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Tag families

Cities for families?

In response to David Albouy & Jason Faberman’s new NBER paper, Skills, Migration and Urban Amenities over the Life Cycle, Lyman Stone asks if this means that cities will always have lower fertility? I think the answer is probably yes, but that’s extrapolating beyond the paper at hand. What this paper shows is that there will always be some regions that are a better (worse) deal for parents relative to non-parents. The paper First, here’s Albouy & Faberman’s abstract, with emphasis added. TL;DR: there’s no point paying to live in Honolulu if you’re going to stay at home and watch Bluey every night. We examine sorting behavior across metropolitan areas by skill over individuals’ life cycles. We show that high-skill workers disproportionately sort into high-amenity areas, but do so relatively early in life. Workers of all skill levels tend to move towards lower-amenity areas during their thirties and forties. Consequently, individuals’ time use and expenditures on activities related to local amenities are U-shaped over the life cycle. This contrasts with well-documented life-cycle consumption profiles, which have an opposite inverted-U shape. We present evidence that the move towards lower-amenity (and lower-cost) metropolitan areas is driven by changes in the number of household children over the life cycle: individuals, particularly the college educated, tend to move towards lower-amenity areas after having their first child. We develop an equilibrium model of location choice, labor supply, and amenity consumption and introduce life-cycle changes in household compo! sition that affect leisure preferences, consumption choices, and required home production time. Key to the model is a complementarity between leisure time spent going out and local amenities, which we estimate to be large and significant. Ignoring this complementarity and the distinction between types of leisure misses the dampening effect child rearing has on urban agglomeration. Since the […]

what about singles?

Both smart growth supporters and sprawl apologists focus on the needs of families with children: sprawl defenders argue that only suburbia can accommodate the desires of parents, while some smart growth types argue that cities should require lots of two- and three-bedroom units downtown because families need a lot of space. But a current exhibit at the National Building Museum in Washington suggests that this focus is a bit misguided.  The exhibit points out that nearly 30 percent of U.S. households are singles living alone.  Judging from all the planning-media blather about families, one might think that the housing market is focused on their needs, and that 30 percent or even more of the housing stock consisted of single-sized units. But the exhibit points out that in fact, less than 1 percent of housing units are studios, and about 12 percent are one-bedrooms.  So family-oriented units are in fact overrepresented in the housing stock. Larger units may  not dominate downtown, but they start to dominate pretty close to downtown.  For example, when I looked at zillow.com I discovered that downtown Pittsburgh is dominated by one-bedroom units, but in zip code 15203 just south of downtown, 3/4 of housing units available for rent or sale have two or more bedrooms, including 80 out of 115 rental apartment listings.    In zip code 15202 just northeast of downtown, 34 of 60 rental apartment listings, and 71 percent of all rental listings have two or more bedrooms. Of course, Pittsburgh is a pretty family-oriented city.  But even in Washington’s 20036 zip code (a wealthy downtown neighborhood) 1/3 of all listings are for two or more bedrooms.  And if you go just two subway stops north to Cleveland Park (zip code 20008) 108 out of 174 listings have two or more bedrooms. What about […]

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