Related to this, kind of it’s inverse, I think there are a lot of couples who would like to have kids, or to have more kids, but sincerely believe that they *must* own a single family home first. I’ve know some who even felt they had to wait to get married until they could afford a single family home to move in to. That means delayed marriage and delayed childbearing, which in many cases means fewer children born than the couple would have chosen if they could have “met their material needs.”
I didn’t personally feel any need to wait to have a house before marriage … but even as an ardent urbanist, I had always imagined I would have bought at least a townhome or something before we had kids. But that biological clock was ticking and when we got to the point that we wanted kids, we were still years away from buying our first home.
I struggled with that, and felt like a failure for a time. We decided to go ahead and have kids anyway. I think within our extended family the fact that were were still renting when it was time for kids was seen as a sad thing and an indication that we were struggling, even well past the point that we were actually doing fine (and saving a lot).
I got over it, but, I still remember that period and the emotional struggle vividly.
So, there’s a cultural norm that I think is really a problem. When IFS says people really want cheap single family houses they can commute from, I believe them. But how much of that is artificial cultural pressure telling people they aren’t allowed to progress as an adult until they own a single family home?
It’s not an artificial cultural pressure. It’s an innate desire for shelter and privacy and resource security. Evidence of this is woven through research and polling across the OECD. We could build homes for 100K each that would satisfy this need for resource security. The reason we don’t is because we think it is better not to.
We don't know if it is or isn't! "The cube" is so far off from any kind of urban density anyone is suggesting that it means nothing to offer that as an example. Millions of people have and do raise kids in towns and cities.
Yes, millions of people do raise children in towns and cities. A large apartment offers many of the same benefits as a house. And humans have adapted to any differences exceptionally quickly. But trying to force everyone to adapt to denser housing (of any kind) makes 0 sense in 2025.
WFH and AI have made the factories of intellectual property and business service—which we call office buildings—obsolete. The obsolescence will take time to fully realize but the process has begun.
Humans no longer need to live in dense cities or dense housing. Perhaps traditional factories return, though much will be automated. Either way, if you want to see the future of cities, the answers can be found in 1950s/1960s Detroit. Urban hollowing and decay.
We should get a head start and embrace the SFH and townhouse and duplexes. It’s time to shift focus to building and expanding affordable housing outside cities where demand will grow most, not in cities just because density is supposedly positive and a trend of the last 180 years.
Arguments for greater density ignore the major and permanent shifts that have already upended the economic case for office buildings and the urban economies that exist to serve them.
If you want density, look to The Cotswolds, not to Paris and New York.
Urbanists have always thought that the office-heavy downtown, served by freeway on-ramps, was a terrible mistake. Read Jane Jacobs.
Giant, gleaming, downtown office buildings were premised on the idea that downtown was mainly a place for suburbanites to commute to——and to at most occasionally buy lunch. Jacobs found them sterile.
Urbanists have always wanted a mix of uses. Lived-in neighborhoods.
You point to the collapse of office real estate, which is real, but you ignore the fact that residential rents in Manhattan and San Francisco remain sky-high.
If no one wanted to live in cities, as you claim, then why is the rent so damn high. Clearly, something else is attracting people to life in the city than downtown office buildings.
Yes. The fact that office buildings is what people think of as "cities" just shows that many Americans really don't know what cities are - frankly reading Jane Jacobs it seems as if even as early as the 1960s many of us had already forgotten
Cities form where there are resources and economic opportunity. Cities unwind when economic opportunity declines and social upheaval begins.
It is true of ancient Egypt, it was true of Detroit, and it will be for every city dependent on offices.
Offices aren’t “a mistake” for urbanists to correct, they are the reason cities thrived in the second phase of the Industrial Revolution. The new phase of the Industrial Revolution we’re entering now will remove hundreds of billions in salaries from cities. This will destroy the service industry of those cities depending on those salaries. What will be left is hollow cores and failing infrastructure and crime. It will take many years, perhaps decades, to be fully realized.
Rents will drop in time. They’ll drop way down low because the once great cities will have little opportunity to offer new residents. The culture that momentarily sustains the draw of cities will vanish with the service jobs.
The real problem is that folks don't even know what family-style apartments even look like anymore. We've made them so hard to build that most folks can't even conceive of the idea. No wonder folks think families can only live in suplexes.
As for the problem of thinking that suburbs naturally create families and thus not wanting apartments, it's a bit like seeing a newly planted field and saying "I don't see any corn here, better throw it out!". I'm a single guy living in an outer suburb, and let me tell you, the dating scene here sucks. Families don't just appear if you build houses, you need (if you excuse the mental image) breeding grounds for them to generate from. And we've basically torn all those out.
Yep. I imagine a lot of these guys maybe got married young and didn't struggle to find someone, and they abstracted from their experience that it just kind of happens unless you refuse to partner with someone by having this fun single life. It's kind of internally consistent but really misguided I think.
One thing this reminds me of is the now often unspoken assumtion led, perhaps ironically, by progressives, that owning a home and already having good jobs (but not necessarily being married) are prerequisites for family formation. Basically, they don't believe working class/poor Americans in general, but especially low income white Americans, should have kids at all, yet refuse to say so out loud. Instead, they just want it to be the unspoken but overwelming norm that they don't, -and take the implications of that how you will!
This is a little discussed phenomenon that I suspect feeds a great deal of mostly quite resentment among the white, working class Americans who most supported Trump (and even many who did not!). It is also part of why so many working class Americans, but again especially white ones because this is a largely racialized phenomenon, have left large, dense urban areas. They have done so often I believe to escape the stygma (which may even percieved as child abuse!) of just having young kids while clearly not being middle class.
And this push to make childbaring a luxury item for many has actually worked to a large extent for influencing the behaviors and life assumptions of downwardly mobile Americans from upper middle class backgrounds of all races/ethnicities, and, to some extent more broadly, in and near many of our larger, wealthier and more diverse internationally oriented urban regions, at least for some demographics. It isn't just about affordability but about morals and unspoken assumptions and social pressures. It has caused far less change elsewhere in the US however, where family formation in apartments or in multigenerational and even roomate housholds often remains common among all major deographics. But this push, lel by upscale progressives and widely spread through the media, has surely been part of the braoder reason for declining birthrates not only in the US but in many other countries as well.
This is very interesting. Yeah. There's a weird horseshoe between people who want to give their kids the very best (in a consumerist sense, often) and the people who view children as luxury consumer goods and attach no moral or even social importance to having families. It is really interesting and there is so much here.
I think I may have excidently cut off the end so I eddited the orphen out and will ad it here now: For referance, my parents were working class/working poor and not married. I grew up in the 1980s largely in a 2 bedroom apartment in a 4 plex in pre-gentrification urban area on the west coast. It was in a racially mixed but majority white blue collar neighborhood sandwiched between a poor and crime ridden area in one direction and the upscale part of town in the other, in the sort of neighborhood that really no longer exists in this region of the country. I am a white man in my 40's with (now deceased) parents from small town mixed protestant and Catholic backgrounds, but whom were agnostic former (and somewhat still) hippies when I was growing up.
How I grew up was not unusual back then for people of my background. Just 30 miles away from me, but in a very differant sort of environment, it is still normal today.
I grew up in New York City and although I lived in a two family house in a outer borough, a lot of my friends lived in high rise apartment buildings. People did not seem to have any trouble having families in them. And it was a a great place to grow up! We could go places on our own without needing someone to drive us around. I feel sorry for kids growing up in car-centered suburbs. The concept that cities are bad for families with kids is just so bizarre to me. Maybe they're better for parents who want to have control over every moment of their child's life, but they're not better for the kids.
Another historical twist here in the pro-natalist/anti-urban framing is that sexual mores haven't liberalized only recently. As I noted in my essay about SROs, rooming houses were popular with young men and women (straight and gay) more than 100 years ago because they offered privacy and independence outside of the traditional family home. Sexual liberalism has always been a feature of cities—and therefore one reason why some people despise them! Nevertheless, early twentieth century sexual libertinism appears not to have caused a massive pre-war baby bust. Nor can urban density as such be the cause of our current fertility problems when, despite the growth of our metro areas, the vast majority of Americans still live in low-density suburbs.
All of which is to say, I agree with you as well as your take on the critics!
This is an argument for, among other things, cheap, dorm-like SRO’s. These can partially substitute for the expensive college dorm life young people are paying for, often not for education but the social currency of attending, increase the odds of meeting someone, increase economic mobility and therefore earnings potential, while at the same time drastically reducing rent burdens for those willing to make the compromise, especially couples that share an SRO—a common practice for newlyweds not long ago.
The point being, you are not plopped on this Earth with a single-family home. Restoring the ladder as you say, even with the seemingly most family unfriendly housing typology, is in fact deeply family friendly.
Great piece, many good comments on it too that capture things I was thinking. Something else: I wonder how much of the cultural association between single-family homes and families comes down to the school district housing lottery. Families want to get into good school districts, most of which are locked in expensive single-family suburbs bc of both housing policy and weird school funding mechanisms. More pro-apartment housing policy could open up the exclusive suburban school districts to more people (and families!) and also improve urban districts by generating more revenue
Tim Carney is one of the better conservative voices on housing. I did not see his comments but it doesn't surprise me they would make more sense than Stone's.
Yeah, the school issue is a big one, and I know much less about it so I try to not wade into it. But improving urban schools could probably keep more families in the city, and likewise more people could access some of the better schools if we built more in suburbia. But that raises the question of whether the schools will be expanded or become overcrowded, and it triggers the fear that opening them up will inherently dilute their quality. But I do think you can't talk about housing fully without talking about schools.
"the answer from the housing-skeptical pronatalists, rarely stated outright, is that they view a long period of singlehood and a later age of marriage as social problems to attack and not as social realities to work with."
This is a really interesting point that I had not thought about before. Thanks!
Thank you! My background as a conservative who became an urbanist helps me to see, I think, where folks are coming from sometimes. I don't obviously think they're right about this, but I think a lot of YIMBYs who come from the left miss some of what's going on.
I very much agree. While I often wish that my parents had been married, or that my mom and step dad did not devorce, I am ultimately very thankful to them that I am here, that my mother chose to have me even under much pressure not to, that my mother's ex husband choose to stay nearby and help raise me and that my him and my mother were on good enough terms that she allowed him to do so.
But I especially cannot help but remember, as a now conservative leaning imdependant who loves both cities and small towns and rural areas, that todays increasingly dominant big city social mores would, if uniformly practiced, mean that people such as myself would not exist at all(!)
I think your argument on YIMBY and views on sex is a stretch. The conservative view is we need people to have kids and spaces to make the babies. Whether that is suburbs, as Joel Kotkins argues, or lofts is immaterial. The conservative view that might be most applicable is that wherever they are they need to be safe from crime and decay.
Yeah the crime issue is a big one (also schools), but I'm talking more about these folks who argue cities are inherently bad for fertility/family formation. They don't think it's immaterial - they seem to think we are doing something bad for families if we build dense urban housing, which is what I'm disagreeing with.
My general understanding, tho, was that they disdain cities for the “living on top of each other” aspect, which they supposedly believe is not good for children, but I suspect is mostly a proxy for lingering anti-urban prejudices formed during the 70’s-90’s crime wave.
I’ve never really picked up on this whole thing where the conservatives are disapproving of sex happening behind apartment doors though. Is there some anecdote or other evidence you’re basing it off of?
My read was always that the NIMBYs just think everyone should have to “drive til you qualify”, and if you’re not willing to do that then you’re a spoiled brat who is incapable of making grown-up decisions to sacrifice your happiness on the altar of being able to have kids in a SFH neighborhood. Anything short of getting married as young as feasible and buying a house in the furthest-flung sprawl you can afford just so you can pop out your 2.1 babies and drive them to soccer practice, is not a responsible adult decision and therefore represents some aspect of being spoiled — like your general take that suburbanites view urbanism as a sort of vacation luxury for the rich to enjoy, the poor to suffer, and the middle class to only envy from suburban safety.
In my experience, quite a few California NIMBYs are Paul Erlich fans who think humans are a plague. It’s not surprising they don’t care if families have a place to live.
The high cost of living in many cities is what drives families out. Single people living with roommates have very different requirements than families. I lived in a rowhouse in DC for many years shared with 3 other roommates and knew lots of conservative Catholics in similar living situations. Tiny bedrooms and shared rooms was very typical. For myself and the people I knew, getting married led to children coming quickly which requires more space. I couldn’t have afforded to buy the rowhouse I rented, and the rent split among 4 friends was reasonable but for a married couple alone was too high. As much as I would love to live in Capitol Hill with my 3 kids, I am ok with high cost of living places increasing in density to allow for a filtering process so that my family could find a slightly less desirable, more affordable house that fit our needs.
Related to this, kind of it’s inverse, I think there are a lot of couples who would like to have kids, or to have more kids, but sincerely believe that they *must* own a single family home first. I’ve know some who even felt they had to wait to get married until they could afford a single family home to move in to. That means delayed marriage and delayed childbearing, which in many cases means fewer children born than the couple would have chosen if they could have “met their material needs.”
I didn’t personally feel any need to wait to have a house before marriage … but even as an ardent urbanist, I had always imagined I would have bought at least a townhome or something before we had kids. But that biological clock was ticking and when we got to the point that we wanted kids, we were still years away from buying our first home.
I struggled with that, and felt like a failure for a time. We decided to go ahead and have kids anyway. I think within our extended family the fact that were were still renting when it was time for kids was seen as a sad thing and an indication that we were struggling, even well past the point that we were actually doing fine (and saving a lot).
I got over it, but, I still remember that period and the emotional struggle vividly.
So, there’s a cultural norm that I think is really a problem. When IFS says people really want cheap single family houses they can commute from, I believe them. But how much of that is artificial cultural pressure telling people they aren’t allowed to progress as an adult until they own a single family home?
100%. Great comment, thank you!
This is spot on!
It’s not an artificial cultural pressure. It’s an innate desire for shelter and privacy and resource security. Evidence of this is woven through research and polling across the OECD. We could build homes for 100K each that would satisfy this need for resource security. The reason we don’t is because we think it is better not to.
We don't know if it is or isn't! "The cube" is so far off from any kind of urban density anyone is suggesting that it means nothing to offer that as an example. Millions of people have and do raise kids in towns and cities.
Yes, millions of people do raise children in towns and cities. A large apartment offers many of the same benefits as a house. And humans have adapted to any differences exceptionally quickly. But trying to force everyone to adapt to denser housing (of any kind) makes 0 sense in 2025.
WFH and AI have made the factories of intellectual property and business service—which we call office buildings—obsolete. The obsolescence will take time to fully realize but the process has begun.
Humans no longer need to live in dense cities or dense housing. Perhaps traditional factories return, though much will be automated. Either way, if you want to see the future of cities, the answers can be found in 1950s/1960s Detroit. Urban hollowing and decay.
We should get a head start and embrace the SFH and townhouse and duplexes. It’s time to shift focus to building and expanding affordable housing outside cities where demand will grow most, not in cities just because density is supposedly positive and a trend of the last 180 years.
Arguments for greater density ignore the major and permanent shifts that have already upended the economic case for office buildings and the urban economies that exist to serve them.
If you want density, look to The Cotswolds, not to Paris and New York.
Urbanists have always thought that the office-heavy downtown, served by freeway on-ramps, was a terrible mistake. Read Jane Jacobs.
Giant, gleaming, downtown office buildings were premised on the idea that downtown was mainly a place for suburbanites to commute to——and to at most occasionally buy lunch. Jacobs found them sterile.
Urbanists have always wanted a mix of uses. Lived-in neighborhoods.
You point to the collapse of office real estate, which is real, but you ignore the fact that residential rents in Manhattan and San Francisco remain sky-high.
If no one wanted to live in cities, as you claim, then why is the rent so damn high. Clearly, something else is attracting people to life in the city than downtown office buildings.
Yes. The fact that office buildings is what people think of as "cities" just shows that many Americans really don't know what cities are - frankly reading Jane Jacobs it seems as if even as early as the 1960s many of us had already forgotten
Cities form where there are resources and economic opportunity. Cities unwind when economic opportunity declines and social upheaval begins.
It is true of ancient Egypt, it was true of Detroit, and it will be for every city dependent on offices.
Offices aren’t “a mistake” for urbanists to correct, they are the reason cities thrived in the second phase of the Industrial Revolution. The new phase of the Industrial Revolution we’re entering now will remove hundreds of billions in salaries from cities. This will destroy the service industry of those cities depending on those salaries. What will be left is hollow cores and failing infrastructure and crime. It will take many years, perhaps decades, to be fully realized.
Rents will drop in time. They’ll drop way down low because the once great cities will have little opportunity to offer new residents. The culture that momentarily sustains the draw of cities will vanish with the service jobs.
The real problem is that folks don't even know what family-style apartments even look like anymore. We've made them so hard to build that most folks can't even conceive of the idea. No wonder folks think families can only live in suplexes.
As for the problem of thinking that suburbs naturally create families and thus not wanting apartments, it's a bit like seeing a newly planted field and saying "I don't see any corn here, better throw it out!". I'm a single guy living in an outer suburb, and let me tell you, the dating scene here sucks. Families don't just appear if you build houses, you need (if you excuse the mental image) breeding grounds for them to generate from. And we've basically torn all those out.
Yep. I imagine a lot of these guys maybe got married young and didn't struggle to find someone, and they abstracted from their experience that it just kind of happens unless you refuse to partner with someone by having this fun single life. It's kind of internally consistent but really misguided I think.
One thing this reminds me of is the now often unspoken assumtion led, perhaps ironically, by progressives, that owning a home and already having good jobs (but not necessarily being married) are prerequisites for family formation. Basically, they don't believe working class/poor Americans in general, but especially low income white Americans, should have kids at all, yet refuse to say so out loud. Instead, they just want it to be the unspoken but overwelming norm that they don't, -and take the implications of that how you will!
This is a little discussed phenomenon that I suspect feeds a great deal of mostly quite resentment among the white, working class Americans who most supported Trump (and even many who did not!). It is also part of why so many working class Americans, but again especially white ones because this is a largely racialized phenomenon, have left large, dense urban areas. They have done so often I believe to escape the stygma (which may even percieved as child abuse!) of just having young kids while clearly not being middle class.
And this push to make childbaring a luxury item for many has actually worked to a large extent for influencing the behaviors and life assumptions of downwardly mobile Americans from upper middle class backgrounds of all races/ethnicities, and, to some extent more broadly, in and near many of our larger, wealthier and more diverse internationally oriented urban regions, at least for some demographics. It isn't just about affordability but about morals and unspoken assumptions and social pressures. It has caused far less change elsewhere in the US however, where family formation in apartments or in multigenerational and even roomate housholds often remains common among all major deographics. But this push, lel by upscale progressives and widely spread through the media, has surely been part of the braoder reason for declining birthrates not only in the US but in many other countries as well.
This is very interesting. Yeah. There's a weird horseshoe between people who want to give their kids the very best (in a consumerist sense, often) and the people who view children as luxury consumer goods and attach no moral or even social importance to having families. It is really interesting and there is so much here.
If you missed this essay, you may also like this one: https://www.thedeletedscenes.com/p/remember-that-you-were-born
Thanks! I will check it out.
I think I may have excidently cut off the end so I eddited the orphen out and will ad it here now: For referance, my parents were working class/working poor and not married. I grew up in the 1980s largely in a 2 bedroom apartment in a 4 plex in pre-gentrification urban area on the west coast. It was in a racially mixed but majority white blue collar neighborhood sandwiched between a poor and crime ridden area in one direction and the upscale part of town in the other, in the sort of neighborhood that really no longer exists in this region of the country. I am a white man in my 40's with (now deceased) parents from small town mixed protestant and Catholic backgrounds, but whom were agnostic former (and somewhat still) hippies when I was growing up.
How I grew up was not unusual back then for people of my background. Just 30 miles away from me, but in a very differant sort of environment, it is still normal today.
I grew up in New York City and although I lived in a two family house in a outer borough, a lot of my friends lived in high rise apartment buildings. People did not seem to have any trouble having families in them. And it was a a great place to grow up! We could go places on our own without needing someone to drive us around. I feel sorry for kids growing up in car-centered suburbs. The concept that cities are bad for families with kids is just so bizarre to me. Maybe they're better for parents who want to have control over every moment of their child's life, but they're not better for the kids.
Another historical twist here in the pro-natalist/anti-urban framing is that sexual mores haven't liberalized only recently. As I noted in my essay about SROs, rooming houses were popular with young men and women (straight and gay) more than 100 years ago because they offered privacy and independence outside of the traditional family home. Sexual liberalism has always been a feature of cities—and therefore one reason why some people despise them! Nevertheless, early twentieth century sexual libertinism appears not to have caused a massive pre-war baby bust. Nor can urban density as such be the cause of our current fertility problems when, despite the growth of our metro areas, the vast majority of Americans still live in low-density suburbs.
All of which is to say, I agree with you as well as your take on the critics!
This is an argument for, among other things, cheap, dorm-like SRO’s. These can partially substitute for the expensive college dorm life young people are paying for, often not for education but the social currency of attending, increase the odds of meeting someone, increase economic mobility and therefore earnings potential, while at the same time drastically reducing rent burdens for those willing to make the compromise, especially couples that share an SRO—a common practice for newlyweds not long ago.
The point being, you are not plopped on this Earth with a single-family home. Restoring the ladder as you say, even with the seemingly most family unfriendly housing typology, is in fact deeply family friendly.
You make it sound so fun
It is fun! I did two years in a co-op of this kind and have kept many friends from the experience
Great piece, many good comments on it too that capture things I was thinking. Something else: I wonder how much of the cultural association between single-family homes and families comes down to the school district housing lottery. Families want to get into good school districts, most of which are locked in expensive single-family suburbs bc of both housing policy and weird school funding mechanisms. More pro-apartment housing policy could open up the exclusive suburban school districts to more people (and families!) and also improve urban districts by generating more revenue
Separately, I found Tim Carney’s pro-natalist + pro-housing take much more consistent and compelling than Lyman Stone’s confused position https://open.substack.com/pub/jeremyl/p/finding-urbanism-in-strange-places?r=74nn5&utm_medium=ios
Tim Carney is one of the better conservative voices on housing. I did not see his comments but it doesn't surprise me they would make more sense than Stone's.
Yeah, the school issue is a big one, and I know much less about it so I try to not wade into it. But improving urban schools could probably keep more families in the city, and likewise more people could access some of the better schools if we built more in suburbia. But that raises the question of whether the schools will be expanded or become overcrowded, and it triggers the fear that opening them up will inherently dilute their quality. But I do think you can't talk about housing fully without talking about schools.
"the answer from the housing-skeptical pronatalists, rarely stated outright, is that they view a long period of singlehood and a later age of marriage as social problems to attack and not as social realities to work with."
This is a really interesting point that I had not thought about before. Thanks!
Thank you! My background as a conservative who became an urbanist helps me to see, I think, where folks are coming from sometimes. I don't obviously think they're right about this, but I think a lot of YIMBYs who come from the left miss some of what's going on.
I very much agree. While I often wish that my parents had been married, or that my mom and step dad did not devorce, I am ultimately very thankful to them that I am here, that my mother chose to have me even under much pressure not to, that my mother's ex husband choose to stay nearby and help raise me and that my him and my mother were on good enough terms that she allowed him to do so.
But I especially cannot help but remember, as a now conservative leaning imdependant who loves both cities and small towns and rural areas, that todays increasingly dominant big city social mores would, if uniformly practiced, mean that people such as myself would not exist at all(!)
I think your argument on YIMBY and views on sex is a stretch. The conservative view is we need people to have kids and spaces to make the babies. Whether that is suburbs, as Joel Kotkins argues, or lofts is immaterial. The conservative view that might be most applicable is that wherever they are they need to be safe from crime and decay.
Yeah the crime issue is a big one (also schools), but I'm talking more about these folks who argue cities are inherently bad for fertility/family formation. They don't think it's immaterial - they seem to think we are doing something bad for families if we build dense urban housing, which is what I'm disagreeing with.
My general understanding, tho, was that they disdain cities for the “living on top of each other” aspect, which they supposedly believe is not good for children, but I suspect is mostly a proxy for lingering anti-urban prejudices formed during the 70’s-90’s crime wave.
I’ve never really picked up on this whole thing where the conservatives are disapproving of sex happening behind apartment doors though. Is there some anecdote or other evidence you’re basing it off of?
My read was always that the NIMBYs just think everyone should have to “drive til you qualify”, and if you’re not willing to do that then you’re a spoiled brat who is incapable of making grown-up decisions to sacrifice your happiness on the altar of being able to have kids in a SFH neighborhood. Anything short of getting married as young as feasible and buying a house in the furthest-flung sprawl you can afford just so you can pop out your 2.1 babies and drive them to soccer practice, is not a responsible adult decision and therefore represents some aspect of being spoiled — like your general take that suburbanites view urbanism as a sort of vacation luxury for the rich to enjoy, the poor to suffer, and the middle class to only envy from suburban safety.
In my experience, quite a few California NIMBYs are Paul Erlich fans who think humans are a plague. It’s not surprising they don’t care if families have a place to live.
Yep
The high cost of living in many cities is what drives families out. Single people living with roommates have very different requirements than families. I lived in a rowhouse in DC for many years shared with 3 other roommates and knew lots of conservative Catholics in similar living situations. Tiny bedrooms and shared rooms was very typical. For myself and the people I knew, getting married led to children coming quickly which requires more space. I couldn’t have afforded to buy the rowhouse I rented, and the rent split among 4 friends was reasonable but for a married couple alone was too high. As much as I would love to live in Capitol Hill with my 3 kids, I am ok with high cost of living places increasing in density to allow for a filtering process so that my family could find a slightly less desirable, more affordable house that fit our needs.
Thank you for this comment