Cities Without Children

Childless cities, childless young couples, and more in this week's digest.

Don’t forget to pick up a copy of Welcome to the Negative World, a book of essays by various authors interacting with my “Negative World” framework.

And if you haven’t already read my original Life in the Negative World: Confronting Challenges in an Anti-Christian Culture, be sure to read that too.

Also, a heads up that the USC Center for Religion and Civic Culture is giving out $5000 journalism fellowships to fund reporting of stories on the changing nature of American religion. The due date is May 4, so right around the corner.

What Is a City Without Children?

A recent essay in the Financial Times explores the implications of the trend of falling birth rates and the disappearance of children from cities.

The school, Colvestone, is in Hackney, east London. It is one of four schools that closed in the borough in 2024. Four more closed last year. But not even that accurately shows the declining numbers of schoolchildren here. Earlier this week, parents of four-year-olds across the UK learnt where their child has been accepted to primary school, but in the capital many seats will remain empty. Last year, it was roughly one in five places in Hackney alone — nearly 500 in all.

The falling numbers of children in London is mirrored across cities in Europe and the US. In Paris, primary school enrolment has fallen by a quarter in the past decade. First year elementary school enrolment in New York fell 18 per cent in the decade to autumn 2024, while in Barcelona, preschool entry (three to six years), the main entry point into the school system, fell 16 per cent between autumn 2016 and autumn 2024. 

Much of this change can be laid at the feet of falling birth rates. But in cities, rising housing costs, the growing use of homes for short-term rentals and housebuilding strategies geared away from families are fanning the demographic imbalance — it’s not just that fewer children are being born, many are moving away. In the UK, eight of the 10 fastest-shrinking boroughs for primary school children in the past five years were in inner London, according to the Education Policy Institute.

…

The problem is being compounded. In the decade to 2025, more than three-quarters of homes built under the Greater London Authority’s Affordable Homes Programme (the majority in the sector), had just one or two bedrooms. In London’s private rental sector over the past five years, that share was even greater, according to Molior, which specialises in London’s new-build data: 92 per cent were homes with fewer than three bedrooms….As a result, despite the capital growing by 543,000 residents between 2014 and 2024, its population of under-nines fell by 107,000, according to Trust for London.

Many argue that these divergent lines are not inevitable. In Vienna, where primary school numbers are not declining, the city provides large numbers of family-sized homes, especially through large-scale subsidised or municipal housing. Helped by high migration to the city and strong childcare and parental leave policies, Copenhagen is another city to buck the trend of falling child numbers.

…

As more children move away from cities around the world — San Francisco’s elementary school intake is projected to drop from 56,000 to 49,000 in the next decade, according to the California state government — the question becomes more pressing: what is a city without them?

…

Saffron Woodcraft, urban anthropologist and research fellow at University College London’s Institute for Global Prosperity, points to other knock-on effects: fewer children using local services such as community centres or church halls makes them more likely to close, which comes at a cost to everyone. “My local Bermondsey village hall, as well as toddler groups and children’s music classes, hosts the polling centre, puppy training, music classes, exercise classes for people of all ages — and you can rent it for a party or a wedding. We would lose all that,” she says.

Closing schools severs deeper psychological ties, too. “When a school I went to or grew up with closes and is standing empty — and may be redeveloped — I will ask, do I belong, do I have a future here, how will I fit in?” says Woodcraft. “When that architecture is dismantled, people are dislocated or dissociated,” she notes. 

…

Perversely, children are disappearing from our cities at precisely the time that great efforts are being made to make them more child-friendly. Street and park design for children is improving across Europe and the world, and lower inner-city speed limits are making streets safer. 

School streets — which close off streets for parts or all of the day — are increasingly common; in Paris, where many roads have been rebuilt as fully pedestrian areas, residents last March voted to add 500 more. There are 78 school streets in New York and more than 500 in London. Recent UK research found a 63 per cent fall in traffic on school streets as more parents opt to walk to school with their children. 

…

Efforts to create child-friendlier streets seem wasted if fewer and fewer families can afford to live on them. Growing concentrations of young adults in inner-city areas and neighbourhoods increasingly siloed by age rob residents of the enriching effects of encounters with those of different generations, says Markus Moos, from the School of Planning at the University of Waterloo in Canada. ‘’With age segregation on the rise in European and North American cities, we are losing the intergenerational exposure that helps with mutual understanding across generations and lifecycle stages.’’

Click over to read the whole thing. Unfortunately, the FT has a very hard paywall and a very stingy article share system. I included as much of the article here as I could justify.

The Cost of Kids

The New York Times ran a widely-discussed article about Gen Z people who are choosing not to have kids because of the cost (gift link).

Growing up in Utah, where big families are part of the culture, Rilee Stewart and Brock Goodwin always imagined having several children. Ms. Stewart has four siblings and Mr. Goodwin has two, so having three or four children felt like the natural next step after getting married last year.

But that vision shifted once they settled into their new home in Mapleton, about 50 miles south of Salt Lake City. The 2,000-square-foot house came with a $20,000 down payment and a $3,200 monthly mortgage. That financial pressure, combined with other rising costs such as gas and groceries, made them rethink parenthood. They realized that even with one child, they would most likely need more space, and moving to a bigger house in their price range would probably mean leaving Utah and their families behind.

Mr. Goodwin, 25, works as a firefighter, and Ms. Stewart, also 25, is a nail technician. Adding a child would push them into living paycheck to paycheck, they said. Ms. Stewart said she would need to take on extra shifts, and Mr. Goodwin would have to give up hobbies he enjoys, like golfing. One of them might even need to stay home full time to care for a child.

After weighing all the costs, they decided not to have children at all.

…

Many couples who once imagined larger families are scaling back or deciding to remain child free. About three in five Gen Zers and millennials said financial concerns influenced their choice not to have any or more children at this time, or caused them to be unsure about it, according to new data from Credit Karma and the Harris Poll that surveyed adults ages 18 through 45. Sarah Hayford, the director of the Institute for Population Research at Ohio State University, said that while many people in their teens and 20s still reported wanting two children, falling short of that goal suggested that external factors were making parenthood more difficult to attain.

…

For Imani Menard, 29, and Austin Cunningham, 31, the decision not to have children came down to the life they’ve built and what it would take to change it. Married in 2023, they have shaped their relationship around exploring new places together, such as Japan, Bali and Morocco.

But that lifestyle has become more expensive. In the wake of the war in Iran, airlines have been raising prices and checked-bag fees to cover soaring fuel costs. The couple have felt it firsthand: A flight to France for a wedding in September cost them $1,600 round trip. Around the same time the year before, a similar trip was just $400 round trip, they said. With a child, they added, going to that wedding would have been more difficult and meant fewer trips this year.

Click over to read the whole thing.

The people they used as illustrations reveal that a big factor driving the decision not to have kids isn’t absolute cost but lifestyle. The cost of children would require lifestyle sacrifices they don’t want to make.

This is absolutely a real tradeoff. A lot of people online criticized the first couple for thinking a 2,000 square foot house isn’t enough for a child. This is certainly true. Our house is smaller than that, and we have plenty of space.

At the same time, attacking other people’s life preferences is not a winning strategy. We do need to understand the extent to which expectations of what it means to have a middle class or upper middle class life have changed.

We aren’t living in 1955 or even 1985 anymore. And it isn’t realistic to expect people to embrace the constrained lifestyles of those eras. Raising birth rates requires us to first understand and address today’s life preferences as they presently exist.

Best of the Web

NYT: More Young Men Say Religion Is ‘Very Important’ to Them, Poll Finds (gift link) - “Gallup’s survey, which combined polling data across multiple years, seems to confirm that young men are indeed becoming more religious. But it has found that religion is dropping in importance among young women, widening a surprising gender gap for young adults.”

The Guardian: How “wife schools” are shaping submissive Christian women.

This interesting short podcast with Collin Hansen talks about the “Young, Restless, and Roman” trend of striver conversions to Catholicism. He notes that many of those converts are in what the Reformed people called the “cage stage” of rabid enthusiasm. This is good to keep in mind, as the highly obnoxious and low consciousness converts who populate social media these days are not representative of Catholics as a whole.

Show Me Institute: St. Louis Demographics and the Future of the Region with Ness Sandoval - a wonky but important look at the demographic trends affecting all too many American cities.

New Content and Media Mentions

I got a mention this week in Mere Orthodoxy. I was also a guest on the Veritas Vox podcast.

New this week:

• The State of America’s Downtowns (paid only) - Field notes from four downtowns, where schlubby workers, empty storefronts, and shrunken corporate footprints tell a complicated recovery story

• AI’s Infinite Economy - A guest post by Kristian Andersen exploring the rise of a new class of economic participant, why the next economy will not belong to better copilots, and why this future economy’s most important layer will still be human.

• My podcast this week was with Georgetown professor Joshua Mitchell on America’s “Hebraic Christianity” Culture.

Subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts, Youtube, or Spotify.

Cover image: empty playground by Rick Obst/Wikimedia, CC BY 2.0