Dense Family-Oriented Urbanism
As cities struggle with climate change, the high cost of housing, and the toxic racial legacies of land-use zoning, all roads seem to point to a future in which more and more people, in all kinds of households, will live in high-density multifamily housing. This form and formula have proved successful in many cities throughout the world. Yet for a century, most North Americans—many planners and policymakers included—have resisted seeing this kind of housing as aspirational, particularly for those rearing children. For them, the house has remained a normative ideal.
North American cities are densifying for the first time since the introduction of the car. But much of this new development targets the childless and the trend is often attributed to demographic shifts (more households without children) rather than to shifting attitudes and behaviors. The City of Vancouver, B.C., however, suggests a different possibility. For three decades it has had policies requiring family-size apartments in most large buildings and has worked to provide neighborhood amenities oriented toward families with children. And it appears these programs are working.
But before we get to Vancouver, it’s important to understand how entrenched is our assumption that cities are not good places for children. As urban historian Robert Fishman argues in his classic Bourgeois Utopias, this myth started in nineteenth-century England with a new sentimentalization of both nature and childhood, as nouveau riche merchants, factory owners, and professionals moved their families out of the vice-filled, polluted city to protected, economically segregated, and highly-landscaped proto-suburbs. By the early twentieth century, the U.S. real estate industry proclaimed detached houses as necessary for childrearing, as Lawrence Vale writes, and city planners condemned multifamily buildings—and not just overcrowded tenements—as “children-devouring, family-destroying.”
Zoning, particularly as adopted by North American cities coast-to-coast in the 1920s, codified these moralistic anti-density biases. In the majority opinion for the landmark Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co. U.S. Supreme Court case, which upheld that zoning was not a government taking, Justice George Sutherland deemed apartment buildings “mere parasites;” he justified single-family zoning because it would “preserve a more favorable environment in which to rear children.”
Vancouver was no exception. In 1926, the same year as Euclid, the city hired leading private planning consultant Harland Bartholomew & Associates to draft a comprehensive plan and zoning by-law “to prevent the intrusion of apartment houses in single or two-family residential areas.” Even today, over three-fourths of Vancouver’s housing stock is detached. Starting in the 1950s, promoted by a pro-business city government, the city saw a luxury residential tower boom next to downtown targeting childless professionals, in many ways analogous to contemporary U.S. urban revitalization. This caused a backlash, and in the 1970s, a new centrist city government built an equitable medium-density central neighborhood targeting families. It was a success, but too low-density to support the planned neighborhood retail. Importantly, the city interviewed residents who noted under-utilized green spaces and professed a desire for greater density. This prompted design guidelines for denser subsidized housing (Figures 1 and 2).
Figure 1. Housing Families at High-Densities, guidelines published by the City of Vancouver Planning Department, 1978.
Figure 2. Mau Dan Gardens Housing Cooperative. Photographs by Louis L. Thomas 2015.
In 1989, in anticipation of the redevelopment of another formerly industrial waterfront site, the city revised those guidelines to prescribe yet higher densities. Furthermore, these now applied to both subsidized and market-rate buildings. They required a quarter of apartments in new buildings to have at least two bedrooms; in 2016 the city began requiring 10% to have at least three bedrooms. The city also began extracting money from developers in the form of Community Amenity Contributions (CACs) and Development Cost Levies (DCLs) to build family-oriented neighborhood public amenities such as community centers, libraries, daycares, parks, pedestrian and cycling infrastructure, as well as affordable housing.
A recent example of a project shaped by these regulations is the Athletes Village Housing Co-operative (Figure 3), opened in 2011. The building has five stories, eight-four units, and, five years after opening, roughly eighty children. One mother, who moved in with a twelve-year-old, told me she was not planning on having another child but after two years there changed her mind because “there is no better place to have kids in the city.” The co-op also adopted an internal policy to accommodate extended families: a right of first offer to relatives of current residents. Since then, three sets of grandparents have moved in. In addition to facilitating intergenerational communities, policies such as this one ease the burden substantially of the “sandwich generation.”
Figure 3. Athletes’ Village Housing Co-operative. Photograph by Louis L. Thomas 2015.
Another example is the Social (Figure 4), also opened 2011, a four-story podium with a nine-story tower. Here a tight-knit community of parents developed in a market-rate condominium. Early on one resident organized a get-to-know-you barbeque in the (guidelines-required) common space. Safely above traffic on the fifth floor, the patio has “the world’s crappiest playground,” as one parent told me, “but the kids make it work.” With this minimal programming, now some families gather informally on the patio throughout the summer for what they facetiously call “Friday night church.” They have also set up a text-message group for help picking up children from school and other parenting needs that only neighbors can easily fulfill.
Figure 4. The Social Condominium. Top: photograph, 2011, courtesy Patrick Weeks. Bottom: fifth-floor outdoor common space. Photograph by Louis L. Thomas 2015.
There are also neighborhood amenities funded by the city’s policies that support parents. Across the alley from the Social is a community center, daycare, library, and bakery/café. These are all in one building, built in 2009 using developer fees and owned by the city (the building additionally has ninety-eight market-rate residential rental units in a ten-story tower above the library wing). One parent at the Social called this adjacent building “a dream.” Another bluntly said “when the kids are being shitty, library—done.”
“North American cities are densifying. . . . but much of this new development targets the childless.”
But the best evidence I found of a new dense urban idyll was a story by a six-year-old, shared with me by her mother (Figure 5). In it, the girl writes “I live in the Social . . . I love it. We have a rooftop patio . . . We have lots of fun there.” The page is illustrated with a drawing of the crappy playground and all of her friends in the building. It continues, “My favorite thing to do with these kids (except Oliver) is play in a sprinkler [on the patio]. I love the Social because of my friends at the Social . . . I just love our community. The End.” If that’s not an ideal environment for raising children, then I don’t know what is.
Figure 5. “Life at t-he Sochil (sic),” drawn by a six-year-old resident of the Social, 2016. Courtesy Tiffany Hilman.
My research in Vancouver, backed up by preliminary research in Boston; Portland, Oregon; Seattle; and Washington, D.C., has led to two major findings. One is the importance of family-oriented space, as opposed to that oriented just to children (or adults). While playgrounds have their place, they can be purgatory for parents. Preferable are spaces that work for all ages. For building common spaces, these should be neither too precious for children’s abuse, nor dominated by play structures. The common space at the Social is a good example of this balance. For public spaces, they should be integrated among residences, stores, food, caffeine, alcohol, and bathrooms. They should have simple ledges kids can play on, and space for bikes, scooters, chalk drawings, other games, etc. Basically, good plazas work great for families.
The second is that there are two broad categories of urban parents: those committed from the start and those who have been "won over." The committed are self-identified anti-suburbanites. When asked where she grew up, one mother replied “suburban yuck.” Another mother quipped, “the only thing worse than having a baby is having a baby in the suburbs.” The won-over parents, on the other hand, assumed they would move to the suburbs once they had children but then did not. A father of two teens in a high-rise told me that he and his wife had planned to move to the suburbs when the kids started school, but life proved so easy in the city that they stayed. He credited neighborhood amenities achieved through Vancouver policy.
This family-oriented model is already starting to work in some U.S. cities, albeit on a more incremental basis, such as at Portland’s subsidized Romana and Abigail apartments. But even such isolated examples illustrate that the Vancouver model can work Stateside, and that it can be done equitably.
To live sustainably, humans need to consume fewer natural resources. Living in dense, all-age neighborhoods can help. But to do that beyond exceptional centers like New York, we need policies to promote high-density living among families, not just the childless, unattached, and elderly. An equitable, resilient, all-age city is not only obtainable, but could be aspirational even in an overwhelmingly suburban nation like the United States.
