The article's title is
Vibrant Cities Find One Thing Missing: Children, but that's the
message. Never actually defining 'vibrant', though it seems to mean
young, wealthy, adults who choose where to live based on
availability of 'dense vertical housing, fashionable restaurants
and shops and mass transit that makes a car unnecessary', the
Times mentions Portland, Ore., San Francisco, and Seattle:
San Francisco, where the median house price is now
about $700,000, had the lowest percentage of people under 18 of any
large city in the nation, 14.5 percent, compared with 25.7 percent
nationwide, the 2000 census reported. Seattle, where there are more
dogs than children, was a close second. Boston, Honolulu, Portland,
Miami, Denver, Minneapolis, Austin and Atlanta, all considered,
healthy, vibrant urban areas, were not far behind.
The article misleadingly cites
national birth statistics
('The problem is not just that American women are having fewer
children, reflected in the lowest birth rate ever recorded in the
country. ... Nationally, the birthrate has been dropping while the
overall population is aging as life expectancy increases.') without
looking at birth rates in the very cities it focusses on, and
without comparing those cities with other places in the country.
While 'the number of [Portland's] school-age children grew by only
three between the census counts in 1990 and 2000', Wake County,
North Carolina, where I live, 'picked up 5,098 new students this
[school] year and could gain 4,000 to 5,000 more this fall. ...'
(
Wake
growth bears $107 million tag in the March 16, 2005,
News
& Observer).
What's so 'vibrant' about places where folks measure their
satisfaction with buying stuff, eating out in fancy places and
generally being so self-absorbed that they don't see how barren
life is without kids, theirs and other families'? Sounds like these
people never grew out of adolescence, when new things, belonging to
cliques and short term entertainment were values: examples of
immaturity. And the folks taking up space in Portland, Seattle and
the other cities in the
Times' story aren't forward looking
in a social sense, only in money terms.