> at the risk of giving Vance any credit here, I must admit that progressives do have a family problem. The problem doesn’t exist at the level of individual choice, where conservative scolds tend to fixate. Rather, it exists at the level of urban family policy. American families with young children are leaving big urban counties in droves. And that says something interesting about the state of mobility—and damning about the state of American cities and the progressives who govern them.
> First, the facts. In large urban metros, the number of children under 5 years old is in a free fall, according to a new [analysis](https://eig.org/families-exodus/) of Census data by Connor O’Brien, a policy analyst at the think tank Economic Innovation Group. From 2020 to 2023, the number of these young kids declined by nearly 20 percent in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. They also fell by double-digit percentage points in the counties making up most or all of Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, and St. Louis.
> America’s richest cities are profoundly left-leaning, and many of them—including New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco—are themselves ensconced in left-leaning states. These places ought to be advertisements for what the modern progressive movement can achieve without meddlesome conservatism getting in the way, at the local or state level. If progressives want to sell their cause to the masses, they should be able to say: Elect us, and we’ll make America more like Oakland. Or Brooklyn. Or suburban Detroit. If they can’t make that argument, that’s a problem.
> Right now it’s hard to make the argument, because urban progressivism is afflicted by an inability to build. Cities in red states are building much more housing than those in blue states. In 2024, Austin, Raleigh, and Phoenix are expected to expand their apartment inventory more than five times faster than San Diego, Baltimore, or San Francisco. Housing policy is the quantum field of urban life, extending across every sector and making contact with every problem. When cities fail on housing policy, the failure ripples.
> One hidden effect of expensive housing is that it raises the cost of local services and creates shortages of workers willing to accept low wages in labor-intensive industries, such as child care. As a result, large urban areas have more expensive child care, even relative to their higher levels of income. A 2023 analysis by the U.S. Department of Labor and the Women’s Bureau found that infant child care devoured the highest share of family income in large urban counties. Nationwide, the average family with at least one child under the age of 5 devotes about 13 percent of family income to pay for child care. But the typical infant day-care center in San Francisco and Chicago consumes about 20 percent of a local family’s income. In Boston, Manhattan, and Brooklyn, it’s more like 30 percent. Child care is just another example of how constrained housing supply can poison parts of the economy that don’t immediately seem to have anything to do with it.
!ping FAMILY&YIMBY
Atlas3141 on
We’ve culturally decided that children need their own bedroom and a backyard, and parents are more comfortable sending their children to income-segregated schools than with the general population. This seems inescapable frankly.
glmory on
“If progressives want to sell their cause to the masses, they should be able to say: Elect us, and we’ll make America more like Oakland. Or Brooklyn. Or suburban Detroit. If they can’t make that argument, that’s a problem.”
Glad to see cities being called out. Most of these cities literally just need to take away the NIMBYs power to slow down 3-bedroom apartment buildings/condos of any height and clear out the homeless. Within a decade the problem is gone. Yet the only places that even get close to success are in states like Minnesota and Utah not California and New York.
3 Comments
> at the risk of giving Vance any credit here, I must admit that progressives do have a family problem. The problem doesn’t exist at the level of individual choice, where conservative scolds tend to fixate. Rather, it exists at the level of urban family policy. American families with young children are leaving big urban counties in droves. And that says something interesting about the state of mobility—and damning about the state of American cities and the progressives who govern them.
> First, the facts. In large urban metros, the number of children under 5 years old is in a free fall, according to a new [analysis](https://eig.org/families-exodus/) of Census data by Connor O’Brien, a policy analyst at the think tank Economic Innovation Group. From 2020 to 2023, the number of these young kids declined by nearly 20 percent in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. They also fell by double-digit percentage points in the counties making up most or all of Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, and St. Louis.
> America’s richest cities are profoundly left-leaning, and many of them—including New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco—are themselves ensconced in left-leaning states. These places ought to be advertisements for what the modern progressive movement can achieve without meddlesome conservatism getting in the way, at the local or state level. If progressives want to sell their cause to the masses, they should be able to say: Elect us, and we’ll make America more like Oakland. Or Brooklyn. Or suburban Detroit. If they can’t make that argument, that’s a problem.
> Right now it’s hard to make the argument, because urban progressivism is afflicted by an inability to build. Cities in red states are building much more housing than those in blue states. In 2024, Austin, Raleigh, and Phoenix are expected to expand their apartment inventory more than five times faster than San Diego, Baltimore, or San Francisco. Housing policy is the quantum field of urban life, extending across every sector and making contact with every problem. When cities fail on housing policy, the failure ripples.
> One hidden effect of expensive housing is that it raises the cost of local services and creates shortages of workers willing to accept low wages in labor-intensive industries, such as child care. As a result, large urban areas have more expensive child care, even relative to their higher levels of income. A 2023 analysis by the U.S. Department of Labor and the Women’s Bureau found that infant child care devoured the highest share of family income in large urban counties. Nationwide, the average family with at least one child under the age of 5 devotes about 13 percent of family income to pay for child care. But the typical infant day-care center in San Francisco and Chicago consumes about 20 percent of a local family’s income. In Boston, Manhattan, and Brooklyn, it’s more like 30 percent. Child care is just another example of how constrained housing supply can poison parts of the economy that don’t immediately seem to have anything to do with it.
!ping FAMILY&YIMBY
We’ve culturally decided that children need their own bedroom and a backyard, and parents are more comfortable sending their children to income-segregated schools than with the general population. This seems inescapable frankly.
“If progressives want to sell their cause to the masses, they should be able to say: Elect us, and we’ll make America more like Oakland. Or Brooklyn. Or suburban Detroit. If they can’t make that argument, that’s a problem.”
Glad to see cities being called out. Most of these cities literally just need to take away the NIMBYs power to slow down 3-bedroom apartment buildings/condos of any height and clear out the homeless. Within a decade the problem is gone. Yet the only places that even get close to success are in states like Minnesota and Utah not California and New York.