“The stroller ban: are cities anti-kid?” is an interesting and thoughtful article by Ashley McGuire. She and her husband are expecting a child and are moving from the Northern Virginia suburbs to the District of Columbia: the opposite, she notes, of the usual trend of young parents or soon-to-be parents leaving the central city for the suburbs. She would like central cities to be more kid-friendly and notes, accurately, that one reason they aren’t is that real estate in low-crime central city neighborhoods tends to be expensive. I wish her and her family the best.
She is under one delusion, however, the delusion that suburban sprawl is strictly an American phenomenon. “Look around the world,” she writes. “In most countries, families have no choice but to make do in cities. And they do so happily. They learn to live with less. They walk and take public transportation. Children share rooms. Everyone survives.” She should know better, since elsewhere in her article she quotes Joel Kotkin, whose newgeography.com blog shows that her assumption is incorrect. One example: this blogpost on a recent Eurostat report on European metropolitan area populations. It shows that in the two largest metro areas the vast majority of people live not in the central cities but in the suburbs: 76% in metro London, 82% in metro Paris. That pattern is not completely uniform, but I suspect that those metro areas that are the exception to this rule the city limits stretch out into what is recognizably suburban territory, as is the case in some cities in this country (Houston, Jacksonville, Louisville). Sprawl is not strictly an American phenomenon. There’s lots of sprawl in Europe.
