A major problem in American cities is what's called "contraception zoning." It's a de facto and sometimes de jure ban on large (as in 4 or more bedroom) apartments.
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America’s urban rebirth is missing actual births
161–170 of 443 posts
Re: America’s urban rebirth is missing actual births
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't need "low rise cohousing communities" to have families in cities. Japanese cities are extremely dense, yet people raise families there just fine. On my trip to Japan, I was really struck by how many children I saw in the middles of cities (moreso in some districts than others, of course), whereas I never see children in downtown American cities. Of course, Japanese cities don't have enormous parking lots, e…
Because they have a high trust, homogenous culture. How many people feel comfortable taking children on public transportation or allowing to roam the middle of cities? Culture matters, and quite frankly Japanese culture is different.
> How many people feel comfortable taking children on public transportation
In major American cities, kids are taken on public transportation all the time. Often big groups of school kids are in transit for a museum field trip downtown.
Re: America’s urban rebirth is missing actual births
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't need "low rise cohousing communities" to have families in cities. Japanese cities are extremely dense, yet people raise families there just fine. On my trip to Japan, I was really struck by how many children I saw in the middles of cities (moreso in some districts than others, of course), whereas I never see children in downtown American cities. Of course, Japanese cities don't have enormous parking lots, e…
Because they have a high trust, homogenous culture. How many people feel comfortable taking children on public transportation or allowing to roam the middle of cities? Culture matters, and quite frankly Japanese culture is different.
> How many people feel comfortable taking children on public transportation or allowing to roam the middle of cities?
Public transit? Most everyone in cities that really depend on it like NYC.
Re: America’s urban rebirth is missing actual births
#164I look at it a little differently. The urban cores in the USA are actively hostile places for anyone to be. You step outside your door...into an empty hallway of doors. You take an elevator or stairs down to a place with a few mailboxes, then step outside. Outside, you have a narrow strip of concrete, possibly with a few trees, that you are allowed to inhabit. Beyond it is as asphalt with two ton steel contraptions w…
Your description doesn't really sound like any actual city that I know of, although it sounds a little like how someone who's never been to New York City might describe it. Do you have a particular city in mind? Because "car-centric and pedestrian hostile" sounds more like most suburbs than most urban areas.
I lived in Manhattan, so I'm pretty clear on my description. And it's true, the suburbs are hostile, too. You just use your lot and single family home to try to reconstitute a usable environment.
Re: America’s urban rebirth is missing actual births
#165I look at it a little differently. The urban cores in the USA are actively hostile places for anyone to be. You step outside your door...into an empty hallway of doors. You take an elevator or stairs down to a place with a few mailboxes, then step outside. Outside, you have a narrow strip of concrete, possibly with a few trees, that you are allowed to inhabit. Beyond it is as asphalt with two ton steel contraptions w…
So my moms parents had three children and my dads five. So not huge families but large. They grew up in a city in a third world country and frankly their childhood was a lot more dangerous than your imagined paranoia. Also your ideas of children are way off. We have a seven month old and we read to her, take her to the library, go to space talks, etc. Actually we do a lot more intellectual stuff now. My wife has take…
> Also your ideas of children are way off.
They come from raising a pair of kids, currently aged four and five. We actually have been living on a semi-rural island for the last five years, though.
Re: America’s urban rebirth is missing actual births
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s not quite so simple. Both men and women state the ideal number of children they want to have as about 2.7: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/13/upshot/american-fertility... . Our society doesn’t just introduce more alternatives to having kids, it introduces more factors that get in the way or having kids. We’ve structured our society around this extended adolescence, where young people aren’t even really done with…
That sounds like a problem for women. Men can happily have children in their 70s as the current president has shown.
Except most men marry women who are about the same age. The gap in average age at first marriage is just two years, and has steadily decreased over the past century.
Re: America’s urban rebirth is missing actual births
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
So my moms parents had three children and my dads five. So not huge families but large. They grew up in a city in a third world country and frankly their childhood was a lot more dangerous than your imagined paranoia. Also your ideas of children are way off. We have a seven month old and we read to her, take her to the library, go to space talks, etc. Actually we do a lot more intellectual stuff now. My wife has take…
| Parks exist in most urban areas and are perfect for kids to play in. Minus the used needles and other debris that litter many of them. It’s a sad state that that’s the best place people with drug problems can go, but it seems they don’t have anywhere else to go. It’s just not where I want to bring my kid to hangout.
This is something I hear about a lot. And yet when I walk through places reputed to be full of them, like Denny Park in Seattle, which I walked through today on my way from my office to the library, the worst that I saw was a candy wrapper on the ground.
Re: America’s urban rebirth is missing actual births
#168The arguments in this article seem extremely dramatic, simplistic and unsupported.
Just one example out of many I found in the article: jobs in big cities are the highest paying. Thus, the article quickly announces then moves on, living in a big city equals a “winner takes all” situation, which leads to dramatic inequality.
How does that remotely support such a dramatic conclusion? Does having a bit less paying job mean you have nothing? Do people not commute into the city for work? Do the lower costs of living outside big cities not offset the lower wages? How does this translate into high inequality? Where does all that inequal wealth go when these “childless couples” die? Etc, etc.
I haven’t read the Atlantic in awhile, but this seemed like something I’d find in the opinion section of my local newspaper. So many poorly supported points in this article.
Re: America’s urban rebirth is missing actual births
#169I look at it a little differently. The urban cores in the USA are actively hostile places for anyone to be. You step outside your door...into an empty hallway of doors. You take an elevator or stairs down to a place with a few mailboxes, then step outside. Outside, you have a narrow strip of concrete, possibly with a few trees, that you are allowed to inhabit. Beyond it is as asphalt with two ton steel contraptions w…
Bulldozing entire blocks of cities and replacing the mixed developments that were there with towers surrounded by isolated green space was attempted in the US during the middle of the century, under the guise of being "urban renewal". These projects were broadly considered failures, creating isolated communities with the net effect of displacing many more people in the "bulldoze" phase than they could attract in the…
Where did I ask for towers surrounded by isolated green space? Please look into what cohousing, as developed in Scandanavia, actually looks like.
Re: America’s urban rebirth is missing actual births
#170I look at it a little differently. The urban cores in the USA are actively hostile places for anyone to be. You step outside your door...into an empty hallway of doors. You take an elevator or stairs down to a place with a few mailboxes, then step outside. Outside, you have a narrow strip of concrete, possibly with a few trees, that you are allowed to inhabit. Beyond it is as asphalt with two ton steel contraptions w…
> replace them with low rise cohousing communities I agree with almost everything you say but this. Why low rise? With high rises, we can use less space for housing and we would have more space for parks, libraries, and greenery.
When I saw low rise, I mean about four stories, maybe up to six. The height of Copenhagen, say. It produces a much more humane built environment and much less interior hellscape.