Thinking about density: It’s complicated

(Bear with me:  today’s post is a bit long and rambly.)

Last Friday, Megan McArdle wrote about climate change and her skepticism of a report that claimed that we could “fix” climate change “free” – that is, with even short-term non-climate-change-related benefits that exceed the costs of reducing or eliminating or use of fossil fuels to produce energy.  Earlier in the week she wrote a piece titled, “Are Tree Huggers Hypocrites?” asking whether the fact that environmentalists don’t live lives of austerity negates the validity of their message.  By and large, she defended them because

The first thing that environmentalists can argue is that they don’t want to use a carbon tax to make everyone live in caves; they want to use a carbon tax to push toward infrastructure changes and cleaner forms of power that will allow everyone to enjoy a plush lifestyle while emitting less carbon. And in many cases, I think this argument works. Denser urban design would allow more people who want to do so trade in their bigger detached houses for convenience and walkability. Less carbon-intensive technologies, from renewables to LED lights, could allow people to luxuriate in power without causing the planet to warm. Hybrid cars, driverless cars, smart grids — name your technology; it’s reasonable to say, “We will, but we’re waiting for the market to provide it.”

In other words: “there is a free lunch, if we just will it hard enough, we can have our cake and eat it too.”

Well, OK, she doesn’t exactly say that, but there a lot of people who like to speak as if (a) all it takes is scientists trying hard enough and we’ll get abundant, renewable, nonpolluting and cheap energy sources, and (b) there are only benefits, and no costs (in quality-of-life terms) to denser cities.

And this is what I wrote as a comment, edited and expanded:

Everybody likes to talk about how great density is, and how for the sake of the environment we should move to a denser, more urban environment, and everyone will be happier when they can walk to their destinations.

And in many situations, and for many people, this is true. Young, urban, childless couples enjoy cities tremendously, with a plethora of restaurants and shopping nearby, and you can pick up a loaf of bread at the corner grocery store on the way home from the subway or bus stop. (Megan McArdle writes frequently about how she enjoys her urban DC life.)  At the other end of the age spectrum, my 75-year-old dad is under a 6-month driving restriction which may be permanent, and we worry because there’s no public transit and nothing in walking distance for a man with a walker, and we’ve been strongly suggesting they look at condos in a suburban “downtown” area or “retirement communities” for a while now. And the poor, and those living on a precarious income struggling to hold onto that “middle class” status, would be better off in a denser, and cheaper as a result, condo or apartment than a single-family house.  (Reihan Salan has written on this multiple times recently.)

But for families, living in a dense urban area vs. a suburban setting is not just a bland “noneconomic cost” but a real quality-of-life issue. Oh, I know there are plenty of families living in places like New York City who are plenty happy there — but you have to have a considerable pile of money, or a considerable amount of free time. Taking mass transit to work is great — combining this with a stop at daycare, and picking up not just a couple groceries but a family’s worth, is a lot harder. And the idea of having a nice park instead of a roomy backyard is nice in principle, but there’s a significant stretch of time when they’re old enough to play out back by themselves but too young to go to the park by themselves.

Now maybe I’ve simply grown up in the suburbs and live there now, so I can’t imagine living in the city, and perhaps if I lived in a dense city with a family of 5, I would be as accustomed to it as families have indeed been for generations. But we did life in Germany for two years, so I have some experience here, anyway.  We didn’t live right smack-dab in the city center, but in what was, comparatively, suburbia, but even then, shopping was a headache — and we had a car; it’s just that we had to walk a block from the parking spot to our front door.  Besides which, I did take the kids shopping in the city, and this was a huge hassle, so I avoided this whenever possible.  Truly managing the chores of daily life with a family is a serious inconvenience without a car.  A while back there was a report that in the so-called food deserts, fast food restaurants were no closer to people’s homes than grocery stores, but the reason why the car-less poor preferred them is just that it’s a major pain to grocery-shop and carry your purchases home, along with your kids.  Yes, I believe that mass transit-dependent families should use a shopping cart of some kind rather than carrying bags, and I believe being dependent on mass transit but living somewhere well-served by mass transit is better than being car-dependent in a place without mass transit options if your income really can’t support the costs of a car, but you’ve got to be kidding if you don’t recognize that the ways in which being dependent on mass transit for daily life, as opposed to having the ability to use mass transit for convenience,is a major quality-of-life issue for families.

And what do families do, in the United States?  By and large, they vote with their feet.  Yes, I know, couples who enjoyed city life in places like Chicago move out to the suburbs because of “the schools” — but I don’t buy that.  And in Europe?  Remember my photo from a while back?  I don’t know about other places, but in Germany, the urban planners love to pack ’em in like sardines, promoting “eco-friendly” urban planning, and amenities such as proximity to transportation, shopping, and schools.  Take a look at this list of new construction projects in Munich, all of them dense condos — and understand that I haven’t just cherry-picked, but that there are no equivalent single-family, or even row-house offerings on this site, and the government exercises a very tight fist over “suburban” developments of any kind.

And what are the Germans doing?  They’re not voting with their feet, but they are voting with their reproductive capacity.  I do believe that, admittedly among other factors, one of the reasons why Germany and other wealthy countries are seeing very low birthrates is because this oh-so-eco-friendly dense way of life is actually a major pain with multiple children, especially if both parents work.

So that’s what I’m putting out there to start the week.