Why Cities Are Becoming ‘Theme Parks Of Childless Affluence’ By Libby Emmons for The Federalist
With many of America’s densest urban areas losing families with kids, we must ask how we got here and why, even in booming economic times, people are simply finding it too difficult to raise families in cities.
This week, the Manhattan Institute hosted a symposium on the Future of Families in the Childless City at the Princeton Club in the kidless New York City. New York isn’t the only childless city in the Northeast. In fact, many of America’s densest cities are losing families with kids.
I was excited to attend the talk, but lacking child care, I brought my nine-year-old son with me. The director of state and local policy for the Manhattan Institute, Michael Hendrix, broached the questions that spurred the symposium: how to raise kids in New York, what factors go into making the city less child-friendly, how we got here, and why — even in booming economic times — people are simply finding it too difficult to raise families in New York. The answers, panelists said, boil down to education and housing.
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Giving background on how we got here was Kay Hymowitz, a contributing editor to the City Journal and William E. Simon fellow at the Manhattan Institute, who experienced this change firsthand. By the early 1980s, men and women earned bachelor of arts degrees equivalently, and these women wanted to use their educations to embark upon careers.
“Women wanted to work,” Hymowitz said. “They were very well suited to the new knowledge economy. They went and got educations.” This led to women “putting off marriage and childbearing as they got more education, more training, [and] started their early years and work in the city.”
The marketplace responded. This new way of living adult life — with money, education, passion for career, and no kids — needed cities to offer matching lifestyle options. The marriage age moved up, and once women married, they wanted to stay in the city to keep their jobs and continue career advancement without the long commutes they would face with a shift to a suburban lifestyle. This increased the price of housing, which is notoriously expensive in New York.
Knowledge Economy Places High Demands on Education
Yet education is a greater issue. The fears George Packer expressed in The Atlantic’s latest issue, in “When the Culture War Comes for the Kids,” about enrolling and keeping his kids in public school were echoed by the panelists as reasons families leave the city before kids hit school age. NYC private schools are prohibitively expensive, even for top earners, and city governments concerned with equity and identity are systematically dismantling the high-achieving tracks in public schools.
