Sometimes I use this newsletter to propose or explore an idea that I’m not quite sure about or that isn’t fully formed. I did that recently here—wondering whether early suburbs were so friendly and communitarian because their residents were largely ex-urbanites or small towners who brought city neighborhood culture with them, but then lost it as the new built environment made it much harder to transmit that culture.

Here I’ve got another one of these pieces wondering through something. There’s a narrative, weakly supported in my opinion by some evidence showing correlation, between city life and low birth rates. This is basically an attempt to prove the idea that suburbia is kid-friendly or family-friendly, and that therefore we can somehow make family life easier or entice people to have more kids by making urban life more difficult or expensive. At least, I think a lot of folks who make hay about this supposed link want that.

But I have a different thought, probably not any more supported by statistics and maybe less, but something which feels like it might be true or partially explanatory. What if the increasing share of Americans living in suburbia actually was a leading indicator or even causal factor in declining birth rates/family formation/etc.?

Think about this. Sometimes we talk about “vulnerable road users” or some similar term in cities—folks who can’t drive and are exposed to the dangers of automobiles. Typically we think of people in wheelchairs, or cyclists, or pedestrians, especially poorer people who, again, can’t afford to drive.

But the most numerous and most visible vulnerable road users are children.

I want to go back to this piece I wrote about Amsterdam (and this additional piece noting Montreal), and how the deaths of children on streets prompted a movement to roll back the dominance of cars in those cities. These sentiments existed in the United States, too, but were not as successful.

I think it’s worth dwelling on this a moment. Today, urbanism and city life are viewed as the domain of young, single, childless people—a place to live out a few wild years or make a lot of money before you grow up and settle down. But decades ago, what spurred urbanist reforms in Europe and Canada—more progressive places than America!—was not the lifestyle interests of young/single/childless people, but the lives of children.

So what this got me to wondering is: what if the decline of urbanism, and the increasing invisibility of children amid traffic and out on the street, actually led us to care less about children in a broad sense? And what if, therefore, bad urbanism or a decline in urbanism actually presaged a decline in birth rates? What if, by concealing family life behind the walls of “family-friendly neighborhoods,” we made the concerns of children and their overall visibility less obvious to everyone?

In other words, what if the notion that cities are somehow anti-natalist is backwards? Or, at most, is born out in data simply because accidents of political, ideological, and lifestyle sorting have made it true right now, in a statistical sense, but not in an inherent sense? What if cities are pro-natalist, and what if our destruction of cities in the 20th century set the stage for a decline of the family or for a collective downgrading of how much we prioritize the needs and wellbeing of children and families?

What do you think?

Related Reading:

You Can Take It With You

How Old Is Your Tallest?

Mayberry Wasn’t a Subdivision

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