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    San Francisco – die kinderloseste Stadt der USA – könnte ein Blick in die Zukunft Kanadas sein


    San Francisco – die kinderloseste Stadt der USA – könnte ein Blick in die Zukunft Kanadas sein

    https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/article-san-francisco-childless-city-glimpse-into-canadas-future/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

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    6 Kommentare

    1. dekuweku on

      The overpriced real-estate and two tier system of those with property and those without already lines up pretty well with Vancouver or Toronto.

    2. Throwawayhair66392 on

      Politicians are currently trying to socially engineer people into accepting dog crate living spaces as adequate. It’s no wonder.

    3. green_tory on

      > In 2016, as part of San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors (akin to its city council), he commissioned a report to study this. The findings might seem obvious today: That housing and affordability were mostly to blame. Home prices tripled between 2000 and 2020, and the vast majority of that housing was studio and one-bedroom apartments. Just 9 per cent of the city’s housing, the report found, could be considered “affordable and family-friendly.” 

      There’s more to it then that; long working hours, expensive childcare, lacking a family doctor, and so on. But housing is absolutely the first and foremost concern. 

      How can one justify having a child if affording to live _without_ a roommate is becoming something of a luxury for young adults, among even the professionals and certified trades. It’s a simple logistics problem: where does the kid sleep? 

      > Once, this park was a place of play and discovery. But now, in the absence of families, “There’s no sense of community,” he said. “It feels like there’s no buy in from people.”
      > Instead, what you feel walking around San Francisco is a city obsessed with the future. 

      There is no future without children. 

      And if we rely on immigration to maintain population then all we’ve done is off-shore the problem of procreation. One can only imagine the ugliness that encourages, considering how we struggle to cope with labour standards abroad as it is. I don’t think we can assume every country is going to value equity in health care access, or education, or afford parents support in childhood care. Our parental leave policies aren’t broadly matched, for instance. 

      > The perception that she often hears about child-free people, said Ms. McKelvey, is that they’re selfish. But how can it be selfish, she asked, to not want to bring children into this world? She cited among her concerns overpopulation, climate change, the economy and the current political state.

      It’s not selfish, _if that’s all there is to it_.

      But [volunteerism is in crisis](https://carleton.ca/cicp-pcpob/2025/the-volunteer-void/). [Charity is much less common](https://www.canadianaffairs.news/2025/03/31/unbroken-trend-decline-in-charitable-givers-a-problem-for-sector-society/). All while [DINK families are doing great](https://www.theglobeandmail.com/investing/personal-finance/article-childfree-dinks-money-canada/).

      It’s not just that they aren’t choosing to have kids; there’s been a *multi* generational shift away from altruistic behavior and towards self serving consumption.

    4. Jeffgoldbum on

      Everyone is desperate to find some third party cause for the declining birth rates so we can find a profitable solution to it.

      The reality is there isn’t anything to fix

      This *is* the fix of an anomaly we had with the human population because starting about 150 years ago we started to have the ability to keep babies alive and so 2/3 of babies no longer died before adulthood, This caused the human population to explode beyond reason beyond what it should have ever been, yet people have taken that small boom as the default for how we should be.

      We need to adapt to a world where people are going to have less children, not force some handmaids tail on everyone else,

    5. calimehtar on

      San Francisco is notable for a total lack of housing construction, not for tiny condos .In Toronto the areas with the highest concentration of children are those with condos like city place. The lesson we need to learn here is not „stop building shoebox condos“ but rather „make it easy to build all kinds of housing“.

    6. Logical_Delivery_183 on

      It’s easy to point to high housing costs, which is the most obvious culprit, and say if we just solved that problem birth rates would come up.  I for sure think we need to be way less restrictive in our building regulations in order to increase the supply and variety of housing and lower costs, but that by itself we aren’t going to solve the problem.  

      We underestimate the hassle factor having kids is today.  My siblings and cousins were all born in the 60s.  After grade 1 we really didn’t demand all that much from parents.  We got ourselves to school.  We entertained ourselves.  We didn’t do all that much extra-curricular.  Both parents worked and visited with other largely indifferent parents.  The level of planning and organization required to raise a child, by today’s expected standards is beyond most young adults.  

      It’s as if we have lost the institutional memory on how to raise kids as a society, so lowering housing costs won’t magically bring back children.  

      Another factor, which I hate to bring up because it’s so controversial, is the cost of schooling.  Every single one of my younger co-workers‘ kids are in private school.  The parents extra to pay for it, which reduces the ability to have more children.  Anecdotal I know, but I can’t be the only one seeing this.

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