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Title: Making Metros Family-Friendly: Rankings and Suggestions
Citation Type: Miscellaneous
Publication Year: 2023
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Abstract: The declining presence of children in the nation’s dense urban areas has been a matter of concern for years, and this trend has only continued since the 2020 pandemic. In light of this pattern, this report assesses the family-friendliness of more than 200 metro areas across the U.S., using a wide variety of data sources, including the Census Bureau’s 2017–21 American Community Survey. It discusses which places have the most children, where families with children choose to move, and how metros fare on measures of well-being such as educational achievement, social mobility, social capital, and child poverty.An accompanying data tool that I created allows readers to see how well each of these variables correlates with all the others.1 Cost of living emerges as an overwhelming theme of these correlations: the metros that are home to the most children, as well as the metros attracting the most family migration, do not strongly tend to be the ones with, for example, high educational achievement, low child mortality and homicide rates, and strong upward mobility. Some of these correlations are even in the “wrong” direction. Rather, the metros that are objectively attractive to families are the ones with low cost of living, including affordable housing and child care.This report also offers suggestions as to how cities and other levels of government might make urban living more attractive to families with children. The single biggest suggestion is to bring down the cost of housing by increasing supply, which is currently held back by intense zoning regulations. Major metro areas cannot compete directly with the combination of advantages that smaller ones boast—cheaper housing plus more space—but they certainly can make housing more affordable, continue to offer their own cultural and economic advantages (areas where smaller cities cannot compete), and make public spaces more accessible and friendly to children.
Url: https://manhattan.institute/article/making-metros-family-friendly-rankings-and-suggestions
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Authors: Verbruggen, Robert
Publisher: Manhattan Institute
Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Family and Marriage, Housing and Segregation, Land Use/Urban Organization
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