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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]GGW is very much a pro-developer website. They push anything that supports greater urbanization and density, which aligns nicely with the real estate industry's goals.[/quote]

Being YIMBY is not being pro-developer.  But yeah, "developer" is not a dirty word if you're interested in increasing affordable housing and livable cities.  [/quote]

Developers don't care about affordable housing. [/quote]

Well limiting the supply of housing surely isn't going to make it more affordable, or make cities more livable. (Unless your goal is to keep your neighborhood from changing at all, in which case, you're not really pro affordable housing either, most likely.) [/quote]

Have you been to New York City? They've packed as many people in as humanly possible, and it is neither affordable nor livable. [/quote]

[b]I find NYC very livable.[/b] And limiting housing construction would not increase affordability, obviously. (PS: nobody every said that increasing density is all that's needed, but the converse -- being paranoidly anti-developer -- is only going to hurt, not help.)[/quote]

You obviously don't have kids. [/quote]

I have relatives raising kids in Brooklyn. Not sure how you can argue against 2 subway stops within 5 minutes, grocery store down the block, public school on the same block, Prospect Park 10 minutes away, Brooklyn library, etc etc etc ... [/quote]

Ha. Famous last words. Just try it. I love NYC but the idea of raising kids in a little apartment sounds like torture. That's why everyone leaves the city when they have kids -- because they need more space, and no one except the very rich can afford to buy a house there. [/quote]

You need to get out of your bubble. Lots of people have kids in NYC and gasp! Even in DC in apartments. People like you are the worst.[/quote]

You need to get out of your little fantasy world. Look at the stats. There are waaaaay fewer children in NYC, especially Manhattan and Brooklyn, than other major cities, not to mention non-major cities. Why do you think that happens? Do you think all these people who moved to NYC in their twenties all just, by coincidence, happen to leave when they have kids? [/quote]

Care to cite those statistics? The last census data shows 6.5% of the New York City population is under 5 (roughly in line with the 6.1% in the US as a whole) and 21% are under 18. This is lower than the country as a whole (22.4%), but higher than DC proper (18.1%), in line with Chicago (21.5%), higher than Boston (16.3%), etc. It seems like NYC mostly reflects the country as a whole and for a larger city has, if anything, a higher than expected number of kids.[/quote]

Look, this isn't something I'm just making up. There's been lots written about this. For example: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/where-have-all-the-children-gone/594133/

To quote:

"New York is the poster child of this urban renaissance. But as the city has attracted more wealth, housing prices have soared alongside the skyscrapers, and young families have found staying put with school-age children more difficult. Since 2011, the number of babies born in New York has declined 9 percent in the five boroughs and 15 percent in Manhattan. (At this rate, Manhattan’s infant population will halve in 30 years.) In that same period, the net number of New York residents leaving the city has more than doubled. There are many reasons New York might be shrinking, but most of them come down to the same unavoidable fact: Raising a family in the city is just too hard. And the same could be said of pretty much every other dense and expensive urban area in the country."

Also, you're being a little disingenuous when you 1. argue for more density and then 2. rely on numbers that are puffed up by areas of NYC that aren't densely populated. Look at Manhattan. 14 percent of the population is under the age of 18. That's almost half the national average. Those numbers get pushed back up when you start including figures from Queens, Staten Island, etc. [/quote]

Queens is the fourth most densely populated county in America; it's almost twice as dense as DC. Brooklyn which is even denser (3x DC more or less) has almost 23% of it's population under 18, more than Staten Island (though not by a lot). I don't think you're making it up, but I do think you're falling for a story that gets told a lot, but isn't true. Millions of people happily raise kids in New York, they're mostly not people who read The Atlantic, so they're not part of the narrative, but they're in the data.

Moreover, your entire argument is a red herring because Manhattan level density levels aren't coming to anywhere near you. Pushing for density in the DC area is about pushing for things to be like Queens, where apparently people love to raise kids. Even you admit that.[/quote]

Actually, parts of DC -- which just happen to be the parts where people want to add density -- are already more densely populated than Queens or Staten Island or even parts of Brooklyn. We have multiple neighborhoods with more than 80,000 people per square mile. [/quote]

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