The Natalist Case For Sprawl (And Why It Fails)

One common argument against city life and in favor of car-dependent suburban sprawl is that suburbs are better for birth rates and families. A recent article in the pro-Trump Federalist website (which I wrote about in my most recent blog post) makes the argument in an inflammatory way: “It’s frankly absurd that conservatives — who are pro-family — would entertain the idea of cramming kids into tiny apartments with no yards. How exactly are parents supposed to raise multiple children in a 600-square-foot box? Where are kids supposed to play? On a rooftop patio shared with strangers?“

It seems obvious to me that this argument is based on a false dichotomy: either you live in conventional suburbia, or you live in “tiny apartments.” Obviously, there are plenty of walkable urban (or almost-urban) places that aren’t 600-square-foot boxes. 

For example, Boro Park, a Hasidic Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn, has a Walkscore of 83 and just over 60,000 people per square mile, about 70 percent higher than the citywide average. If you walk through Boro Park, you will see some single-family homes and apartment buildings, but a lot of what urban planners call “missing middle” housing: houses with two to four families. Only about 27 percent of households own houses, far below the national average.

And yet Boro Park has the New York City's highest birth rate, and in the neighborhood's major zip code (11219) 33 percent of residents are under 16. By contrast, in the zip code where I grew up (30327 in Atlanta), which is dominated by houses on two-acre lots, only 20 percent of residents are under 18. And in suburban Suffolk County, New York, where I work, only 17 percent are under 18. Even though Boro Park is hardly typical, it does appear that some urban neighborhoods are capable of generating high birth rates.

Moreover, suburbanization has not been a success in this area. Defenders of suburbanization argue that suburbanization must work because Americans have been voting with their feet for suburbia: for example, the Federalist article states that “when given the freedom to choose, people didn’t flock downtown but instead stampeded to the suburbs.”*

So as suburbs have grown, birth rates must be growing, right? Wrong. In 1960, the U.S. had 23 births per 1000 people.  Over the next two decades, central cities declined rapidly and so did birth rates — to 15 per 1000 in 1980. Since then, birth rates have continued to decline at a slower pace, to their current level of 12 per 1000. In other words, birth rates have plummeted as suburbia has grown. 

The Federalist article’s only concrete policy ideas are a vague endorsement of “policies that encourage more single-family homes” and opposition to the Obama administration’s fair housing proposals, which they claim would “impose high-density housing in suburban areas, effectively eroding local control over zoning laws.” In other words, the authors seem to believe that if you wipe out alternatives to single-family houses, people will a) start moving into single-family homes and b) start making babies.

But this of course makes no sense. Let us imagine that a city bans everything that is not a single-family house: no more condos, no more apartments. This means that everyone who is not currently living in a single-family house will compete for those houses, thus increasing demand for single-family houses. Thus, single-family houses will become more expensive, and more families will be priced out of those houses. In other words, exclusionary zoning reduces, rather than increasing, homeownership. And if the city stigmatizes smaller single-family homes as “high-density housing”, then fewer single-family homes will be available, thus ensuring that such housing will be even more scarce and expensive.

Let’s suppose that the city government is somewhat more enlightened and solves the problem by permitting lots and lots of single-family houses. Indeed, this seems similar to midcentury U.S. policies: home ownership rose from about 62% in 1960 to 67% in 2020. So, surely, birth rates should have risen? Actually, no. As noted above, birth rates imploded. Suburbanization and home ownership may have their virtues, but as pronatalist tools, they don't do the job.

*Incidentally, I reject the notion that Americans have unlimited  “freedom to choose.” As I have pointed out in a book and in numerous articles, government land use and transportation policies load the dice in favor of car-dependent suburbia in a variety of ways: education policy ensures that urban schools are more poverty-packed than suburban schools, government road spending artificially encourages suburbanization, wide state-built roads make walking more dangerous and cities less livable, and zoning keeps urban housing scarce and expensive while making suburbs unwalkable.