There's a conventional school of thought that the best place to raise a kid is in the suburbs. Walkable, urban centers are great for young singles, but when it comes time to grow your family, the default assumption is that it's time to move on. Anecdotally, I can tell you that, now that we're expecting, some people assume we're obviously going to move from our condominium in the city to a low-rise house somewhere else.

But this viewpoint also shows up in the data. According to a recent article from The Economist, between 2010 and 2024, the total population aged under 18 declined by 22% in Chicago, by 23% in Los Angeles, and by 12% in New York. These figures are the sort of thing that lead some people to conclude that the suburbs are simply a natural market outcome. It's what families want, right?

However, it turns out this isn't universally true! The same dataset also reveals a clear exception: rich white families. Over the same time period, the number of white children grew by 6% in Chicago, by 13% in Brooklyn, and by a staggering 62% in Washington, DC. In certain inner-city neighbourhoods in Chicago, namely Wicker Park, the number of white children has increased by 39% and 94% (based on the two zip codes that make up the area).

Here's what's going on:

Families are mostly not moving in; rather people are moving to suburbs less once they become parents. Eric Johnson, a software engineer who grew up in Elgin, an outer suburb of Chicago, now has a ten-month-old baby in hipstery Logan Square. “We love the farmers market…I like not having to drive,” he says. Sara Weston-Shea, a social worker, grew up in suburban New Jersey and now has two children in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. “We can just easily access the wonderful resources that a city has, the arts, music, whenever,” she says. She likes that her kids are growing up in a multicultural neighbourhood, and that she can cart them around on a cargo bike.

What this tells us is that, no, the suburbs aren't necessarily a de facto market outcome for everyone. There are families who have the means to live wherever they want, and they are choosing walkable, transit-oriented urban communities. These are crucial data points because if rich white families are making this decision, how many others would do the same if only they had the means or, more importantly, if we were able to deliver more housing within their means?

This is a core city-building thesis of mine. There are families who move to the suburbs because that's what they prefer, and that's totally cool. But there's also a segment of the market that moves because they have no other choice. How big this segment actually is can only be accurately determined by figuring out how to meet that demand. And that's why addressing this need is one of the great opportunities and challenges facing large cities today.

Cover photo by Brad Knight on Unsplash