Are we Ready for a Childless City?

A couple of years ago, former deputy mayor Doug Holyday made headlines when he said downtown Toronto was unfit for children. Hard to say whether he was being obtuse deliberately or merely being obtuse when he talked about children playing in traffic on King Street. When then-acting chief planner Gregg Lintern said “it just makes for a healthier city” to have families living downtown, Holyday mocked him. Holyday later said he was “willing to leave the choice up to (parents).” Ain’t that grand of him? “There are healthier places to raise children,” he insisted. Holyday summed up the essence of his argument succinctly enough: “It’s not the place I’d choose.”  (And don’t we all think that what we choose is the only “right” choice?)

This is a faulty-logic argument that never fails to get my hackles up. The only places inherently unhealthy to raise children are garbage dumps and nuclear test sites. Everything else is just choices. Try telling parents in Tokyo, Rome or Manhattan that they’ve made an unhealthy (read: selfish, uninformed, not what Holyday would do) choice and see where it gets you.

Most of the stresses cited in the numerous articles like “Stress While Raising Children in Inner Cities”  in the Journal of the National Medical Association in 2005 — lack of exercise and healthy foods, crime, insufficient medical care — aren’t the result of city living, but of poverty. They aren’t interchangeable, so why do we keep acting like the city itself is a second-rate place for kids? We’re building condo communities with amenities that are on par with the finest the suburbs can offer — and without the need to drive anywhere — and yet we’re in danger of creating an inner city where only the poor are raising children.

We’re conditioned to think that you have to head for the ‘burbs when the kids come along, but this is a uniquely North American mindset, largely a simple case of wanting to give our kids the things we didn’t have. Our immigrant parents grew up with either too little space in a crowded city or an unwieldy abundance of it in services-strapped rural areas where they worked on the family farm as soon as they were old enough to walk. The suburbs seem like the perfect antidote to a hard-knock life – vast expanses of green lawn, low crime rates, little (at least visible) poverty.

But why are we, in this generation, still running away from the city? Are the values we lump in with suburban living really that much better for our kids? Are bottleneck commutes better than public transit? Is taking a stroller on the subway any less of a pain in the butt than loading it in and out of a Dodge Caravan? Would you rather risk your kid’s getting mugged for his iPod or crashing the family sedan on a back street somewhere? We can’t raise them in bubbles, no matter where we go.

Kids know what they live. City kids don’t envy suburban kids, nor vice versa. Their lives are what we make them. If we tell them — or more importantly, act like — the city is dirty, unsafe and unhealthy, that’s what they’ll think. If we put the emphasis on its diversity, dynamics, and cultural opportunities, they’ll think it’s a wonderland. To very badly paraphrase Henry Ford, whether you think the inner city is a great place to raise kids, or you think it’s utter garbage, you’re right.

In a 2009 article I ran across in the New York Times by Lisa Belkin about raising your kids in the city versus the suburbs, the author relates the story of her son’s first mugging. In the boroughs, she says, it’s a rite of passage. Her suburban friends freak out just hearing about it, and pat themselves on the back for moving to Scarsdale, but as she says, “What I don’t tell them is that I am actually more afraid of visiting them than they are of visiting me. For one thing, I have an irrational fear of suburban basements; I can get myself quite worked up imagining all the Stephen King-like things that go on down there. Teenage drivers freak me out too. Some parents say a teen’s first fender-bender is the suburban equivalent of the city kid’s first mugging, but at least in a mugging, my kid isn’t the perp.”

If we don’t start now to create a city that at least offers the potential for child-rearing, the choice will be taken from us. There won’t be three-bedroom condo units, nor schools, nor daycares, let alone splash pads or playgrounds. We need to think about the city of the future. The fact is that we’re kids for a very short time, and once we’re grown, we’ll decide where we want to live for ourselves, and it will likely be the opposite of whatever our parents chose, because that’s what every generation does.

Let’s stop trying to pretend we’re all the same, with the same priorities and proclivities, and just get on with the business of raising good adults.