The Future of the City Is Childless
The Future of the City Is Childless
JUL 18, 2019 By Derek Thompson Read More: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/ar...n-gone/594133/ Quote:
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the function of cities hasnt changed, our material expectations have. 80 years ago, a family living in manhattan probably lived in a 1 bedroom apartment, 2 if they were better off. my mom was raised in an apartment with my aunt. my grandma and grandpa never lived in anything else. what has changed is our income and space expectations. who is driving this urban renaissance? white suburbanites accustomed to suburban proportions. the expectation that a single person must have at the very minimum a one bedroom apartment is common. a studio is for poor hipsters, not successful ones...theres plenty of room to raise kids in a city, we just became spoiled.
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In my little anecdotal corner of family-friendly Chicago, our neighborhood K-8 CPS school just started a $25M expansion because enrollment is bursting at the seams.
My daughter starts kindergarten there next year. Yay, were part of the "problem"! |
Well, at least my city/area has a mix of everything
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This phenomenon seems specific to dc and sf.
Dc doesn’t have an adequate public school system while sf is too expensive Portland is full of kids, Brooklyn as well. Public schools are fine. * White upper class kids is what the article is about, of course. |
Part of the reason urban births are down is because teen births have plummeted. Also, U.S. black and Latino birthrates are now basically the same as white/Asian birthrates, but the steep decline in black/Latino is overrepresented in urban areas.
Also, birthrates have generally held steady in wealthy neighborhoods. Tribeca has one of the highest birthrates in NYC. So the story of urban birthrate decline is largely a story of black/Latino mothers having fewer children, especially at young ages. |
Actually, I stand corrected - in NYC, the Hispanic and African American birthrates are now well below that of whites and Asians, when years ago they were much higher. And the NYC teen birthrate has plummeted nearly 60% in the past decade, probably in part because Bloomberg mandated sex ed in schools. Also, abortions have plummeted.
https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doh/down...vs/2017sum.pdf |
This sounds dumb, a functional city cannot be and never will be childless.
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this is how you can have a situation where earlier this decade CPS closed 50 schools across the south and west sides due to falling enrollment, while our neighborhood CPS school on the north side is embarking an a big expansion because the 100 year old school building can no longer reasonably hold all the kids who live in our neighborhood. chicago's future is less children overall, but it's certainly not gonna be entirely childless in all areas. not by a long shot. |
I am interested in when exactly a gentrified urban area "flips" in terms of school enrollment from being non-desirable to desirable.
For example, I've always found it funny Hoboken is still an undesirable place for white yuppies to enroll their kids in school. The city is up to 70% non-Hispanic white and about 9% Asian. Yet the public schools are still majority nonwhite and 47% Latino (the city is only 15% Latino). At some point it stands to reason that basically all of the poor Latinos and blacks left in Hoboken will have been gentrified out save for those in protected HUD-assisted housing developments. One would presume then white/Asian parents would be more apt to "take a chance" and the demographics would quickly flip, with it becoming a top-performing school district. |
^ school "flipping" definitely happens in chicago.
our neighborhood school is a textbook example. here are the 2019 demographics of our school: white: 56% latino: 29% asian: 4% black: 3% other: 8% and here are the 2004 demographics of our school: white: 18% latino: 73% asian: 4% black: 5% "other" wasn't a category that was tracked. our neighborhood has never been remotely close to 73% latino, but 15 years ago the white families in our neighborhood overwhelmingly sent their kids to catholic school. now, most white families in the neighborhood feel perfectly comfortable sending their kids to the CPS school, hence one of the big reasons why it's bursting at the seams. |
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The Hoboken projects, like NYC projects, aren't going anywhere, so I think the town will always retain some lower income black/Latino households in its public schools. |
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Not responding to stats, Toronto's worst urban mega project, lovingly known as "cityplace/shittyplace" is completing a huge school/community complex.
https://urbantoronto.ca/forum/attach...py-jpg.195415/ Shot by SomeMidTowner |
After having so many acquaintances move out of downtown after having a kid, my wife I and really thought we could be one of the few who could raise a kid downtown (at least for a couple years and move when the second would be a toddler). We had a two bedroom 930ish sq feet condo and thought it would be big enough and the kids could share a room.
The second we got home from the hospital we realized we had made a terrible mistake. The front hallway would be unpassable due to the stroller and car seat. It was impossible for my wife to haul groceries from the parkade...Our parents would normally need to pay for parking to come visit their grandchild. Complete disaster. We moved into a house in a neighborhood from the late 1970's era...two story, huge pie lot, attached front garage. life is better. I just built a bed for my daughter from scratch on the driveway, and currently finishing up designs on a playhouse/swing set that I will start building this weekend. cant do that downtown. Looking back on it now, it was incredibly selfish of us to think we could raise a kid downtown. The things that our daughter enjoys the most....we would have never of had room. Her inside playhouse, the inflatable pool in the backyard...etc. The house is big enough where if our daughters toys are spread out in the family room after we put her to sleep, my wife and I can go watch TV and unwind in the living room without being surrounded by a mess. If kids are in your future.....do yourself a favor and get into a house with a backyard asap. Moving with a toddler/baby sucks....don't do what we did and think you can get by. |
^ i kinda feel sorry for people in cities where the only choices are downtown shoe-boxes or '70s tract homes in the burbs.
thank Pizza God for chicago's almost unbelievable amount of legacy pre-war neighborhood urbansim. the creamy middle that i hold so near and dear to my heart. my wife and i thought we were gonna stick it out with our first child in our 800 SF one-bedroom downtown highrise condo, but as we started accumulating baby crap, we realized it wasn't gonna work all that well. so when my wife was 7 months pregnant with our first child, we moved into a 1,600 SF condo in a six flat in one of chicago's gorgeous and leafy and family-friendly city neighborhoods. solid move all around. after our 2nd was born, we moved again to an even bigger condo in another flat building in another wonderful leafy & family-friendly city neighborhood. i'm EXTREMELY happy with where we ended up. |
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My family's first house was a 1,260 square foot rowhouse in a highly urban and walkable neighborhood (by Pittsburgh standards). I bought it when I was single shortly before my wife and I got engaged. Even though it was a small home, we made it work for some time as a family house. Before our daughter was born, we had the attic completely redone into a finished and climate controlled space, moving up there and setting up the front half of the "great room" as a nursery. As she got bigger, we moved her downstairs into her own room. But once we had our son, we knew we had to move on. There was theoretically another second-floor bedroom, but in truth you needed to walk through it to get to the bathroom, which made it unusable as anything besides an office. Thus we kinda had a countdown to when our son would be aging out of the "nursery" space. Plus my wife honestly has some hoarding tendencies, meaning our tiny house was packed to the gills with stuff I would have thrown away if it was up to me.
Theoretically, we could have easily afforded to remain in our old neighborhood, even though while we were there the neighborhood gentrified and had a huge jump in property values. However, my wife, unlike me, is from Pittsburgh, and was convinced that if two people with a combined salary in the rage of $100,000 buy a home which costs over $250,000, they're going to be "house poor." Thus, we were priced out of the neighborhood. We ended up landing a few neighborhoods away in a streetcar-suburbanish part of the city. The area I live in now isn't incredibly walkable - it takes about 15 minutes to walk to either of the closest two business districts. However, there's a bus stop literally outside my front door, which makes commuting to work by transit even easier than in my old hood. The detached house (from 1905) we landed in five years ago is about twice as large and arguably has six bedrooms (though we don't use three of them for that) and 2.5 baths. Plus it's pretty historically intact, with hardwood floors, stained glass, original grand entrance stairwell with unpainted woodwork, etc. Small yard (houses eight feet away on either side), and no off-street parking, but I don't really mind about that. I do miss having commercial amenities closer to my house. Our neighborhood finally got a coffeeshop again after two years, and just has a single mediocre neighborhood bar/restaurant. But honestly as parents we don't utilize that stuff as much, and paying the full premium for a lot of these amenities doesn't seem worth it. |
Here's how Sun Belt sees it:
1] Cities are becoming more child-less than they have in the past Why? A] Cities are becoming more expensive. B] Cities are growing older and less diverse. C] Some parts of some cities are emptying out and therefore the overall student population appears to be dropping, despite some other successful/desireable outliers -- [Steely's situation]. 2] Today's young people put off marriage and have kids much later into their mid 30s. A] They got a whole lot of F'n to do in their 20s. B] They want to be able to postpone adulthood, drink beer, play corn hole at the local watering hole until 2 am. C] They have a huge debt burden and can't afford kids, even though they love to point out how successful they are. D] Some don't want kids -- to SAVE THE EARTH!!! Kids breathe oxygen and produce carbon while consuming natural resources. 3] Those that want kids, have already grown up and left for the suburbs in their mid 20s, where life is more affordable. |
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