanting to leave, that is potentially a benefit even if they would not be able to leave after attempting it."
“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.” - PREACH
You almost had me with that title
Made you look! ;-)
I’m a family man myself, but can you elaborate on why childless cities might be more entertaining but less fulfilling? Especially for the many of us who increasingly are foregoing parenthood?
Good article that describes the issue really well
Personally have a bit of a 'grimmer' view of whether this trend is at all reversible. I think the outcome you're describing is inevitable under the wider national preferences of the country and market forces. Some examples and my thoughts of these issues below:
If we take schooling which is based on local area funding, parents, especially richer parents will agglomerate in areas to have a stronger, well funded school. That means they won't have an incentive to live in the core.
The really good example, you mentioned, of the houses/apts designed for roommates is an example of market forces at work - a landlord needs flexibility to be able to rent to any type of consumer. Betting on a family restricts your potential pool of candidates.
Additionally, we also have the issue of family friendly amenities - no private company will build a park in a high value area as the opportunity cost of not building a residential house/apt is far too great. So this would need to be city funded (but now we're entering city centralized planning).
Another issue is daycare - running a daycare business in the core of a city will be expensive (opportunity cost again - the business that could be in there is a law firm). That means you need to charge a lot for day care, meaning parents will want to move out.
Lastly, a car based country. If you want to go on a vacation in the US, it's predominantly by car. Car ownership in a city will again be more expensive. But there's no other option for many. For example, getting to the airport in almost all cities is almost impossible by public transport (and Ubers/taxis with child seats are not popular).
A lot of things would need to change to have parents with kids stay in the city - I personally don't think that can happen.
Thanks for the comments! If we're doing anything here, it's to make an optimistic case for cities by examining the policy choices that hold back better possibilities. Nevertheless, I agree this is a multifaceted issue, and there are more factors to consider than I could cover in any depth in a limited article length (I try not to write screeds here, and this one already clocks in at 1,500 words!).
Schools matter a lot, which is why I opened with that; when we took those out of the equation during the pandemic, basically nothing else mattered. But, there's a sort of circularity to your point: if wealthy families agglomerate in the core, they would have a better-funded school, which incentivizes them to stay. Wealthy New Yorkers, for instance, certainly agglomerate in the city, but mainly for its best-in-class private schools.
Similarly, with apartment design, I think you could equally make a case that a landlord is limiting their flexibility by only designing apartments for roommates. The market for apartments is therefore potentially smaller than it might be if the layouts were more flexible. It may also increase turnover since most people don't want to live with roommates forever.
I agree that daycare costs matters, but urban parents with higher incomes will also be willing to pay more (up to a point), especially for alternative programs like Montessori. Regulation makes childcare more expensive than it might be through zoning, excessive credentialism, arbitrary group size and ratio requirements, among other things. There's a whole article I plan to write about that topic, based on running childcares in cities for almost 10 years.
I know lots of people who have raised (or are still raising) their kids in San Francisco, New York, and Austin--and they all find ways to make it work, to send their kids to school, to go on vacations, etc. All of it is easier with more money. A longer but less pithy title for this article might have been, "Cities aren't for poor and middle-income families." I know many middle-class families who would have stayed in cities, but couldn't because a panoply of bad policy choices left them with limited livable options. There's no single silver bullet that will reverse things, but cities should try, and land use reform is a good place to start!
Appreciate the response! Completely understand the issue of including every facet (my articles often grow well past a reasonable word count).
Regarding the wealthy families point - there is an issue that this again is a natural consequence of market forces and people's choices. Any potential policy change can face the issue of the Lucas Critique (i.e. people respond to policies - in this case land reform - in ways we may not have observed previously in the data. They do not have to sit by and 'accept' the policy change). I wrote about this research paper ( https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0166046221001204, and others similar to it) on the idea of 'secession of the successful'. Basically, if some of the current amenities and control in an area are changed (such as land reform), the impacted wealthy individuals can push back (creating land reform rules via HOAs), secede (like the Eagle's Landing vote), or leave the city entirely (which is I suppose what is happening most of the time).
A fragment from the paper:
"HOAs may represent an alternative approach to wealthy residents providing localized public goods which can improve their standard of living at a much lower cost than secession without as substantial of a negative externality imposed on others. Our question is whether the existence of this HOA option might blunt the desire of wealthy city residents to exit a city. If so, the HOA may offer a way to increase city cohesion by giving wealthier residents an option to improve their own welfare at much less of a cost to the other city residents than the wealthy segments seceding. The HOA option would therefore be working as a safety valve to relieve some of the pressure from the inequality and allow the cities to stay whole.3
Given that many city secession attempts fail anyway, one might not see this as much of a benefit. We disagree. Ahn, Isaac, and Salmon (2008) and Ahn et al. (2009) show, there can be substantial negative consequences from denying high contributing group members from being able to exit from a group they have decided they wish to leave. If the formation of an HOA can prevent these high contributors from wanting to leave, that is potentially a benefit even if they would not be able to leave after attempting it."
Looking forward to reading your future articles!