America’s urban rebirth is missing actual births
I look at it a little differently. The urban cores in the USA are actively hostile places for anyone to be. You step outside your door...into an empty hallway of doors. You take an elevator or stairs down to a place with a few mailboxes, then step outside.<p>Outside, you have a narrow strip of concrete, possibly with a few trees, that you are allowed to inhabit. Beyond it is as asphalt with two ton steel contraptions whizzing past at speeds that will maim or kill you.<p>There are a few places you can go from here. There are a few parks, where you can have some green space, along with the sound of the steel contraptions. There are other strips of concrete throughout the city between the contraptions&#x27; domain and the buildings. There are places you can pay to be allowed to occupy for a time. There are places you are paid to be for some number of hours each day. And there&#x27;s the public library if you can reach it.<p>If you&#x27;re responsible for just you and have access to a ready stream of money, you can cobble together an okay existence from this. You escape into intellectual pursuits in your small housing box. You spend lots of hours at the place you are paid to be. You visit your friends&#x27; small housing boxes. You spend some money to have somewhere else to go from time to time.<p>If you have small children, this changes. Intellectual pursuits? They can&#x27;t read yet, so your only option is parking them in front of videos. It hurts to see their faces go slack and their motions grow spastic. You spend time taking them to visit their friends in other boxes and meeting their friends at the park. You breathe a sigh of relief when they enter school, since now they have a place to be analogous to the place you are paid to be. You can&#x27;t let them outside to play on the narrow strips of concrete. One false move and some yahoo in a steel contraption has killed them.<p>If you want families in the city, bulldoze the major urban cores and replace them with low rise cohousing communities. Cars are parked on the edge. Everyone lives in spaces that face onto communal spaces. Community centers become focal points in each block, along with lots of other public space, indoors and out, instead of turning it all over to commercial interests. Short of that, if you want to raise a family and you have the means, you buy your own place that has its own small park and inside space to play. Everyone is cut off and must own the same amenities because of the tyranny of commercial space and cars over the ground level of the city.