If people can buy dirt they'll have families.

Yimbyland culture presents an excuse for the fact folk can't buy a house with talk of walkability, liveability and standing on the balcony of a small flat. This is, as those bros say, simply cope

The ‘Yimbyland’ account on X describes itself as “Reurbanizing America Through Abundance” and has this to say:

“The cure to male loneliness is living near your bros in a walkable, mixed use neighborhood.”

This statement is accompanied by an image (possibly AI-generated but maybe the richer bit of Paris’s centre) of two young, slim, contented young men on a balcony surrounded by that European ‘gentle density’. The words and picture present the most perfect illustration of what I call “The Great City of the West”, a playground for rich, educated and, if not always single, definitely childless people in their thirties and forties. Everything about the lifestyle, for all its superficial appeal, is shallow, hedonistic and valueless.

It is nearly a decade since I wrote my *Great City of the West* article where I pointed out that we created an urban culture designed entirely in the interests of and for the benefit of single people and childless couples. In the article I talked about how, in the richest places on Earth, everything was geared towards work and hedonism with no space, literally no space, for families or children:

“Urbanists talk about 'liveability' and 'walkability', about public spaces, even about play - yet the reality of the city is selfish, focused on the here and now rather than on creating places to which people can relate, where they might want to spend their whole lives.

Planners reject suburbia as somehow too naff, 'not our sort of place' and then justify their rejection with tales of sustainability, sprawl and the curse of the motor car. Yet suburbs - at least the one I was brought up in - were liveable, open and child-friendly. They might have been a bit boring for childless, young adults but they weren't boring for children and, mostly, weren't so for grown ups with sheds to do hobbies in, gardens to keep and associations to join.”

More people now recognise the reality of the baby bust in western societies but too often this is seen as a matter of incentives, that if you pull the right economic levers and provide more state support, women will start having more children. But few recognise the huge cultural barrier implicit in the words and images in that Yimbyland post and its 7.5k likes. The people responsible for designing the world in which we live are childless, often single and promote the explicitly anti-child idea of gentle density. We are told that agglomeration is everything, that the human desire for a home and garden must be suppressed because it means public transport is less efficient or there's an unevidenced loss to the economy. Even the advocates of gentle density such as ‘Create Streets’ tell us their ideas are bad for children:

We are told there will be parks and communal gardens mixed with the argument that children should have ‘purposeful’ lives carefully curated by parents, schools and other institutions. It's an environment designed by adults with the idea of a tidy adult existence, not a messier life with children growing up. Like so much of modern thinking around planning and housing, children are an afterthought, an inconvenience to be managed, rather than - as they are for many people - the main reason for having a life.

People recognise the problem: here’s Tory front-bencher Neil O’Brien and researcher Phoebe Arslanagić-Little setting it out (with the help of Phoebe’s child). But the barriers are all presented in purely economic terms; children are expensive, childcare is difficult, rents are high, people can’t afford the space they need for a family. Yet I can’t help but think that the city boosters, advocates of urban agglomeration as an economic lever and the sort of cultural vibe seen in that Yimbyland post are as much of a problem as those economic barriers talked about by Neil and Phoebe. We are told that urban density is essential to make public transport viable, that suburban life is car-dependent, and that making cities more densely populated will save the planet (and the view from the houses of wealthy influential people).

We know (or at least polling tells us) that women have fewer children than they’d prefer and that factors such as career and education contribute to this ‘fertility gap’. In the UK, according to Dr Paula Sheppard, a Lecturer in Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University’s School of Anthropology & Museum Ethnography this fertility gap means that “for every three children wanted only two are born”. Dr Sheppard suggests that the state could play a role but also observes that Scandinavian countries, despite their reputation for child support, do not have noticeably high ‘total fertility rates’ (TFR). With half of women now attending university the result is delayed parenthood but university educated women have a completely different outlook from every other group towards when they should start a family. Here’s Dr Sheppard again:

“University-educated women only start seeing the timing of when they have children as an important decision at age 33. Before this, it seems they do not consider it a pressing issue. This contrasts with all other groups for whom baby timing is a significant factor from the youngest ages (21 for university-educated men and 18 for non-university-educated men and women). This suggests that university-educated women already face limited time to have children, as they do not consider themselves to be delaying parenthood until age 33.”

So part of the problem lies with women who make the choice to have a career before embarking on being a mum. But although access to IVF and other fertility support (as Neil O’Brien urges) is one part of the answer, there’s still a cultural problem as illustrated by “living near your bros in a walkable, mixed use neighborhood”. And this cultural problem is reflected in ‘The Great City of the West’ and the image of urban living as, not only the ideal lifestyle, but also as almost entirely free of children. It’s as if (I’m grateful to Nelson Jones for the reference) we’re living in the world of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang where the child-catcher takes away the children so they don’t inconvenience adult fun.

This culture spills over into the development of our society as we’re told that ‘upzoning’ is essential, how ‘single family zoning’ is terrible, and how suburbs are without soul and killing the planet. Yet when we take the cultural and planning constraints away, what happens? Suburbia happens. People build a house on a plot of land they own or buy a house that someone else has built on a similar plot. Yes some people like an apartment (and in places like Spain this liking is leavened by 25% of the population having a second home outside the city) but the ordinary sort of family wants what the old man advises in Jordan Davis and Luke Bryan’s song, “Buy Dirt”:

“Buy dirt

Find the one you can't live without

Get a ring, let your knee hit the ground

Do what you love but call it work

And throw a little money in the plate at church

Send your prayers up and your roots down deep

Add a few limbs to your family tree

And watch their pencil marks

And the grass in the yard all grow up

'Cause the truth about it is

It all goes by real quick

You can't buy happiness

But you can buy dirt”

Right now too many young people and especially university educated men and women feel that’ve no chance of buying dirt. And the Yimbyland culture presents an excuse for the fact these folk can't buy dirt with talk of walkability, liveability and standing on the balcony of a small flat. This is, as those bros say, simply cope. It’s dirt people want for their family, not a sky-high rent for a sixth floor apartment with at best 20 square feet of outside space.