Cities Should Be Hubs for Families, Not Playgrounds for Affluent 20-Somethings

Married couples in cities are having fewer kids--or none at all--instead of relocating. Let's meet them where they are.

A former coworker of mine asked me about the IVF process because he was thinking of freezing embryos with his wife. I asked if either of them struggled with fertility. He said they didn’t, at least not that he knew of. His concern was that despite meeting in their early twenties, they were now in their mid-thirties, and worried they were still many years away from having kids, if they were to have them at all. They lived in San Francisco (their jobs required them to live there) and their parents lived too far away to help them with childcare. Despite the fact that he was making well over $200K annually (I’m not sure how much his wife made) he didn’t believe they could afford to raise children in San Francisco—mostly because of housing costs, but also because of childcare costs given the lack of family support. Because they couldn’t leave the city without upending their careers, they were stuck. As he was explaining this to me, he stopped and said, “We might just not have kids at all.”

You could argue that he and his wife were too selfish or career focused to prioritize a family, or that they must not have wanted parenthood badly enough if they were willing to give up on it. But people like him are in cities all over America, and would have kids (or more kids) if cities were built for families, as opposed to expensive playgrounds for well-off twenty-somethings, barring family formation to the ultra-affluent who can afford to spend $4M on a house. Writing people off as “too selfish” to be good parents because they’ve prioritized the “wrong” things means conceding to a lower birth rate.

As someone who considers herself “natalist-friendly,” when I write about the birth rate my biggest priority is enabling people to have the number of kids they want. This is partially because one of my strongest beliefs is that people will ultimately do what they want to do, if you make it possible. Working against human nature is unhelpful and often inhumane. As I’ve written before, you can’t guilt and shame women into quitting their careers and having more kids (plus, their husbands might not even want that.) You also can’t expect to turn back progress in the form of mass layoffs (or more realistically, tanking the economy on purpose via tariffs) hoping that they affect women because only women work in jobs you’ve determined to be bogus (and further assuming that these women will respond to financial hardship by marrying someone they wouldn’t otherwise have liked, and having lots of kids.) The right-wingers have been clear about their strategy for improving the birth rate: make life more miserable for everyone (especially women) and hope that with nothing better to do, or no choice in the matter, women will have more kids.

The far left isn’t any help either, not because they’re equally antagonistic and cruel as the far right, but because they generally don’t believe the birth rate is an issue, and many believe it’s a bad idea to have kids at all. They’re obviously not in charge of the country, so this is less of a big deal, but my point is, there aren’t a lot of left-wing advocacy groups focused on humane pronatalism.

So that leaves us with corny libs like me, working out how to enable people to have the number of kids they want (which in most cases, as I’m about to explain, is higher than the number of kids they currently have.) Achieving this will improve birth rates in a way that makes people’s lives better, not worse. I ran a study recently to figure out the exact levers that we can pull to improve the birth rate among this cohort—which means leaving all the happily childfree people alone and focusing only on people who want more children than they have. My conclusion? Transform cities from inordinately expensive career and social stepping stones for young people, to places for families to thrive for multiple generations.