Tag Archives: children

Cities, The Middle Class, and Children

Posted on by
Reply

by Michael Lewyn

In a recent article, Joel Kotkin critiques the work of Jane Jacobs; he points out that Jacobs idealized middle-class city neighborhoods, and suggests that because cities have become dominated by childless rich people, middle-class urbanity “has passed into myth, and… it is never going to come back.” He suggests that Americans are “moving out to the suburbs as they enter their 30s and start families” because central cities are only appropriate for “the talented, the young, and childless affluent adults.” This claim rests on a couple of assumptions: 1) that cities have little appeal to families and 2) that the only Americans whose preferences are typical are those middle-class families.

The first claim has an element of truth: families do tend to prefer more suburban living environments. But what Kotkin overlooks is that the tide is turning (at least a little). Although American suburbs clearly have more children than cities, the most desirable city neighborhoods are more appealing to parents than was the case a decade ago.

For example, Kotkin writes that Greenwich Village (where Jacobs lived) “today now largely consists of students, wealthy people and pensioners.” But according to the Furman Center’s neighborhoood-by-neighborhood surveys of New York housing, the percentage of households with children actually increased in New York’s more desirable urban neighborhoods. For example, in Jacobs’s own Greenwich Village, 15.1 percent of all 2013 households had children under 18—lower than in most places to be sure, but higher than in 2000, when only 11.4 percent had children. Similarly, the “households with children” percentage increased from 11.4 percent to 15.1 percent in New York’s financial district, from 14.6 percent to 17.8 percent in the Upper West Side, and from 13.3 percent to 16.6 percent in the Upper East Side. Continue reading →

The Geography of NYC’s Children: More Evidence of Urban Popularity

Posted on by
Reply

by Michael Lewyn

Conventional wisdom is that making urban cores stronger and more pedestrian-friendly is irrelevant to the interests of American parents, who supposedly want to live in suburbs or faux-suburbs at the edge of cities. But when I looked at the Furman Center’s new report on New York City, I discovered a very interesting table on page 43: The only places in New York City where the percentage of children grew (albeit often from a low base) were (a) the well-off parts of Manhattan and (b) the parts of Brooklyn closest to Manhattan (that is, the least suburb-ish parts of the borough). The more suburb-like, traditionally child-heavy places at the city’s edge (as well as some of the city’s poorer areas in the South Bronx and northeastern Brooklyn) either lost children or gained children more slowly than they gained adults.

(Cross-posted from cnu.org with minor modifications)

Highway to Serfdom

Posted on by
Reply

(cross-posted from planetizen.com, with minor modifications)

In “The Road to Serfdom,” F.A. Hayek wrote, “Individual freedom cannot be reconciled with the supremacy of one single purpose to which the whole of society is permanently subordinated.” Hayek was of course thinking about economic planning designed to govern society as a whole. However, his thoughts could just as easily be applied to transportation and land use policy; at all levels of government, 20th-century American land use and transportation planners sought to support “one single purpose to which the whole of society is permanently subordinated”—making cars go as fast as possible. For example, American planners bulldozed city neighborhoods to build highways so that cars could go from downtown to suburbs as rapidly as possible, widened existing roads so that cars could move as rapidly as possible, and limited density everywhere because of concerns about traffic congestion.

Much has been written about whether these policies have achieved their goals; however, it seems to me that even if car-oriented policies have reduced congestion, they may have also led to restrictions on the freedom of nondrivers.

Here’s why: after a few decades of car-oriented policies, driving inevitably became the norm in most of the United States. This alone need not, in theory, restrict the freedom of nondrivers.* However, once driving became the norm, politicians, police officers and prosecutors inevitably began to see walking as abnormal or even dangerous, and as a result have begun to limit pedestrians’ liberty in the name of security.

A very early manifestation of this mentality was anti-jaywalking statutes; in the 1920s, the automobile lobby and its allies persuaded state and local politicians to enact statutes outlawing something called “jaywalking”—that is, walking anywhere except at certain portions of the street (that is, intersections). Even at intersections, pedestrians can only cross streets for a few seconds at a time. Americans supported these statutes because they thought without these limits, pedestrians would not be safe from speeding cars.**

By contrast, drivers have the entire street at their disposal. In the most car-dominated places, police have gone beyond fining pedestrians for this offense; in some places, pedestrians have been arrested for jaywalking, and in others, they have been treated even more harshly. For example, if you are walking with a child at the wrong place or time and the child is hit by a car, you may be prosecuted for manslaughter, on the theory that your jaywalking caused the crash. If your jury is comprised of people who drive everywhere and view walking as abnormal and dangerous, your chances of acquittal are probably not very good.

On the other hand, police (many of whom spend lots of time in cars) and prosecutors tend to treat errant drivers leniently; as long as the state cannot prove a driver did not kill a pedestrian intentionally or after drinking copious amounts of alcohol, a driver who kills a pedestrian is unlikely to receive significant punishment in some jurisdictions. Less serious violations of traffic law are treated even less seriously by government and by the public; for example, I suspect that nearly every American who drives a car violates speed limits on a fairly regular basis.

Jaywalking statutes do at least allow walkers to cross some streets at some points. However, some government officials have gone even further in keeping minor pedestrians off the streets. If government officials view walking as dangerous, a logical step is to limit minors’ access to this activity. And most states have created perfect tools for such limitations, by enacting vague laws prohibiting “neglect” or “endangerment” or children. In some places, if you let your child walk (or even play) outside and anyone sees the child present without you, you can be arrested (and possibly even lose your child) for this offense, if the nearest police officer believes that a child alone is in more danger than a child in her parents’ vehicle. Continue reading →