I was reading an article on Japan that popped up in my feed, and one of the comments was this:

This is one of those very popular and widely held quasi-truths that comes up, especially online, in discussions of cities, density, and families. I’ve written about these things before, and this idea that cities are somehow inherently bad for families or depress fertility. (The same things get said about new apartment buildings, wherever they are.)

There are a lot of specious arguments against cities and urbanism—for a laundry list of the most specious, in their most specious form, see this Federalist article attacking New Urbanism and urbanism generally—but this one about children and families troubles me somewhat, because one of the reasons I favor urbanism is precisely because I think children and families are important, and our built environments should be safe and favorable for them. I think of something someone said once, in response to one of my previous pieces on this: suburbia is great for parents, but terrible for kids.

Making cities more friendly to families with young children, in particular, does mean taking crime and disorder seriously. Probably more seriously. But making suburbia more friendly to families means taking traffic deaths and injuries seriously, and more broadly it means being aware of how typical suburban design imposes a great deal of wasted time. Spreading things out, and requiring car trips to do everything, exacts a particular tax on tired, harried parents and on children not old enough to drive.

That’s a little bit about the practical question of which sort of built environment is most conducive to family life. But the thing about cities and fertility is a little bit of a deeper question. These folks aren’t just saying “Big cities are kind of unfriendly to young families.” They’re saying something about cities is inherently depressive of fertility—that cities are a kind of fertility sink threatening the future of humanity in the sense of reducing human reproduction.

Take a look at MoreBirths, a Twitter account and Substack newsletter by former tech worker and father of six Daniel Hess. Hess notes in his Substack’s “About” that
Elon Musk and many other thinkers” identify the collapse in birth rates as the greatest threat to civilization facing us. (It would have been nice to include some more of those thinkers by name.)

I don’t know who Hess is or what his provenance is, but he’s written a piece with at least one person I would consider questionable, which is fine, you work with a lot of people and a big tent when you focus on a somewhat niche issue like pronatalism. This is just to say that Hess would appear to be on the right, and his views on cities and density are pretty typical of a lot of conservatives.

For example, he argues that immigration isn’t a fix for low birth rates in terms of the working-age population or safety net:

And here’s a chart he made, or at least that has his publication’s name on it:

And here’s a long bit on housing—he doesn’t deny that housing is a major factor in family formation, but he argues that single-family homes are ideal for fertility:

My understanding is that while the data used to make these arguments is basically valid, the causation is not necessarily clear or agreed upon. It seems to me you need to disentangle what you might call statistical truths and metaphysical truths. The statistical truth is that if you take a snapshot of a city, it will have lower fertility than less dense outlying areas, generally. But what does that mean?

Maybe it means something different in East Asia, where American-style suburbia is less common. But most people historically have either lived on farms or in towns and cities. Most people never had much space, or private yards. It would seem to me the culture is more likely the thing that’s changed to be less supportive of children and young families—not that suburbia was a kind of innovation that unlocked fertility. In other words, it isn’t, and almost can’t be, metaphysically true that cities are bad for kids. Which is not to say, as I acknowledged above, that many large cities as they exist today couldn’t be made much more conducive to family life.

The other issue is that Daniel Hess even notes, in that screenshotted bit on housing, that being able to move out of your parents’ house and start your own household is a big factor in whether you get married and have kids. Of course it is.

But for any number of reasons—cultural, educational, professional, not to mention having used a lot of proximate land for low-density construction already—we just aren’t buying small detached houses in our 20s anymore and having kids right away. There’s a 5-10 year gap for a lot of people where you need to start yourself off as an adult. And in order to do that, you need somewhere to live that is not your parents’ house and is not an extremely unaffordable single-family house. Unless it’s a cheap “tiny house,” which somehow I think the people who look askance at density wouldn’t care for either.

Hess mentions Tokyo as a low-fertility city, so here, look at this: an article on Tokyo’s cheap 95-square-foot apartments. Of course nobody can start a family in such a housing unit. But that’s not the point. The point is that nobody can start a family either if there’s no bridge housing between leaving your parents and getting married or starting your own household. The people in these apartments are 20-somethings, for the most part. They will live in them for a year or two or three, and then trade up.

More broadly, the people in a city are going to tend to be disproportionately young, so of course a city will look like it has lower fertility. Suburbs have higher fertility because they’re older. Taking a snapshot of a thriving city with affordable small apartments and lots of young people starting out, and determining that something about the city must depress fertility, is like looking at an elementary school and determining the same.

More broadly, what I’m saying is, it’s a cultural change more than a land use change that right-wing pronatalists really want, and attacking cities and density is mistaking a snapshot data point for a metaphysical truth.

Related Reading:

Serendipity And Proximity

Kids And The City

Faux-Natalism

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