I 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 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.
If you're responsible for just you and have access to a ready stream of money, you can cobble together an okay existence from this. You escape into intellectual pursuits in your small housing box. You spend lots of hours at the place you are paid to be. You visit your friends' small housing boxes. You spend some money to have somewhere else to go from time to time.
If you have small children, this changes. Intellectual pursuits? They can't read yet, so your only option is parking them in front of videos. It hurts to see their faces go slack and their motions grow spastic. You spend time taking them to visit their friends in other boxes and meeting their friends at the park. You breathe a sigh of relief when they enter school, since now they have a place to be analogous to the place you are paid to be. You can't let them outside to play on the narrow strips of concrete. One false move and some yahoo in a steel contraption has killed them.
If you want families in the city, bulldoze the major urban cores and replace them with low rise cohousing communities. Cars are parked on the edge. Everyone lives in spaces that face onto communal spaces. Community centers become focal points in each block, along with lots of other public space, indoors and out, instead of turning it all over to commercial interests. Short of that, if you want to raise a family and you have the means, you buy your own place that has its own small park and inside space to play. Everyone is cut off and must own the same amenities because of the tyranny of commercial space and cars over the ground level of the city.
I’m raising a child in NYC right now. What is this dystopia you are describing? It’s the opposite of my personal experience. NYC is such a kid friendly place to raise kids: Museums, zoos, aquariums, free events for kids, concerts just for babies, parks, swimming pools, little league, soccer league, skate parks, etc… we have it all. I can’t fathom how people raise kids in the suburbs. They must be so bored…
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.
We both earn large professional salaries but decided to go to the suburbs for kids. We have 2 beaches within 20 minutes of us, we have parks, cinemas, out door water parks, outdoor pools, skate parks plus half an acre of garden and a big house where the kids can have a music room, a playroom, separate room for computer games and we get a very nice home office. I don't know why anyone would want to stay in the cramped city making their kids live indoors.
We used to do apartment living, it sucked, especially when the neighbours kids started learning instruments.
Driving. We could move beachside but then that extra 40 mins each day adds too much to our commute (I go to the city / office 3 days per week). If I go 100% remote then I can live 30 seconds walk to the beach.
A 20 min drive is assuming a bit of traffic. It's not a big deal though. We are avid surfers and the kids go to "nippers" (Australian national club that gets kids into life saving and understanding the ocean).
As the kids get older, they will either drive themselves or they will get the bus to the beach if they want to hang out with their mates. The driving age here is 17 (that's when you can drive yourself). It's a semi rural area so driving or buses (good quality buses) are the norm.
When we liveed in Sydney, we used to live right next to the beach but the droves of people that come to visit ruin it a little. Where we live now, we don't get too many people coming this way other than locals which is awesome.
Depends on the number of kids and what they do. Playing drums in the same room as someone trying to focus on a high-adrenaline multiplayer FPS would never work (at least not very well). Separating into multiple rooms also allows kids to bring friends over and do stuff without disturbing the other kids. Also; kids needs time to be alone, multiple rooms allows them to do stuff by themselves without having be with others.
The music room has dampening mats on the walls to stop too much sound from escaping. It also has amps, drums, guitar stands etc. A purpose built room is awesome.
The second living room has darkened walls and tints on the windows. It has a project bolted to the ceiling and a screen that rolls down for movies, smash and mario kart (my kids are still young enough to think Nintendo are the only computer games :-)
I don't know about you, but those are things I'd go to at most once a year so taking the train/driving downtown for those rare events wasn't a big deal for me growing up.
> free events for kids, concerts just for babies,
more details?
> parks
My friends and I used to play basketball, american football, and ultimate frisbee all the time growing up. Now I live downtown and the parks I walk past never have enough free space to play those kind of sports. Not to mention the walking parks and playgrounds in the suburbs are usually way bigger and less crowded.
> swimming pools
Suburbs have these too and one of my friends growing up even had their own backyard pool where we would play sharks and minnows, use the pool basketball hoop to play 21, or use the diving board. Playing the former 2 are much harder in a packed city pool then a suburban pool due to crowds, let alone a private backyard one.
> little league, soccer league, skate parks,
Had all these in the suburbs when i grew up and again, those require a lot of space which is in short supply in the city so there's almost always more available options to do these in the suburbs.
This is your problem. In a city you don't need to put yourself and your family in a deadly metallic stress machine to get places. And as a result you will feel happier and more connected.
Even in a city I am sometimes very shocked at what we put ourselves through to use a car. People constantly honking and flicking each other off with various insults and me on the sidewalk wishing they'd all calm down. (And when I used to drive too much, I was angry like them, and weighed substantially more.)
You know it's okay that other people don't want the same thing as you, right?
It's difficult to go anywhere without putting yourself in a
"deadly metallic stress machine", whether it be a car, plane, train, boat, etc. I suppose if you have that much fear of transportation, living somewhere with ample options within walking distance is best.
So other than call me afraid or claim I want to monopolize opinions in the universe, have you addressed the point that a good train system is much less deadly and much less stressful than single occupant vehicles?
Trains are objectively less deadly than cars. I wouldn't dispute that. However, I have zero fear of being in a car. You can reduce the risk of being in a car substantially by either driving the car, or having someone drive the car, who isn't impaired, isn't distracted, and is driving defensively.
Stressfulness is much more subjective. To me, city train systems are higher stress for me than the majority of the driving I do. Granted, I rarely drive in heavy traffic, which is more stressful. Since I don't encounter that while driving, I find subways more stressful since 1) I have to plan around their schedule 2) their schedules are always subject to delays 3) I have to be around strangers in close quarters and 4) you expose yourself to a higher risk of being victim to a crime
However, I have no problems riding the NYC Subway, Chicago's L, etc. when I visiting there.
There are also other ways to avoid miles besides living in a city. For example, I have a remote job, so I don't have a daily commute.
It's always weird how people in the suburbs complain everywhere about how crappy cities are and yet if you turn around and say you like them they get all defensive...
OK, but road fatalities per capita and per automobile are higher in the US than in Europe. As is obesity. I believe that our obsession with motor vehicles even for small tasks plays a role in this.
His comment generalizes to other forms of transit. The point isn't that he/she's driving downtown, it's that it's not convenient enough to go on a whim but that's not a problem for his/her use pattern. The fact that he/she chose to use a car is immaterial to the point being made.
I don't want to use the word virtue signaling because it's become a politically loaded term and I don't want to use it that way but your comment is just virtue signaling to the anti-car crowd.
Fine sir or madam, I don't care what you think of my virtue or lack thereof. But the health affects are real. Example: I was obese. I largely quit driving, or drastically reduced it. I am no longer obese or overweight; my BMI is 21, down from 33. If you want to live worse because you decided that is "virtue signalling", go ahead and ignore the suggestion. But the benefit will exist whether you believe in it or not.
> I don't know about you, but those are things I'd go to at most once a year so taking the train/driving downtown for those rare events wasn't a big deal for me growing up.
Do you have children? I ask, because the frequency of attending these and all the other public institutions skyrockets when you have kids.
Before I had kids, it had been literally decades since I stepped foot into a public library. After we had kids, we go all the time. Same with museums, parks, pools, everything.
Just for the heck of it, and because I have a thing for Google Earth, I counted the number of baseball diamonds (easy to spot from the air) within the city of Boston but gave up once I got over one hundred. Not counting Fenway Park :)
> I can’t fathom how people raise kids in the suburbs.
Well, the vast majority of families could never afford to raise a child in NYC or any other 'dense urban' area, so the decision is mostly made automatically.
I grew up in a suburb and was bored shitless. I had one friend that lived within walking distance, and everyone else was too far away to get to without a car, which meant that I didn't get to see my friends unless it was convenient for one of my two parents (who both held full-time jobs). Cycling anywhere outside of the local neighborhood was out of the question, since the roads connecting neighborhoods were full of fast-moving traffic and no bicycle lanes or pedestrian walkways.
There were "woods" between the endless maze of houses, but all of them were just parts of other people's property. And who was I going to play with in them, except for my one nearby friend?
I ended up just playing a lot of video games.
For all that urban centers are supposedly "hostile places" (according to the GP), I look at the adults and children I know in cities and I see mostly fit, healthy, active people with multiple hobbies and interests. I look at the adults and children I know in suburbs and I see overweight, sedentary people who spend so much of their life commuting between work, school, and home, that they barely have time for more than one day of a week of something fun like an organized sport. The rest is just spent at home watching TV or playing video games.
If I do decide have children, I definitely know what kind of place I want to do it in.
I lived in that kind of place. I also had my one nearby friend.
We would ride our bicycles more than 5 miles along US-44. It has 2 lanes each side for a total of 4 lanes, 2-foot shoulders, and traffic that often got to a decent highway speed. There could be snow on the shoulder. One of the older bridges was narrow, with only about a half-foot shoulder. We went anyway.
We had similar woods. We went out there and built a fort. We camped. We misbehaved. We went to the railroad tracks and put coins on the rails. We hiked a mile to a lake, carrying an inflated raft and fishing or camping gear.
Don't blame the suburb if you chose to play video games. I hear that cities also have video games.
> We would ride our bicycles more than 5 miles along US-44. It has 2 lanes each side for a total of 4 lanes, 2-foot shoulders, and traffic that often got to a decent highway speed. There could be snow on the shoulder. One of the older bridges was narrow, with only about a half-foot shoulder. We went anyway.
Nowadays I am a cyclist and I feel comfortable riding alongside traffic for any distance. Even if it had occurred to me that riding five miles to a friend was possible (cycling is currently enjoying a surge of popularity, but at the time it was somewhat unfathomable even to adults that you might ride a bike for such distances), I'm not sure that would have been a practical or reasonable thing for an eight year old to do. By the time I was fourteen or fifteen I felt comfortable riding my bike farther distances, but at that point I was nearly able to drive a car alone anyway.
The "woods" I mentioned were small enough that there was no point away from easy eyesight from some neighbor's living room windows. Sure, we played in them. But there was no actual sense of isolation. There were no train tracks anywhere nearby. There were some tiny lakes, but they were clearly on other people's property.
It's great that you seemed to live in somewhere more rural than me and that was an area you were able to thrive in. Still, if you look at populations of people as a whole I suspect you'll find orders of magnitude more bored and unhealthy kids (who start getting into real trouble) in suburbs than you find in cities where there are actually plenty of opportunities and things to do.
Same here. I don't get this trope where we're pretending that a car with a parental chauffeur is the only method of transportation. I roamed all over the place as a kid with my first bicycle. Shorter distances when I was very young (6-7) but up to dozens of miles as I got older. I was raised by a single parent who was often working, so there was no car available, but using this great miracle machine, I could still visit friends, explore nature, build forts, etc. Suburbia just means you need to ride your bike a little further to get to your friends' houses.
There is an alternative. Don't live in a big city! There are plenty of 2nd & 3rd tier cities where you can get both a house and land for a reasonable price and still have good schools and a vibrant cultural environment. Of course you won't have some things (international airport, professional sports teams, top rate museums), but you'll make up for it in "free" QoL for your family.
I grew up in a city of 75,000, in a house currently worth about $150k (purchased new in 1976 by my parents for $38k and sold in 1993 for $120k), on 2.5 acres. It was about 30% lawn, gardens & sports area and 70% wooded (with a creek, even!). I only had 1-2 good neighborhood friends but I did have a younger brother & sister and we were constantly outside doing something.
I think you need to think about how you define "city" and "suburb" a little more.
For a lot of people, the city is automatically Manhattan or downtown Chicago. They can't fathom anything but that or a suburb, and to be fair America is very bad at making anything else.
This is such a west coast bubble mindset. Basically everywhere west of the Missouri river is littered with 2nd and 3rd tier cities. Many of them are even within a reasonable commuting distance of the nearest major economic hub (though the southeast definitely has a lot of sprawl going on).
Eh, I kind of have all that, depending on where you draw the line for distance and seriousness. I'm in Brevard County, FL. So not counting Orlando? OK...
There is an international airport. It has seasonal flights to Ottawa, Toronto–Billy Bishop, and Windsor. Those are in Canada.
There is a professional sports team, the USSSA Pride women′s professional fast-pitch softball team. Another is the Brevard County Cocoa Expos, a member of the Women's Premier Soccer League.
There are top-rate museums. One has a Saturn V, a Space Shuttle, a Saturn 1B, the Apollo 14 Command Module, space suits, moon rocks, and related stuff. Another has the Gemini 2 spacecraft and a bunch of missiles. Another has spacesuits and Sigma 7, the fifth manned Mercury spacecraft.
Woosh. So to the parents point, let me just explain that if you have kids and bring them up in the city, there’s a good chance they’re back on 2050s version of hackernews posting the suburban-centric viewpoint of how bleak city life is.
I get that everyone is living the best existence out there, but c’mon people, isn’t it clear that there is no objectively better place, only places with trade offs that appeal to different folks?
My early teenage years were in the city, my later teens in the suburbs.
I hated that move to the burbs... Nothing to do except getting kicked out of the local mall or Borders. No libraries, no parks, no pools nearby... And no public transport.
When before in the city I could just take public transport and go downtown, meet my friends, go to the library, etc..
Now that I have kids, I live in a city. But it's a quiet neighborhood, and we have a yard -- that I did appreciate from the suburbs ;-)
We raised our daughter from 0-5 in big cities, and there is definitely a huge appeal to that. But on the flip side, kids don’t need to “go anywhere.” They just need other kids around. When I grew up, we just roamed the neighborhood causing trouble. That element is missing in most cities today. You can’t just count on having a mess of kids on your block. Parents are the minority, so they have to more consciously get together and schedule activities with other parents.
At least in NYC, growing up, there were always playgrounds and parks full of kids. And I could go there by myself and meet my friends there. If we got bored of the nearby park we could always go use public transportation and go to a different one. And when I got older I could go to restaurants by myself, or go to museums and shows by myself, etc.
There isn't that much within safe walking distance of a suburban home. Especially now that anchor tenants and the attached malls are starting to thin out. Anecdotally when I went to college, the kids from the suburbs definitely drank and did drugs much more heavily, and I suspect it was because that's all there's left to do if you get bored of video games and whatever little is actually at your fingertips.
I am glad you are giving your kids more opportunities than you had. I did not have the same experience growing up in a suburban environment, and my kids aren't the least bit lacking for activities, so to each their own. My suburban neighborhood also has transit service, so there's that.
Then why do people from suburbs flock to the cities for their entertainment? Or build their suburbs right on the edge of cities?
Suburbs are boring. I grew up in them and much of my family still lives in them. I understand why people live in them — cost and space for raising kids, but they are definitely boring. And most of the people I know that live in them wouldn’t disagree, it’s a necessity driven by cost.
Nobody I know flocks to the city for anything. Sometimes we drive in to the urban center, most of the time we do not. There are lots and lots of things to do without going downtown. Lacking for entertainment, or being bored, neither is something I've ever had a problem with.
I think a lot of people here think suburbia is some vast wasteland of houses as far as the eye can see. Sure, that exists in some places, but a lot of us live in vary diverse suburbs with mixed residential, retail, commercial, etc.
I also have to say I have not met anyone who lives in my area because it's cheaper :). If anything I could save a few bucks by moving closer to the urban core. Again, I'm sure the cost thing is true somewhere but America is a pretty big place.
> Then why do people from suburbs flock to the cities for their entertainment?
In ages past, this had more to do with shopping than entertainment. I suspect that it will become obvious that Amazon has negated this need, partially or wholly. The only they don't sell (mostly) is groceries, which for the large part were and are available locally.
No worries this is a common topic - city folks can't comprehend what the heck is so great in non-city life, and folks that grew up close to nature, open places and good old lack of concrete everywhere can't see an appeal in living in city.
I'd say look for a cross-section of both if you can - city so vibrant that it offers 10x (or 100x) more culture, events, activities, jobs etc. than you can possibly cover, while having walking distance to amazing swimming (at least in summer), great nature and mountains within quick drive distance for the weekends, or where traffic jams mean usually at most 1 bottleneck street getting slow a bit twice a day for an hour. Those places are rare but they do exist.
>city folks can't comprehend what the heck is so great in non-city life, and folks that grew up close to nature, open places and good old lack of concrete everywhere can't see an appeal in living in city.
And all the "muh school district" types can't see that the inner suburbs are the worst of both worlds (IMO).
I had all that and I could pretend I was doing any of it in my backyard at any time with my imagination and the free space to roam I was given. Kids need to pick up sticks and pretend they are tools or imaginary things, kids need to run free and climb trees unsupervised.IMO
I second your experience. 3 kids, NYC. Outside of the building a street with light traffic. The back exit leads to a little park, with a nice slide and sandbox (actually 2). Within 200 meters we have literally everything: school, grocery store, cinema, pharmacy, restaurants, shopping mall, bookstore, caffe, 2 libraries (one public, one privately funded, but open to public), a ballfield, a larger park with a pretty serious playground, some quite impressive gym that has a semi-olympic pool, and where the kids can also take music lessons (piano in our case), etc, etc.
Oh, and our kids have hundreds of other kids to play with.
My wife and I did the unthinkable by moving back to the city (Boston) when our son was about to start kindergarten. Our friends and neighbors acted like we were moving to the moon. Parents we connected with in the city prior to moving looked at us like we were idiots for even considering NOT moving to the city. It all depends on your perspective.
Growing up, I had several of those in the suburbs in the suburbs too. And even then, my parents would take me into the city on weekends to visit the zoo and museums (I don't remember going to the aquarium, but we had one too).
But then again, where I grew up is very different from NY. My parents are both from NYC, and my cousins are both raising kids in the NYC area (one in the city, one in the suburbs), but my parents moved to Dallas a few years before I was born, and I grew up in Dallas but still got to visit my family in NY. NYC's strength is also the most aggravating thing about it: everything is in the city. This means that the suburbs are just bedroom communities with nothing to do. Visiting my family in Westchester has always felt like spending time out in the country. Dallas, on the other hand, is distributed and spread out. Except for a teeny tiny urban core, we're all suburb. We have edge cities everywhere instead of concentrating everything on one place. The suburbs where I grew up are also much denser than the suburbs where my cousins grew up, which helps.
One interesting study though is with my cousins in NY. They have three kids each, and both are fairly wealthy (honestly, they make more in a year than I'll ever see in my life). One of them lives in a swanky apartment on the Upper West Side, in walking distance of both Central Park and Lincoln Center. The other lives in a large house in Westchester, not far from where she grew up. I can say that, for my cousin who lives in the city, her kids have access to everything you mentioned, and she and the kids are very happy with where they live. But she's also filthy rich and is able to afford a very large apartment in a prime location. Not many people in Manhattan have that kind of privilege. Before she moved to the suburbs, my other cousin used to live in a teeny tiny two-bedroom apartment in Battery Park City. When she had twins, there was pretty much no space for anything, and as soon as she got pregnant with her third kid, she and her husband immediately began looking for a house in the suburbs, and they moved right after she gave birth. It's a giant house with six bedrooms, an expansive basement, and a backyard that won't quit. She told me that while she misses her short commute, it's all worth it to give the kids a perfect environment to grow up in. And the kids certainly have no lack of anything to do: when I visited last year, the kids were all involved in multiple sports leagues and other activities. Everyone is happy with where they live.
> Museums, zoos, aquariums, free events for kids, concerts just for babies, parks, swimming pools, little league, soccer league, skate parks, etc…
You have to have all these things, because the children in a city can't just run off on their own and have to be marshalled and entertained at every step. Living in the suburbs I used to just go out every day and play in the woods and hills with my friends and we entertained themselves. Hardly boring!
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, 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.
Japan has one of the lowest birthrates in the world, well below replacement rates. Their society is also consists almost entirely of Japanese that all share the same culture. It would be very hard to emulate what they do and even so, no real guarantee that it would change anything.
Japan does have a low birthrate, but it also has a rising birthrate. Since 2005 Japan has seen a long general trend of increasing birthrates since the ‘60s. This turnaround coincides with efforts to make housing cheaper and cities more kid-friendly. They’ve gone from 1.26 to 1.44.
It’s not a complete reversal, but the fact that Japan’s rising birth rate has defied regional and global trends and persists despite continued urbanization and secularization shows they might be on to something.
I think this nails it on the head. The writer is conflating the affects due to socioeconomic conditions with the affects he wishes to perceive as it strengthens the arguments he brought forth in prior essays. This seems like an exercise of mental gymnastics as marriage age and birth rate have been pretty correlated with the cost of living throughout the world. When I left London during its peak costs, the average age for marriage was 36 for me and 32 for women. The displaced rural American worker clinged to both Sanders and Trump in the last primary. This isn’t some massive conspiracy. Home owners in SF and NYC have discouraged development through NIMBYism. Meanwhile, magnetic schools and private school options haven’t really grown their pupil base. If you are making a million a year, the equation works out, but if not, you need to make sacrifices, and, for many millennials that means sacrificing reproduction over lifestyle.
Exactly. My family moved from an American city core to a Japanese city core specifically because we don’t want to live in our cars but American cities aren’t suited for children. Japanese cities are dense and walkable but wonderful places for families and children.
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.
This is almost exclusively a Millenial/Homelander thing (with Boomer or Gen-X parents). My mom took the elevator train in from Jackson Heights to Manhattan every day for school from the time she turned 12. That's a 50 minute train ride with 2 connections. This was in the early 60s.
I feel like there's basically a two-generation swath where kids were treated like they'd break if you breathed on them, which coincides with the first generation that's never known real deprivation (Boomers) raising kids in an environment where their leaders are trying their hardest to create an environment of fear to maintain social control in the absence of war and real deprivation. It's slowly reversing itself as Millenials are themselves having kids and realizing all the ways that they were screwed over by not being forced to face risk & adversity in their formative years. (There's a big selection bias, too, in that Millenials who buy into the culture of fear are just not having kids because they think the world is hopeless, meaning everyone who has a next generation tends towards the un-anxious population.)
From my reading of your link, it looks like the incident that brought her fame/infamy happened in 2008. That's right during America's obsession with helicopter parenting, so the timeline makes sense.
If you go back to the 1980s, what she did wouldn't have been that remarkable. In that time, kids like me were gone from home for hours, walking or riding bikes for miles away from home, and we didn't have cellphones for our parents to keep tabs on us. Statistics show that crime rates were much higher (they peaked in the mid-70s, and have been falling since); the difference is that Americans just weren't paranoid back then the way they are now.
The problem, of course, is that in America a driver will kill your four year old, and it will somehow be your fault for letting your kid walk to the metro station.
At the worst, public transportation and city centers are biohazards (needles, urine, feces), with mentally-ill people (who are unable to get help) screaming at the top of their lungs. I'm not sure which is worse, when they're screaming at somebody, or when they're screaming at something we can't see.
There are various historical factors that have resulted in that abysmal situation in the US. Assigning it all to a four-word summary of Japanese culture is a bit reductive. The dangers in the city are different than they in the 80's, and they'll change again. The important part is to believe we can do better.
> 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.
Americans cry child neglect when 10 years old play alone outside in residential are with no traffic and last crime 20 years ago. People being uncomfortable with 7 years old playing on playground without direct supervision is literally a thing.
Homogenity has little to do with it. Same paranoia is applied to playground structures, when the child can stay alone home for 1 hour, to everything.
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 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
Well no. Most of the time she screams honestly. She actually screamed the entire time we were giving our marriage prep talk at church and screamed for another two hours while my wife and I read articles to each other
> Parents who put their kids in front of the TV are lazy.
Maybe when your kid is a bit older you'll understand the appeal of turning on the TV just to have an hour to clean up, do a bit of laundry, and prepare dinner...
There is great appeal for sure, but the better long-term solution is to get the kids helping with cleanup, laundry, and dinner prep, even from an age where they can’t do anything yet.
You might be surprised how interested they are in helping out.
> You might be surprised how interested they are in helping out.
Maybe there are some super-parents out there who can manage to always make that work, but in my experience trying to get my kids to help when they are hungry and tired after getting home from some activity on a hot summer day is just an exercise in frustration.
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.
| 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.
Where do you live that you're seeing "used needles littering many of them"? This was something that I often heard talked about by teachers and parents, but I only ever recall seeing ONE used needle laying around when I was a kid and it wasn't at a park - it was on the campus of an Ivy League college!
The vast majority of the parks I've been to in the US have been clean and well kept up, even ones in the higher-crime areas of town.
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.
Singapore solved this problem, and we should probably follow their example
> Singapore's top diplomat in the UK, Michael Teo, defended Singapore's harsh drug laws by pointing to the country's lower rates for drug use.
"8.2% of the UK population are cannabis abusers; in Singapore, it is 0.005%. For ecstasy, the figures are 1.8% for the UK and 0.003% for Singapore; and for opiates—such as heroin, opium, and morphine - 0.9% for the UK and 0.005% for Singapore," claimed Teo. "We do not have traffickers pushing drugs openly in the streets, nor do we need to run needle exchange centers."
Portugal didn’t solve the drug problem. Portugal has stratospherically high rates of drug use before it’s change in policy. At one point fully 1% of the population was addicted to heroin. That has come down, but drug use rates are still much higher than in China, Japan, and Singapore.
In fact, heroin use was the only drug the use of which went down in Portugal after the decriminalization. Use of other drugs went up, especially MDMA. At the same time, heroin use also went down in other European countries in which no decriminalization happened. It blows my mind that some people believe that change in Portugal’s policies was some kind of a huge success.
If you find a country with fewer needles on the streets and fewer people using drugs, we are happy to listen to their policies and how they accomplished it
Alcohol consumption has purposes other than mere intoxication. Likewise I wouldn’t execute a pharmacists who sells opium for legitimate reasons.
But sure, if you have an alcohol executive cutting their wine with methanol, pushing it to middle school kids and breaking interstate laws shipping laws to evade enforcement, like you did in prohibition... screw him.
If alcohol was as illegal as the drugs are today, sure. Even during prohibition the actual laws against alcohol were much more lenient than today’s laws against opiates.
If it was legalized and sold retail (out of liquor stores), all these problems would go away.
Junkies would get little red sharps disposal containers, and bring it back those back in for the deposit refund. They'd stop doing it on the streets (for the most part), for the same reason you don't see raging alcoholics crowding the alleys drinking moonshine.
Drug criminalization/prohibition creates all of the problems that most people associate with drug use/addiction.
Needle disposal boxes and injecting clinics are pretty good at cleaning that up. Not to mention modern needles that kids can't accidentally prick themselves on make it a much lesser issue than decades ago. Not to mention having a lot of other responsible adults around keeping an eye out for stuff like this.
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've lived in several cities including Boston and DC (and the urban cities that surround them both). It sounds like every wealthy city I've ever lived in or been to and sounds nothing like the 2nd tier cities that I've been to and now live in.
When a city is wealthy it gets like the top level comment described. I don't know what it is but it's related to money. You can see this by comparing the wealther boroughs of NYC to the poorer ones or comparing the wealthier suburbs of Boston to the poorer ones. The poorer ones are more "alive" for lack of a better term.
The car stuff really doesn't bother me. It's just a function of the dominant means of transit when that city was built out.
I don't agree with the dystopian view in the OP, but I will say that I notice far fewer people outside in wealthier areas where I live than in poorer areas. I attribute it to most low income jobs not really being bound to the 9-5, so people might be out and about at all hours, especially now that school is out for the summer. It makes these areas feel warmer and closer knit vs. some of the sterile luxury apartments I've seen.
>Your description doesn't really sound like any actual city that I know of, ... Do you have a particular city in mind?
Actually, it sounds a whole lot like the Phoenix metro area. Atlanta, SLC, and most of LA probably qualify too.
>Because "car-centric and pedestrian hostile" sounds more like most suburbs than most urban areas.
Most American "cities" really are more like suburbs, when you compare to real cities in other countries. Especially the cities which grew up after cars became popular. These cities were never very pedestrian-friendly. Phoenix is probably the poster child for this. The amount of sprawl there is ridiculous, and there's really no place that's pedestrian-friendly, just because everything is so far apart that it would take forever to get to your destination on foot, even though sidewalks generally do exist.
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.
I don't see how much different this is from suburbia, but with even more car intermediated isolation from other people? I hated suburbia as a child, since you were stuck in the house and needed your parents to get you to anywhere.
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.
I think the pros/cons shift very quickly once the children get into their teenage years. when they are young and there are other children in the neighborhood, it is much easier for the parent to relax and let them go play together in the cul-de-sac. rough deal for the kid though if they don't manage to make friends on their street.
when they get older, they develop more specific personalities/interests and they are likely to go to a larger school and make friends that live further away. when I was a kid, I lived basically right on the border between the city and the suburbs. all my friends lived just a little too far away to walk/bike to their houses, and the streets were busy enough that I doubt my parents would have let me anyway. any plans I made had to be convenient for my parents, and they tended to be pretty busy.
this is just my opinion, but I think "real life" doesn't really begin until you can move around the world on your own. for me, this wasn't until I got my license near the end of high school (which represents its own danger; teenagers are terrible drivers). I suspect my friends who grew up in the city, taking public transit to hang out with each other, had much richer teenage years than I did, maybe even safer.
I currently live in SF and could not imagine having kids here. I’m sure some people do, and have a great time. But it’s not a life that I would want, nor would I want for my kids. This narrative captures pretty accurately why I would not want to raise kids in this city. Now, some other city? Maybe. Probably in Europe. US cities though are just hard places to be. Hard people. Aggressive homelessness. Dirty. Unfriendly. Generally just unpleasant places to be. I would want my kids to grow up with more community and green space and also not have them walk through human feces on the way to school.
I am not sure what part of town you are in. Can you open google maps and tell me how much "green space" you see? More than I grew up with. Hint, there is a rather large rectangular one on the west side of town.
But I have noticed (and been criticized on HN for claiming) that the parenting cultural bubble in SF seems completely unknown to many other subcultures. It is indeed a very good community, though.
Sure, but good luck easily getting to Golden Gate Park if you're, say, coming from Mission Bay. And if you can afford to live in the hillier parts of town the odds are good you probably have decent (albeit small) neighborhood parks. The problem with SF is that the public schools suck, the streets in a lot of the "urban" parts are rife with squalor, and the city is a lot bigger than it looks when you're trying to get from one side to the other. I mean, if you live in the Outer Sunset you may as well be in a "suburb".... I think SF requires a pretty specific mentality for one to intentionally raise children there [for people of such means to be able to choose to stay or go].
Most of SF west of the Mission is actually pretty good for raising kids - Noe, Twin Peaks, Forest Hills, Sunset, Richmond, and Lake Merced are all pretty family-friendly if you can afford them.
You're right that they're practically suburbs though. Somebody did a transit-scaled map of SF and it actually takes longer to get from the Outer Sunset to downtown than from Mountain View, 50 miles to the south. One of the biggest problems with SF is that the public transportation system sucks, since it's such a patchwork of independent agencies. (Residents of these areas might consider this a feature rather than a bug, though, because it keeps the homeless, poop, drugs, etc. out of their neighborhoods.)
I know hundred-millionaires raising kids in San Francisco and Oakland. They, of all people, have a choice of where they could raise their kids. And they do it in the cities.
When I was a kid I grew up in a rural area, an urban area, then a rural area, then an urban area. They were both super cool, but I had more friends I could hang out with in the latter and so my life was automatically better.
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 "rebuild" phase. Many of these projects ended up as low-income public housing, developed huge crime problems in their isolation, and eventually got bulldozed themselves, in turn.
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.
In the large city where I live, green spaces and parks are flourishing. There are many cultural amenities for children (zoos, museums, libraries). There is also a large ecosystem of for-profit child care/play spaces. Cars are everywhere, but bike sharing, bike lanes, and public transportation are also available. I'm not sure that the city is an unfriendly a place for small children. The biggest problem with all of this is cost in dollars and supervision time. I'm sure with the right priorities, those problems could be solved also. Suburban sprawl isn't inevitable.
Yeah I was thinking this as I read the parent comment. Everything they said is true, but it's also true that there is a lot for kids to do in those places. The comment about plopping kids in front of screens applies more so to the suburbs than to downtown! What are kids supposed to do in their neighborhood? Letting kids wander and play outside is seen as basically criminal, and there's nothing else to do.
> Letting kids wander and play outside is seen as basically criminal, and there's nothing else to do.
Not where I grew up and at least there is space to play sports. My friends and I used to play basketball, american football, and ultimate frisbee all the time growing up. Now I live downtown and the parks I walk past never have any free space.
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.
This feels like hyperbole. Instead of saying you are wrong objectively, I’ll say instead that my subjective experience of “the city” is in stark contrast to this. Green spaces and the ocean abound. My neighbors are wonderful people. The businesses around me are owned and operated by local people. I can’t walk down the block without running into good folks with smiles on their faces. I try to bring the same energy to my neighborhood. I couldn’t imagine not living here.
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.
My life in Glen Park is quite similar. Recently, I've taken to running to BART for a warm up before I take it to the Equinox and one of the first times I did, a neighbour stopped to ask me if I was in a hurry and if he could give me a lift. I accepted, obviously, and we chatted.
Honestly, most of SF is rather friendly and nice. I like it. First moved here 6 years ago.
CA, USA. To be fair it’s not like everyone is smiling all the time! But I genuinely feel that my neighborhood is a great community mostly consisting of interesting and friendly people.
I don't know how to capture the hostility of suburbia any more perfectly than a walk down the El Camino in Sunnyvale. Try this on street view for a few blocks. Imagine yourself on the sidewalk. This is the world that the "urban cores in the USA are actively hostile places to be" consensus has given us. Maybe the cities this was built in response to really were some kind of unimaginable horror. But I'm pretty sure the cure is worse than the disease.
https://www.google.com/maps/@37.3655957,-122.0294912,3a,75y,...
Residential and commercial space are both required. Picturesque low-density residential zones kind of force the commercial areas to be like this; how else would people get to them?
A lot of older suburbs have a main street like this, including the one I grew up in. They're grandfathered from before the zoning code, not allowed anywhere else in the municipality, and sometimes illegal to replicate even on the same lots [0]. Sunnyvale is what's allowed to exist at scale and to grow all across America.
I mean that’s not really true, right? Here’s a residential neighborhood in Chicago: https://images.app.goo.gl/o9crCx8EYGJcz7NcA. Another view: https://images.app.goo.gl/2AFgALbMTH3KsxYbA. Not exactly the hellacape you describe. And homier than many new suburban subdivisions. (None of the suburban neighborhoods I’ve ever lived in have even had sidewalks.)
You can get a surprising amount of density from low rise buildings, with narrow tree-lined streets and generous sidewalks.
I thought of replying, thought better of it. But it's true that you can get a lot of density from low rise buildings. My old neighborhood of 100 year old two story town houses is about 18,000 people per square mile. Friends of mine with older kids just let them roll around the city. There's a lot to do.
My take on the bad thing about sprawl and suburbs is the amount of time and driving needed to get to not sprawl and suburbs. And when there was 'the city' and 'the suburb' living in 'the suburb' was 'nice'. Now that it's all suburbs and a city jammed with traffic from the suburbs, nothing is that nice.
I don't understand. What would your reply have been? Rayiner posted an image from a high density part of Lakeview, which is an inner urban neighborhood of Chicago, about a mile further from the (significantly larger) commercial core of Chicago than 16th and Mission is from 2nd and Market. I could give you pictures of the same neighborhood with mixed 2-3 flats and single-family homes on streets with total tree canopy and parks at the end, and Lakeview is one of the more urban parts of (residential) Chicago --- go to Avondale or Humboldt Park and and find more parks, more trees, and smaller houses, all in inner ring neighborhoods.
What you've described would be the experience of living inside the Loop in Chicago, amidst class A high-rise office space. People do this! But they actively select themselves into it; by far, most people in Chicago live in residential neighborhoods that read as such, are close to the heart of the city, and don't respond at all to your description.
I think the places your parent comment was characterizing are the ones with mixed use zoning. Think Manhattan, shops on the first floor, office and housing space above. All of the parent's points stand.
I prefer to call it "respecting people's property rights", "mixed use" and "European style zoning" are too vague leave way too much room for curtailment of freedom which when they run their course bring us basically back to the status quo.
Every bylaw and city planning initiative "curtails freedom" for the sake of engineering a better, more efficient community and better quality of life. The issue with (in particular) single family residential zoning isn't that it limits what land owners can do with the land - in the city, this is unavoidable and very much desirable. It's that it artificially incentivizes inefficient, unhealthy and socially disconnected car-centric suburbia.
I'm not sure what it can mean to respect people's property rights with respect to residential-only zoning. A zoning decision is not written into the original deed and can be changed with an exception by the zoning board or a general change in the city/county code. However, the residential-only zoning makes it difficult for one person to use their property as they see fit, for example, building a duplex or rentable apartment onto their house, or opening a small store or tiny school.
I'm sorry, but... have you actually lived in a city? Actually spent time in a public park? Dined at an urban restaurant? Actually been (???!?) unable to reach a public library? This sounds just crazy to me. Literally everything you do in the suburbs, absent long hikes and home gardening, is more conveniently available in an urban center. You don't have to like it, but... that list of complaints just reads as nonsense to anyone actually living in these places.
This mirrors my sentiment prior to moving to Boston. It turned out to be the opposite. It took more time to get to most places in the city than it took to get to equivalent places when I lived in New Hampshire. You name it: grocery stores, restaurants, pubs, cafes, shopping, parks, markets, etc. My wife and I moved back to NH after a year due to our quality of life dropping so drastically. Two of my childhood friends recently moved back from San Diego and Los Angeles for exactly the same reason.
Now I can get to all of the aforementioned places via car in under 5 minutes. There's Uber and Lyft for when I want to go to a bar. DoorDash serves more than 50 local restaurants. Traffic adds at most 5 minutes to any drive, and only during a small window around 5pm.
The city offers convenience in theory, but from my admittedly anecdotal experience it doesn't hold up in practice. And I'm not sure that matters. At the end of the day, it's just a preference.
> Now I can get to [grocery stores, restaurants, pubs, cafes, shopping, parks, markets, etc.] via car in under 5 minutes
I... sorry, I don't believe that. I've never seen a suburb anywhere with ALL that stuff within the 1.5 mile radius you postulate. Sure, you get some of it locally. We have restaurants within 5 minutes, but the place we want to go tonight is 11 minutes away. There's a park next to the local school, sure, but the kids want to go swimming at the place with the good slide and it's 22 minutes away.
And FWIW: I literally grew up in urban Boston, and live in west coast suburbs now.
He's in New Hampshire. It sounds legit for a place like Concord or Manchester.
I have that too, and I didn't even try for it. I'm in unincorporated land just north of Indialantic, FL.
I had to check for pubs, because I don't use them. There are some within 5 minutes. In that distance I also get a beach on the Atlantic and a fishing dock on the brackish intercoastal waterway. It's 8 minutes to Walmart and 11 to a commercial airport. My workplace is only 3 minutes away.
Near me, 3-bedroom homes of about 1200 to 2000 square feet on 0.25 acre lots are going for $120,000 to $240,000. For 4-bedroom homes of about 3000 to 4000 square feet on 0.35 to 0.65 acre lots I think you'd pay $350,000 to $650,000. To get up over a million you'd need to be on the beach (sand and waves in your yard) or on the intercoastal waterway (with a dock for your yacht).
It can't be helped if you insist on going to the far-away restaurant and the far-away park. There is always something better, so you'll end up traveling the farthest that you tolerate.
> 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.
Probably one of two things, one of which I believe is a mistaken correlation:
* High-rises block more of the sky, making it not seems as worthwhile to go outside.
* Mental detachment from the local area.
The second one is what I've only in the past year or so realized myself. I used to live on the 3rd floor of a 3-floor building, and my apartment had a front and back entrance. The front entrance went to inside stairs out to the front of the building, but the back entrance when straight outside to a wooden porch, then had wooden steps down to ground level. Where I am now, only on the 5th floor of 24, there's only one entrance, to a hallway where I take the elevator to go down and outside.
At my old place, I regularly went outside to do whatever on a whim. Nowadays, it's a really rare thing. And while there is a low-rise/high-rise correlation, I think it's the patio and the stairs, vs the hallway and the elevator that actually caused it. Having so much more distance between inside and outside creates an emotional distance where you don't even think about the outside, let alone decide whether or not to bother.
I've yet to live in one, but I'm thinking if the high-rises have balconies, it would create the same effect as that patio did for me.
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.
It's actually completely opposite from my experience. The kids on the low-rise neighborhoods and burbs are stuck in the house unless there's a parent present whose full time job to haul them around. My nephews are growing up in the burbs, and they can barely walk to a gas station without the risk of being hit by a fast moving vehicle, and cannot reach even e.g. a park without driving. Sure, they can play baseball in the backyard. How exciting is that?
I grew up in a major city... I was walking to play soccer on my own starting perhaps at 7yo (short walk to a field on streets with tons of foot traffic and hence slow cars), went to school on my own since around the same time, took the subway by myself starting perhaps at around 10; around the same time (very short, and safe walk), or a little later when I could be trusted with money I could go buy bread or whatever, all by myself. A friend of mine transferred to a specialized middle/high school around 8th grade and took a subway for 40 minutes every day to get there, by himself; if one of my nephews in the low-rise neighborhood wants to do that, that will throw his parents' day in complete disarray.
Sounds like the words of someone who didn't grow up in a city, currently/recently lives/lived in one they dislike, and hasn't found happiness somewhere else.
I currently am raising two kids in the suburbs and the only reason we are not in the city is that rents are too expensive for a reasonable sized house/apartment.
> I 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 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.
GP:
> Outside, you have a narrow strip of concrete, possibly with a few trees, that you are allowed to inhabit.
You:
> Step outside your door into a narrow strip of concrete, possibly with a few trees, and a shortly cut lawn
It doesn't have to be low rise housing. Look at Singapore for an example of how high density, high-rise housing can coexist with plentiful public spaces.
Have you tried being a kid or raising a kid in the city? This description does not match my experience or my general impressions of other people’s experiences at all.
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.
I am raising a 2.5 year old in SF and my experience is very similar to yours. We're looking at moving out to the East Bay soon to be closer to my parents, but SF - outside of housing - is not a bad place to be raising a child.
So I have to tell my kid to ignore a syringe on the ground at a muni stop once in a while - like dangers don't also exist in suburban and rural areas - but poop barely phases us... it's like some of these folx have never woken up to their kid having taken a diaper off and smearing poop all over the crib
Exposure isn’t a bad thing. Eventually, kids have to learn. Growing up first in the city and then in the adjacent suburb, I would say kids who grew up solely in the city were much more mature by the time they were 18. Many kids who grew up in the suburbs were “looking for the thrill” versus being cognizant of reality. Too often in the US, parents seems to try and shelter kids form near-term dangers at all costs versus giving them exposure to situations, and letting them learn from it and grow.
Children have to be children. Yes, you have to make them responsible, to have chores, to start treating them like adults early.
But the necessity for exposure to "near-term dangers" is a very American thing to say and I believe that it is wrong.
Yes, children growing up in big cities are more mature. And cynical. And depressed.
The irony of the situation is that big cities are so dangerous nowadays that parents no longer allow their children to play outside unsupervised or to go anywhere by themselves until adolescence.
I grew up in a small city in the eighties and nineties (not in the US) and was walking home or to school, by myself, since I was 7 years old. The mentality back then for raising children was basically "make sure they do their homework and feed them once in a while". I now live in a big city and I couldn't do that with my son, because the environment is not the same. We live in a big city, but I still have to drive him everywhere, even though he's 9 years old.
I think you two are not talking about the exact same thing. In my understanding GP isn't at all opposed at kids being kids. Their point sounded more like being about autonomy.
Due to the mobility restrictions of the suburbs (everything can only reached by car) you as a parent are automatically managing more of the time of your kids: Picking them up at school, driving them to organized event 1 or 2 (sports for example) etc.
In the city it's easier for kids to do those things themselves: My kids went to school by themselves after a few weeks in first grade (school is only a few hundred meters away from home, though). This has a bunch of other consequences: They can autonomously meet peers earlier, so they have more free and unstructured time together etc. All in all less parental involvement, and the kids have to (and want to!) organize more by themselves.
Anecdotally the people I know who grew up in cities have less psychiatric problems then people I knew who grew up in suburbs. They also don’t seem more cynical, just more competent.
Do you have any evidence? Or just a personal hunch?
> big cities are so dangerous nowadays
Big cities nowadays are dramatically safer than they were a few decades ago.
> parents no longer allow their children to play outside unsupervised
This is due to the parents’ paranoid fears, not the inherent danger involved.
> but SF - outside of housing - is not a bad place to be raising a child
You can't discount housing, because it's what gets you to live in a really small space, possibly in a dangerous neighborhood and with so much street noise that you can't sleep with your window open.
So yes, if you can't afford a nice place with plenty of room in a nice neighborhood, then SF is a terrible place to be raising a child.
> more small shops of all kinds, more coffeeshops, more live music, more social clubs, more classes, more playgrounds, more museums
Suburban playgrounds are way better than urban ones and the rest of your examples require a lot of money. I'm biased because I grew up in the suburbs, but playing sports outside for free like I did as a kid sounds much better than having to get job because the only thing you can do in the city outside of your house is pay for "culture" at "coffeeshops, more live music, more social clubs, more classes, more museums".
There is more of pretty much everything within a kid-accessible distance in the city, including tons and tons of free stuff. There are more and better parks and playgrounds. There are more publicly accessible athletic facilities. There are more and bigger free public libraries. The amazing museums have regular free days for residents, and zoo/aquarium/museum passes can often be checked out for free from the library. There are more free art exhibits. There are more cultural festivals. There are more special-interest meetup groups....
Plenty of city kids play pick-up (or organized) sports outside for fun for free every day.
Coffee houses are often free to sit in. Social clubs also often hold free events. Live music is often outside. Playgrounds and museums tend to be free or low cost
>I 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.
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.
You might dislike cities, but please don’t narcissistically project your personal preferences into everyone else and claim that they are unpleasant for everyone.
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.
If you're responsible for just you and have access to a ready stream of money, you can cobble together an okay existence from this. You escape into intellectual pursuits in your small housing box. You spend lots of hours at the place you are paid to be. You visit your friends' small housing boxes. You spend some money to have somewhere else to go from time to time.
If you have small children, this changes. Intellectual pursuits? They can't read yet, so your only option is parking them in front of videos. It hurts to see their faces go slack and their motions grow spastic. You spend time taking them to visit their friends in other boxes and meeting their friends at the park. You breathe a sigh of relief when they enter school, since now they have a place to be analogous to the place you are paid to be. You can't let them outside to play on the narrow strips of concrete. One false move and some yahoo in a steel contraption has killed them.
If you want families in the city, bulldoze the major urban cores and replace them with low rise cohousing communities. Cars are parked on the edge. Everyone lives in spaces that face onto communal spaces. Community centers become focal points in each block, along with lots of other public space, indoors and out, instead of turning it all over to commercial interests. Short of that, if you want to raise a family and you have the means, you buy your own place that has its own small park and inside space to play. Everyone is cut off and must own the same amenities because of the tyranny of commercial space and cars over the ground level of the city.