Theย U.S. birth rate recently sunk to a 30-year low, a trend thatโs been blamed on everything fromย economic anxietiesย andย climate changeย to the rise of smartphones andย the Millennial โsex recession.โ Perhaps we should also lay some of the responsibility at the feet of city planning.
As bizarre as an anti-day-care bill may seem, the fear of more children coming into a community is a mainstay at new housing proposal hearings. Particularly in high-cost suburbs along the coasts, the mere inclusion ofย three-bedroomย apartmentsโthe kind of units young families needโcan get a project inย hot waterย with elected officials. While the justifications for blocking this kind of housing vary from preserving rural character to preventing (real or imagined) school overcrowding, the result is that more and more municipalities are adopting policies designed to keep out children and the families who care for them.
In the New York suburb of Garwood, New Jersey, city officials adopted aย master planย earlier in 2018 that places a total prohibition on units with three or more bedrooms. In Nutley, New Jersey, another New York suburb, a Julyย zoning fightย came with assurances that three-bedroom unitsโand the children that come with themโwerenโt part of the plan. In the Garden State more broadly, municipalities increasingly meet theirย state-mandated fair-share affordable housing requirements by building only senior housing. Affordable housing proposals that include three-bedroom units are rejected out of hand, leaving working families with few options.
The problem is likely much bigger than even these overtly anti-family measures in Philadelphia and New Jersey would suggest. Insomuch as zoning serves to block smaller, more affordable housing, the way we plan cities may be undermining the desire of young couples to start families. A former Massachusetts state senator coined a term for this phenomenon:ย vasectomy zoning.
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Iโm not sure that cities that want to promote the cool factor may not be completely against children.ย Adults who care about being cool are often pursuing the goal of perpetual adolescence.ย In effect, they want to be the children.
At any rate, a culture that cares so little for the next generation, in which adults are so oriented to themselves that they are not interested in having children or in even being around them, is a culture that is dying.
Illustration by SamDuluth [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], from Wikimedia Commons