Childless cities and the Mandarin Class

From The Future of the City Is Childless by Derek Thompson. A thought-provoking piece, as much because of what he gets wrong as what he gets right.

Last year, for the first time in four decades, something strange happened in New York City. In a non-recession year, it shrank.

We are supposedly living in the golden age of the American metropolis, with the same story playing out across the country. Dirty and violent downtowns typified by the “mean streets” of the 1970s became clean and safe in the 1990s. Young college graduates flocked to brunchable neighborhoods in the 2000s, and rich companies followed them with downtown offices.

New York is the poster child of this urban renaissance. But as the city has attracted more wealth, housing prices have soared alongside the skyscrapers, and young families have found staying put with school-age children more difficult. Since 2011, the number of babies born in New York has declined 9 percent in the five boroughs and 15 percent in Manhattan. (At this rate, Manhattan’s infant population will halve in 30 years.) In that same period, the net number of New York residents leaving the city has more than doubled. There are many reasons New York might be shrinking, but most of them come down to the same unavoidable fact: Raising a family in the city is just too hard. And the same could be said of pretty much every other dense and expensive urban area in the country.

In high-density cities like San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C., no group is growing faster than rich college-educated whites without children, according to Census analysis by the economist Jed Kolko. By contrast, families with children older than 6 are in outright decline in these places. In the biggest picture, it turns out that America’s urban rebirth is missing a key element: births.

Click to enlarge.

Cities were once a place for families of all classes. The “basic custom” of the American city, wrote the urbanist Sam Bass Warner, was a “commitment to familialism.” Today’s cities, however, are decidedly not for children, or for families who want children. As the sociologists Richard Lloyd and Terry Nichols Clark put it, they are “entertainment machines” for the young, rich, and mostly childless. And this development has crucial implications—not only for the future of American cities, but also for the future of the U.S. economy and American politics.

Well . . .

This is something I have been talking about for some years now. It is a category error. Because people live in cities, live in suburbs, live in exurbs, towns, and country, we treat them as one category, and for some narrow purposes they are.

Another way to think of constructed spaces is as Production versus Residence. We use some places for Production, we use some for Residence, and in some configurations we conjoin them. Services, Agriculture, Extraction, and Manufacturing are the traditional segments of the Production economy.

We used to have manufacturing cities, but that has basically disappeared. Manufacturing, a particular type of Production has moved out into the suburbs and substantially out into the country. At most, and it is a lot, Production in cities is now primarily Services.

In most our major cities, they are Services Production zones with some Residence while everywhere else (suburbs, exurbs, towns, country) is heterogenous Production (agriculture, extraction, manufacturing and services) heavily mixed with Residence. Large Services Production/Small Area Dense Residence are a different category than the Heterogeneous Production/Large Area Heterogeneous Residence category.

Our pundits, being primarily Urban/Services/Deep Density residents are reporting from that singular perspective without acknowledging the spectacular diversity and productivity elsewhere.

Throughout history cities have been characterized by deep density, high productivity, and being demographic sink holes. People live check-by-jowl, they are enormously productive, and cities are not demographically self-sustaining and rarely have been. They rarely produce enough children to sustain their population, depending on injections of people from suburbs and country or from immigration to sustain their population levels or to grow.

It is not a recent phenomenon and it is not an American phenomenon.

The counties that make up Los Angeles, Chicago, New York City, and Philadelphia shed a combined 2 million domestic residents from 2010 to 2018. For many years, these cities’ main source of population growth hasn’t been babies or even college graduates; it’s been immigrants. But like an archipelago of Ellis Islands, Manhattan and other wealthy downtown areas have become mere gateways into America and the labor force—“a temporary portal,” in the words of E. J. McMahon, the founder of the Empire Center for Public Policy. “The woman from Slovakia comes to Queens, lives in her second cousin’s basement, gets her feet on the ground, and gets a better apartment in West Orange, New Jersey,” he said. Or a 20-something from North Dakota moves to Chicago after school, works at a consultancy for a few years, finds a partner, and moves to Missoula.

But if big cities are shedding people, they’re growing in other ways—specifically, in wealth and workism. The richest 25 metro areas now account for more than half of the U.S. economy, according to an Axios analysis of government data. Rich cities particularly specialize in the new tech economy: Just five counties account for about half of the nation’s internet and web-portal jobs. Toiling to build this metropolitan wealth are young college graduates, many of them childless or without school-age children; that is, workers who are sufficiently unattached to family life that they can pour their lives into their careers.

Cities are becoming more productive, they are growing whiter and more Asian, they are growing more immigrant diverse, they are becoming more childless, they are becoming more temporary (average life duration in a city), they are becoming more expensive, they are becoming more economically unequal, they are notoriously young, they have higher levels of education attainment.

All these things are true. All these things have long been true. All these things are occurring in cities around the world. And there is nothing inherently alarming about any of that.

Cities have effectively traded away their children, swapping capital for kids. College graduates descend into cities, inhale fast-casual meals, emit the fumes of overwork, get washed, and bounce to smaller cities or the suburbs by the time their kids are old enough to spell. It’s a coast-to-coast trend: In Washington, D.C., the overall population has grown more than 20 percent this century, but the number of children under the age of 18 has declined. Meanwhile, San Francisco has the lowest share of children of any of the largest 100 cities in the U.S.

High productivity zones are not necessarily child-friendly zones. That is why people have always fled cities when their careers were established or when they could afford to.

Thompson then goes on to narrow his focus to establish that childless cities are a problem and that there is something we can and should do about that. Because Thompson fails to recognize the category error he is committing, his assertion that there is a problem and his belief that it might be solved are both questionable.

What is missing? Think about the measures. What is the average duration in a city? Of all the residents, how many have lived in the city for how long? As Thompson notes, people move to cities for careers and move to suburbs for families. Think of cities as career machines.

In the eighteen hundreds when transportation was expensive, when you moved to a city, that is where you tended to stay for generations. You were trading higher productivity (income) for dirt, crime, disease, density, etc. The continuing flow of populations to cities is a testament of just how great is that productivity boost. The average urban resident duration from the eighteen hundreds onwards has been very high, only beginning to decline post-WWII when transportation costs began to fall and systemic productivity rose high enough for people began to have choices about where to live.

As everyone becomes wealthier and has higher incomes (a feature of the modern world), the supply and demand lines keep shifting. The most capable and productive are still drawn to cities because the boost to productivity that comes from densifying talent is still so great. But as the economy becomes more winner-take-all and as the high base level of income rises, the preference rates for city living change. It becomes more and more compelling for those in the broad middle to exit a city, leaving only the most productive and the young chancers at the beginning of their careers. Unless cities explicitly set out to remain residential and to control the average cost of living, it is unlikely for residents to remain.

Another interesting measure would be to look at the average number of years there is of urban living per person by death. And by urban, I mean urban center, not suburbs, exurbs, etc. That has almost certainly been falling. An ad executive who moves to a city to be part of the services economy and whose career at mid-level plateaus, might easily continue to live in a city in 1950 or 1960 even though there is little more career advance to achieve. In 2010, they will almost certainly move out because of the continuing rise of cost of city living.

If I look at my own life I can see 60 years in 14 locations and among those:

Rural - 4 separate occasions for a total of 8 years

Town - 1 occasion for one year

Exurb - No occasions

Suburb - 5 occasions for a total of 17 years

Metropolitan - 4 occasions for a total of 34 years
(center city)

Thats a lot of churn (14 locations) and a lot more metropolitan living than most of my family and most of my colleagues.

All this is an obvious and inherent consequence of the traditional laws of supply and demand, comparative productivity, etc. There is nothing that government needs to do about it.

The only downside I see to city centers becoming more clearly Services Productivity centers is my oft-repeated concern.

Media communication are concentrated in those handful of cities. They project a reality of concerns and issues and conditions which are urban center centric. Worse than that, they are unaware of how life is actually lived in more heterogeneous categories of Mixed Economy Sectors and Mixed Density Residence. The problem is the isolation of the Mandarin Class and their mouthpieces within the urban bubble, not with the condition of High Services Productivity/High Density itself.