Cities are for families

It's easier to build a village when different types of people can live near each other

Thanks for visiting Nuclear Meltdown. If you’ve ever been to a city, this blog is for you.

A while back, I had a brief conversation with Ivana Greco on Twitter about families living in cities — and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. Ivana — who I haven’t met in real life but whose writing and commentary I very much enjoy — was making the case that for families, it’s nice to have things like a minivan or the ability to buy groceries in bulk and store them in the garage freezer. In other words, she was making the case that suburban life appeals to families for a lot of very good reasons (and that there are policy implications if we actually want to create a more family-friendly world).

But today I want to make the family-based case for city living. I do not deny that the suburbs have a ton of appeal. I grew up in the suburbs, and even today when I visit friends and family in more suburban settings I am constantly tempted to move. I may well move to a suburb at some point in my life.

Nevertheless, my wife and I live in the densest census tract in my state right now and have three small children. And I think there are distinct benefits for families living in that type of place¹ — one of the biggest being that village building is easier in diverse places. In other words, I’m not arguing against the suburbs (or anything else) but rather saying, hey, maybe give the city a second chance.

Diverse housing is magical

For the past few years, five different households from my family (including ours) have lived within walking distance of each other. Two of these households have kids, two are young couples without kids, and one is a single adult. So, we are all in different phases of life.

Part of the reason we were all able to live so close together is because that’s what everyone chose. But a bigger factor is that our neighborhood is filled with different types of housing catering to people in different life stages. My nuclear family and I live in a 2,700 square foot victorian house. The youngest member of this cohort lives in a small apartment. Others live in single family homes, small apartment buildings, and so on.

Because all of these different housing types were right next to each other, we could all live within a short walk even though our means, life circumstances, and housing preferences are different. We saw each other all the time, both for organized get-togethers as well as impromptu encounters on the street.

I love the idea of living in a compound with the people I love. But how do you set that up when everyone has different means and different interests? Well, one answer is that you go to a place where people can do their thing but also be near other people doing other things. So, a city²³.

The long term benefits

There are other benefits to city living as well. A couple of winters ago, we hired a teenager from our church congregation to do some snow shoveling. He also had a second job working at the bakery down the street. I believe he was also doing school. But he didn’t have a car. Both of his jobs, along with other amenities, were within walking distance.

That experience highlights the purpose of cities in the first place, which is to concentrate economic opportunities into one location. Whether that’s a market town in antiquity or my neighborhood today, the whole point is that you want jobs and trade all clumped together. And cities are where that concentration is densest.

Long term, my hope is that this concentration means my kids at least have the chance to stay in their current city — keeping their existing social network — and also choose from a variety of jobs. They can decide to be a doctor or a restaurateur or an artist or a construction manager or whatever, and also still have us nearby to help them out as needed. Maybe they’ll end up making a different choice, but the option will be on the table.

Obviously, the suburbs exist so people can tap into urban job markets without having to actually live in urban settings. And that’s great. But in my most recent post I pointed to research suggesting that even tiny distances between family members significantly reduces interdependence. The village can barely survive even a few miles of separation.

I’ve seen this first hand; the suburb where I grew up was about 30 minutes without traffic from where I eventually lived in central Los Angeles. But we rarely made that drive, and I think that’s generally true for a lot of the people I grew up with who have since left that suburb for the greener pastures of L.A.’s more diverse job market. People see their extended families once or twice a month, but that’s barely a village and not even close to the kind of experience I’ve had where I see family just about every day in my current neighborhood.

I don’t mean to suggest that there are no tradeoffs. Before our current neighborhood, we lived in part of Los Angeles that was pretty rough. One friend jokingly called our street “shanks-ville” and there was copious amounts of human waste and needles on the ground. Once, our garage was burned down in a homeless encampment fire, destroying a majority of the things we owned at the time. I am well aware that city living is not without drawbacks, and I think our experience in that neighborhood highlights the ways that many cities are in practice not actually solving their problems or investing in improvements. The theoretical benefits of cities are being canceled out in some places by bad decision making.

But I don’t think bad leadership in some cities negates the benefits they provide when they work well. People have congregated in cities for a long time, and in living in a city now I’m making a bet that the tradeoffs of cities are worth it for families.

Thanks for checking out Nuclear Meltdown. If you’ve enjoyed this blog, consider sharing it with a friend.

1. This does raise a question about what qualifies as a “city.” Though I live in an urban environment relative to the rest of my state, my neighborhood is a mix of single family homes, small apartment buildings, and a few large complexes. A person from Manhattan probably wouldn’t think of it as a “city.” On the other hand, I have had people from the surrounding suburbs wonder why I live in “the inner city” and “downtown.” My point is that this is somewhat subjective, but at the end of the day I guess most of us have a sense of whether our neighborhood is in a city, a suburb, a rural setting, etc.

2. For a variety of reasons, several members of this family cohort have recently moved away. I think that reflects the failings of our cities’ ability to adapt. My neighborhood has skyrocketed in price, sending some of my siblings further afield as they search for more affordable options. But there’s no reason a neighborhood like mine with a diverse housing stock needs to be as expensive as it is. The reason its expensive is because supply — at the hyper local level and regionally — is constrained and its difficult to build new housing.

3. Of course I don’t mean to suggest that there’s no diversity in the suburbs or other places. I grew up outside Los Angeles, and my high school friend group, for example, was actually quite racially diverse. But also, everyone sort of came from the same slice of the socio-economic spectrum. When there is mainly just one type of housing, there’s a limit on how many different types of people can live in a particular place.