America’s urban rebirth is missing actual births

The steps 1...3 you described are literally "the demand for housing will gradually fall". What follows is, naturally, gradual lowering of the prices, with subsequent stabilization and rebirth.

Curiously enough we observe the same patterns in nature: a species out-grows its prime ecological niche; the population starts falling down (usually without outright crashing), and then stabilizes at the optimum point. The cycle repeats.

The only possible source of instability in the whole housing/population cycle would be the government trying to prop up the house prices once the price correction starts. Some people have this misbegotten idea that real estate has to be a magical kind of investment that always appreciates in value.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20474724

While I’m not trying to be overly critical, he is also off base with his violent crime statistics as the nineties had the highest aggregate number of murders up until the end of the decade.

The cost is high because those "affluent childless" singles are willing and able to pay more.

It used to be that the cities had lots of single-income families. They only had to compete with each other in the bidding war for good housing.

Women entered the job market due to birth control and legal changes, so now we have lots of two-income households in that bidding war. Same-sex couples also became legal, adding even more two-income households.

Meanwhile, low-cost forms of housing were legislated away. You can rent an apartment or be homeless, but you can't rent an SRO (single-room occupancy) or bed cage. The homeless scare away families, and the lack of SRO options forces single people into the bidding war for larger housing.

Most also own a home, that they bought... by saving money. They do not come from privileged backgrounds, and at least one family immigrated to this country.

What choice did they have? Birth control wasn't widely available until the 60s.

The word inequality (as opposed to poverty or standard of living) explicitly registers disinterest in this kind of argument. The important thing is that the distribution is too wide; the objective conditions at its midpoint are irrelevant.

At least in Europe I have found that while salaries can be a bit higher in cities (maybe 10-20%) compared to rural areas, the housing cost can be massively higher (200-500% higher). The difference between regional and capital cities is smaller, but can still be important.

This doesn't take into account other costs such as food (supermarkets are cheaper) and entertainment (mostly because there's less of it and mountainbiking in the forest is largely free).

I'm always surprised so few people seem to realize and take advantage of this.

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.

Of course, Japanese cities don't have enormous parking lots, everyone driving cars, etc. They have taxis of course, and some cars (not a lot really, given the population), and work vehicles, but not the huge amount of vehicle traffic we have. And of course, there's tons of trains and buses, so it's really cheap and easy to get around by public transit. On top of that, there's bicycles: tons of people get around by bicycle, and the traffic level and speeds are low enough to make this very safe, plus there's no culture there of being aggressive towards cyclists or pedestrians the way America has.

With rural areas the isolation is even larger if your on a farm that is miles away from any other human beings. You have a nearby forest to explore, but that isn't exclusive to rural areas.

I think what your complaining about is culture, and you're conflating it with the form of housing. It's how you can't let kids go out and find other kids to play with in the local neighborhood like you could in the 70s or earlier because it's illegal and enforced quickly.

You can do that in a city (see berlin: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/05/travel/berlin-family-holi... ), suburbia or a village but it's all dependent on culture and law.

There is some interesting historical reading here: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/4ef3/28b64fdb97357674725324...

The modern twist on the concept is to focus on preservation instead of total replacement, trying to enhance the environment that attracted people to the diverse urban area in the first place rather than outright replacing it with centrally-planned alternatives. There are also large efforts to redevelop totally unused land (with projects like the Docklands in London or Hudson Yards in NYC) - but rarely in isolation, the goal is usually to incorporate the space into the rest of the city's fabric.

I completely agree with your points about cars, though - most American cities devote far too much space to them, especially storage of empty ones. We'd do well to shift our streetscape priorities to people, especially in dense mixed-use areas, which I think would be a big step towards the communal spaces you envision.

Indeed, car-intermediated everything and complete dependence on parents is a much better description of suburban life for children than city life. I grew up in one of the most pleasant and active suburbs in the US, in a little college town, and it was still incredibly child-hostile. The city is IMO much friendlier to children.

In the city people can and do walk all over, with longer trips made by transit. There are more small shops of all kinds, more coffeeshops, more live music, more social clubs, more classes, more playgrounds, more museums, and in general more regular human contact of all kinds. Kids can be independent at a younger age, and can pursue a wider range of interests with community infrastructure and support.

> you have small children, this changes. Intellectual pursuits? They can't read yet, so your only option is parking them in front of videos.

I have one 3-year-old kid and one 5-month-old kid in San Francisco. Neither of them watches significant amounts of videos (occasionally we watch kids’ movies or old Mr. Rogers episodes together). The other kids we meet at the playground don’t seem to do excessive amounts of video watching.

Kids absolutely can do “intellectual pursuits”, but at their own level. First and foremost they play with all manner of physical objects – blocks, other construction toys, folded paper, empty cardboard boxes and yogurt containers, balls, sand, clay, water, their own bodies, ... Then kids love having stories told to them or books read to them. They love singing, using random household objects as percussion instruments, playing rhyming games, recognizing and naming objects, learning new words, counting random stuff, drawing with chalk and crayons, .... They love helping with household chores (not the most helpful at first, but they try), watching people do physical work of all kinds, play-acting all sorts of grown-up activities, ...

By far the biggest problem for small kids here in SF is the high cost of housing and childcare and the distance from grandparents. Many families we know have moved away to find places with cheaper housing (e.g. they were previously living in a rent-controlled 1 bedroom apartment and decided they wanted a 2-bedroom place, but couldn’t afford to pay current market rent for it) or more help with childcare.

> One false move and some yahoo in a steel contraption has killed them.

It would be great to ban cars from more streets, and get the remaining cars down to 15–20 miles/hour. This is not really a city problem per se; our whole society is built around cars, and suburbs are generally worse than cities at putting pedestrians in harm’s way.

You have a very narrow definition of the infrastructure required to raise kids. People have been raising families in cities long before suburbs were invented.

> 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 whizzing past at speeds that will maim or kill you.

> There are a few places you can go from here. There are a few parks, where you can have some green space, along with the sound of the steel contraptions. There are other strips of concrete throughout the city between the contraptions' domain and the buildings. There are places you can pay to be allowed to occupy for a time. There are places you are paid to be for some number of hours each day. And there's the public library if you can reach it.

You've actually described the typical suburb. Step outside your door into a narrow strip of concrete, possibly with a few trees, and a shortly cut lawn, that you, at great expense of time, and money are allowed to maintain and inhabit (As long as you maintain it to the asinine, often environmentally-harmful expectations of your HOA/Municipality). Beyond that is a frequently sidewalk-less asphalt road, with two ton steel contraptions that are either stationary, or moving at speeds that will maim you.

There is nowhere you can go without getting into a car. (Corollary: Your neighbour will be driving home from the bar, every other Friday, drunk as a skunk.) The nearest park is a mile away. You have some green space you can look at, but its all owned by other people, and if you spend too long gawking at a stranger's yard, somebody might call the cops. [1] If you drive far enough, you may find dreary places where you can pay to be allowed to occupy for a time, called stripmalls. A few may even contain a library.

[1] Because only a criminal or a lunatic would be walking around in a suburb.

And https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20116699.

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 taken some online courses ans weve started re learning french. Parents who put their kids in front of the TV are lazy.

Parks exist in most urban areas and are perfect for kids to play in.

All the other dangers you mentioned are way overstated

I do not understand this paranoia that has gripped the American public. The way people act would have you believe things are worse today than in the past when all actual data (anf observation) say the contrary

You can get a surprising amount of density from low rise buildings, with narrow tree-lined streets and generous sidewalks.

I think the city and the country and everywhere in between can be a wonderful or terrible place, but I would hesitate to say that any one place is right or wrong for any one person.

I stepped out of my door into a hallway of doors, greeted by the scent of several different ethnic foods being cooked, and usually the sound of one or more families.

I take an elevator down the stairs to the lobby, nod at the guy manning the desk who was interested in what I ordered yesterday (it was heavy - he thought car parts, was a rack-mount UPS).

I step out into a U shaped walkway, lined with bushes, with a cherry tree in the middle before merging onto the sidewalk.

Fifteen minutes away in one direction is a zoo that was free. Full of kids learning new things about amazing wildlife. Five minutes in the other direction is a hiking trail, onto another hiking trail.

I'm sure such places exist, but I've lived in a city (Boston) for many years and this description doesn't apply to the areas I've lived.

Somewhat ironically, the places in Boston that are closest to your description are the ones where they bulldozed large swaths and tried to remake things in a more people friendly way.

This constricts the larger apartment housing stock for families, and especially if you're living in the same room as someone else, probably makes your ability to cultivate a romantic relationship harder, too.

This adds up to - American cities ban units both large and small that allow a city to function properly; they simultaneously tend to dramatically underbuild housing altogether for the demand to live in these cities; and then we wonder why, given how prohibitively expensive it is to live in an American city, that they tend to have serious social problems and only the most tolerant/flexible to stressful situations—i.e. the most privileged—can afford and profit from living in them.

One thing I'm struck by living in Tokyo recently, aside seeing way more children than I ever do in SF (against all odds given the low birth rates), is that you can get a small studio for not much money - you'd be lucky to find one in SF within 30 minutes of the city for less than $2,500, but you can get one 15-20 mins from the hottest neighborhoods in Tokyo for like $500-$700. They'll be much smaller, but the lifestyle is also more space-efficient, so I find it to work for my needs as a 27 year old.

SF is weird in that you can have very nice areas that are literally just a couple blocks away from hellholes.

Recency has little to do with it.

Many articles, including this one, champion the cause of immigration as a positive to society, a reason of which is making up for the low birth rate of said societies existing members. And I’m not refuting that.

But since immigration tends to occur from undeveloped countries to developed countries, what happens when you apply this trend across many generations and across many developed parts of the world?

And what does this, or should this, mean for a society and culture in present time?

making childfree adults pay more taxes is essentially a subsidy towards having children. in general when you apply a subsidy to something, you get more of it. in the west, we already face significant sacrifices to our standard of living over the next couple decades if we want to even approach a sustainable usage of our planet's resources. if we actually grow the population, we have to make even larger sacrifices. from this perspective, your tax proposal seems like a bad idea.

on the other hand, we also have a looming demographic crisis as the ratio of retired to working adults increases. if nothing changes, the working population will bear a much greater burden in the future to support retirees, or we will have to drastically cut retirement benefits. from this perspective, it does seem beneficial to increase the incentive to have children (or at least blunt the disincentive a bit more).

yet another perspective: childless people (in the US, at least) already pay more taxes than parents. they are ineligible to take the per-child tax deduction that you probably take every year. they also pay for services like schools which their (nonexistent) children will never consume or benefit from. there is also a negative correlation between number of children and income. because of this correlation, people with few or no children are more likely to already pay more into the system than they receive in services/benefits. they are also more likely to have adequate savings for retirement and depend less heavily on government retirement benefits.

I think in an ideal world, some well-meaning experts would convene and establish a target population and age distribution for a country (or the world, but I'm trying to keep at least one foot grounded in reality). then if we're on track to meet the target, no special benefit for parents. if we're below target, a proportional tax advantage for parents. if above, a proportional penalty tax. the the tax benefit/penalty would be locked in for the next twenty years so that parents wouldn't have the rug pulled out from under them. actually maybe the penalty could be removed, seems unnecessarily punitive otherwise.

The child tax credit is $2000/child in 2019, which is laughable. I spend more than $12,000/child/yr for childcare alone for two kids (ages 8mos and 3yrs). These early years are terrifying to potential parents - it's gauntlet to reach public school age where property taxes disproportionately taxes the childless.

I think that there should be a deduction for 100% of tuition for children under age 5 (not to exceed $20,000/yr/child). I.e., in the 24% tax bracket, $24,000 in tuition for two children would reduce my tax burden by $6,000. Those in higher brackets would receive a greater refund. In lower brackets, AGI would become negative and not function as a credit.

In effect, the more you make, the more you get back. I think this is an elegant incentive to encourage well-earning people to make babies and continue working. There's no risk of gaming the deduction either: money will by definition go toward childcare tuition. (If there's a risk, it's that childcare will go up. I assume it would, but not 24%.)

We want tax-paying parents to put more future taxpayers into the system so that we don't become Japan. The parents benefitting from a policy like this are making a significant contribution to the economy. Consider their earnings, their patronage of the childcare facility, and the promise of a preschool-educated person to become a future taxpayer.

If all that sounds too convoluted, it could be more straightforward. Let's extend public education down to 3-month-olds. Or we can give parents five years paid leave from work to raise their children to public school age.

Every idea I can imagine is polarizing.

Here are some counter arguments:

- having children means you will likely receive support in your older age that childless couples won't, how will you account for that?

- having children gives you purpose, realization and satisfaction and forcibly links you with younger generations, which childless people must try to find in other places (making it easier for the childless to be depressed, become disconnected from modern technology and society, etc)

- there's the ecological argument of course: as we increased in numbers the number of species has decreased, pollution, carbon output, destruction of habitats, etc has increased, it rather seems that having children should be taxed to account for these externalities (but arguably that's already done so through the additional costs associated with it)

And last but not least: it is very unlikely that you were forced to have children. As an adult you made a decision knowing fully well what it carries with it (and if you didn't know there's no excuse in the Internet age to not have been able to research it). You are fully responsible for the decision and it seems unfair to me that now after having committed to it, you want to change the game rules so it goes against those that have decided different from you.

Some people definitely want and enjoy these things.

Maybe if you hadn’t grown up on a 1000 acre lot in the middle of nowhere you would have interacted with more people different from you and come to the realization that not everyone shares your lifestyle preferences.

> zoning laws and the real estate economy are engineered to promote space per human trending towards zero.

This is utterly factually wrong. The vast majority of the land area of most cities are zoned single-family only. The size of the average new construction has also trended dramatically upwards over the past couple generations.