I know that this is taking me quickly beyond issues that I have any real competence to discuss, or at least those with respect to which I have anything halfway concrete to say, but I feel a burning need to weigh in on the questions raised by Ross Douthat’s post about cost-of-living statistics and family-friendly tax policies. He writes:
I would also note that when I say the “cost of living” I really mean the “cost of raising children,” since a childless couple in NYC or DC making $150,000 annually enjoys a vastly different lifestyle than a couple trying to raise 2 or 3 school-age children on the same salary. This distinction is worth pondering in the context of the debate over whether conservatives should push for child-friendly tax policy; it’s also worth pondering the context of the desuburbanization agenda beloved of progressives nowadays. You’ll frequently hear Ezra and Matt, among others, lamenting the latticework of subsidies and tax breaks that incentivize Americans to buy biggish homes in spread-out suburbs and exurbs, rather than clustering more efficiently in inner-ring ‘burbs, medium-sized towns and urban cores. But of course these policies don’t just redistribute people from energy-saving cities to gas-guzzling exurbs; they also effectively redistribute money away from the singletons, childless couples and small families who are more likely to be drawn to urban areas, and to the larger families that are more likely to be drawn to bigger yards, quieter streets, and houses with 3-5 bedrooms.
As I’ve said before, though, it seems to me that the link between urban living and unfriendliness to family formation has been greatly exaggerated:
My wife and I live in an expensive, semi-urban city [that of Berkeley, California, by the way], and we’ve found that we can make do quite well on a very restricted income. But this is only possible because we limit our spending in lots of ways – we have a one-bedroom apartment and our one-year-old shares our bed with us (though now he does have one of his own), we hardly use the car more than once or twice a week, we mostly eat grains and beans instead of meat, and so on. What we’ve found, though, is that most of what we’d been told about how Incredibly Expensive it would be to have a child was a myth: it’s built on the assumption that you’re going to pay thousands of dollars for countless things (offhand: an extra bedroom with all the trimmings, a crib, a basinette, a tub for the baby, a swing, a “bouncy seat”, a stroller, a fancy car seat, a breast pump, formula, bottles, a bottle warmer, canned baby food, baby sitting and day care, and dozens of cheaply-made plastic toys) that you just don’t need. Cut out those expenses, and (factoring out medical costs, which are a topic for another post) having a child costs about as much as having a cat.
In fact, I would argue that in lots of ways, urban family life as we’ve been living it is actually less expensive than life in the sprawling suburbs: to name just a few things, we pretty much never have to drive to get places, our son can play at the park down the street and so we don’t need a back yard, and we can buy cheap, healthy food from the (decidedly un-super-) market down the street instead of having to schlep over to Whole Foods. And so when we go to visit family in the Virginia ‘burbs, we quickly find ourselves spending loads more money than we do when we’re in urban, high-cost-of-living Northern California.
So suppose we make a distinction between de-facto-cost-of-raising-children on the one hand, and real-cost-of-raising-children on the other. I’m no economist, and so I really have no idea what it would mean to calculate these kinds of things, but what I’m suggesting is that while the de facto “cost” of living in cities and urban areas is high, and so those kinds of communities are de facto unfriendly to family life, their real cost – that’s to say, the cost for what’s actually required to get by comfortably – can actually be distinctively family-friendly. That’s my proposal, anyway, and I’d love to be able to work it out in some more detail.
Now consider the way that Ross ends his post:
… all things being equal, it’s worth keeping in mind what when progressives talk about fighting sprawl and incentivizing re-urbanization, they’re often talking about making it vastly more expensive to raise kids the way most Americans want to raise them [emphasis mine - JLS].
And there’s the rub, right? Most Americans want to raise their kids with a bedroom each, a nursery from day one, strollers, baby food, formula, daycare, fancy carseats for all the driving, big backyards, and private schooling. That’s what they want, and that’s why the de facto costs of raising a family in urban areas are so high. But it’s also far more than what they need (and, I would submit, it’s also quite different from what’s actually best for them and their children), and so it seems to me that what pro-family conservatives (and progressives!) ought to be doing in response to the flight from the suburbs is not to try and combat it by giving families a reason to “give sprawl a chance”, but to work on redeeming our cities and denser suburbs as places that can be family-friendly in their own right, and showing families how to make urban life work for them.
Filed under: conservatism, family, government/law, politics, taxation, urbanism
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