My podcast this week is with real estate developer Bobby Fijan to discuss one of the most overlooked crises in American urban life: the dramatic decline of children in major cities.
Really liked this podcast as it reflected some of my observations. I'm a New Yorker who moved to the equivalent of the rich person outskirts of Charles Murray's Fishtown. Without doxxing myself, I have also lived in various other cities around the world of varying tiers.
Under-remarked upon however is the gulf in values between the natal populations and the non-natal populations. In the Bay Area or New York, not that many people want to have children or are conventionally religious. It is also very expensive to buy something that your parents would have seen as a house or apartment for poor people. The decision to have children is counter-cultural in the world of elite coastal private school educated professionals. To make that decision is to leave the magic circle, and once that's done, you might as well move away from the city as well.
Most private school educated people are seriously dedicated to their unacknowledged religion of "work," worshipping popular figures, and performing rituals of sex and consumption. Their pious sincerity and dedication to the urban cults should be respected and seen for what it is. I do not think therefore that trying to sell family apartments to people who have seriously dedicated themselves to living alone makes sense. Their way of life is to live alone so as to better worship the screen together. This will be their way until they are all gone. The error therefore is in seeing singledom as a phase rather than a cultic vocation. So I agree more with the line of argument from your book about how the religious are becoming more of a moral minority than a majority; and that a snap-back is not likely in the near term.
I’m a new husband and father. This piqued my interest here as I’m in a major city, Columbus, in a neighborhood that most would consider it suburban-like. It’s one of those post-WWII areas that boomed, but lacked some imagination in the development. It made me think, I can’t recall a local elected official or business leader in my city mention any initiative for families in recent memory. I’m not holding my breath to hear one either.
One look at the cost of living in cities (above all of family-sized housing) suffices to explain why families are moving out of ("fleeing" is overly dramatic). Indeed, that trend has been in place for longer than (58 year old) I have been alive, beginning in the years after WWII as the country suburbanized.
Tangentially related, in regard to the recent tweet about public schools in Frisco, TX, shrinking despite that suburb's ongoing population growth.
I asked ChatGPT to check on this, and it found that several other fast-growing parts of the country are also seeing declines in public school enrollment (e.g. Bellevue, WA, Gilbert, AZ, and North Carolina overall). It could be significantly about wokeness/Zoom/COVID/homeschooling/charters, etc. but I'm wondering if it is also about the population pyramid getting much older and the declining birth rate.
Frisco schools had three murders recently. Gilbert, AZ was home to a violent high school gang called the "Gilbert Goons" that allegedly killed someone.
I would think it's a combination of demographics and the decline of public schools.
Trying to think through if we could still call this "decline produces concentration." What I do observe is that good public schools can enter a death spiral from which they cannot recover and regain good students again. So over time, the upper middle class, and even a good chunk of the middle-middle class, clusters into alternatives.
This may be the case where I live; I notice that public school enrollment in the county has basically flatlined even though the county is still growing rapidly, with many young families. Meanwhile the private schools are surging (including some new startup schools), and homeschool is common as well.
One unfortunate thing about private school: it's one of those areas in life, like air travel, where there are basically no economies of scale for large families. So that's discouraging for fertility. Home school of course has SOME economies of scale for large families, but not to the degree public school does.
Really liked this podcast as it reflected some of my observations. I'm a New Yorker who moved to the equivalent of the rich person outskirts of Charles Murray's Fishtown. Without doxxing myself, I have also lived in various other cities around the world of varying tiers.
Under-remarked upon however is the gulf in values between the natal populations and the non-natal populations. In the Bay Area or New York, not that many people want to have children or are conventionally religious. It is also very expensive to buy something that your parents would have seen as a house or apartment for poor people. The decision to have children is counter-cultural in the world of elite coastal private school educated professionals. To make that decision is to leave the magic circle, and once that's done, you might as well move away from the city as well.
Most private school educated people are seriously dedicated to their unacknowledged religion of "work," worshipping popular figures, and performing rituals of sex and consumption. Their pious sincerity and dedication to the urban cults should be respected and seen for what it is. I do not think therefore that trying to sell family apartments to people who have seriously dedicated themselves to living alone makes sense. Their way of life is to live alone so as to better worship the screen together. This will be their way until they are all gone. The error therefore is in seeing singledom as a phase rather than a cultic vocation. So I agree more with the line of argument from your book about how the religious are becoming more of a moral minority than a majority; and that a snap-back is not likely in the near term.
I’m a new husband and father. This piqued my interest here as I’m in a major city, Columbus, in a neighborhood that most would consider it suburban-like. It’s one of those post-WWII areas that boomed, but lacked some imagination in the development. It made me think, I can’t recall a local elected official or business leader in my city mention any initiative for families in recent memory. I’m not holding my breath to hear one either.
One look at the cost of living in cities (above all of family-sized housing) suffices to explain why families are moving out of ("fleeing" is overly dramatic). Indeed, that trend has been in place for longer than (58 year old) I have been alive, beginning in the years after WWII as the country suburbanized.
Tangentially related, in regard to the recent tweet about public schools in Frisco, TX, shrinking despite that suburb's ongoing population growth.
I asked ChatGPT to check on this, and it found that several other fast-growing parts of the country are also seeing declines in public school enrollment (e.g. Bellevue, WA, Gilbert, AZ, and North Carolina overall). It could be significantly about wokeness/Zoom/COVID/homeschooling/charters, etc. but I'm wondering if it is also about the population pyramid getting much older and the declining birth rate.
https://www.bsd405.org/about-us/news/news-details/~board/bsd-news/post/message-from-the-superintendent-pausing-the-consideration-of-a-middle-school-consolidation
https://www.azfamily.com/2025/11/17/gilbert-public-schools-considers-closing-elementary-school/
https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/education/article313591827.html
Frisco schools had three murders recently. Gilbert, AZ was home to a violent high school gang called the "Gilbert Goons" that allegedly killed someone.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/15/magazine/bullying-teenagers-gilbert-goons-gang.html
People want to blame this on demographic change, but the violence factor (not caused by Indians moving in, that's for sure) has to be playing a role.
I would think it's a combination of demographics and the decline of public schools.
Trying to think through if we could still call this "decline produces concentration." What I do observe is that good public schools can enter a death spiral from which they cannot recover and regain good students again. So over time, the upper middle class, and even a good chunk of the middle-middle class, clusters into alternatives.
This may be the case where I live; I notice that public school enrollment in the county has basically flatlined even though the county is still growing rapidly, with many young families. Meanwhile the private schools are surging (including some new startup schools), and homeschool is common as well.
One unfortunate thing about private school: it's one of those areas in life, like air travel, where there are basically no economies of scale for large families. So that's discouraging for fertility. Home school of course has SOME economies of scale for large families, but not to the degree public school does.