The Real Reason Birth Rates Are Falling - Lyman Stone - #962

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
How did you get into Neighborhood Design Beef on Twitter?

**Lyman Stone** (0:06)
Oh, so, I mean, somebody shared a photo of, it was like an aerial photo of some neighborhood in Phoenix, and they were like, how would it, I forget what exactly was, but like, how would any human ever want to live here? I was like, I mean, it looks like kind of a nice neighborhood, like people have pools in their backyard. It doesn't have like a big highway cutting through it or anything. I street viewed the neighborhood. There's a bunch of parks in the neighborhood, like in street view, you can see kids playing in the parks. Like clearly people enjoy this neighborhood. I also looked up like the Zillow on it, like houses in this neighborhood, or like people clearly want to live here from the prices they're paying. So I said like, you know, I don't know, it looks like a nice neighborhood. Like it looks pretty nice to me. And the thing that really set people off is I said, it looked relatively walkable. And what I mean by that is it's like, you can look up the census tract. It's a density of like 9,000 people per square mile, which is considerably, considerably above the US average, right? And if you look at the street grid, like it's quite compact lots. These are not like half acre lots or something. They're like quite compact lots. You could very easily walk around. I could envision my kids going to play at any of the many parks in the neighborhood. There's a school on the edge of the neighborhood. Kids could walk to school.
But people really were mad that I called this neighborhood walkable. They're like nothing in Phoenix is walkable. It's 110 degrees in the summer. I'm like, okay, man. When I lived in Montreal, it was like negative 10 degrees, 11 months out of the year. I didn't think that was very walkable either, but whatever. So yeah, people didn't like the take.

**Chris Williamson** (1:50)
Where do you think that's coming from? What's the underlying impetus of that, the motivation for them being so upset at you?

**Lyman Stone** (2:00)
So a lot of people said, okay, but walkable to what? There's no bars, there's no restaurant in the neighborhood. What are you walking to? And I was like, I mean, 90% of the time, when we walk somewhere, whether in my current neighborhood or when I lived in Montreal or when I lived in Hong Kong, most of the walking we did was not walking to what. It was walking to who, right? We're like, oh, we're gonna go to a neighbor's house and the kids are gonna play at the neighbor's house. We're gonna go and visit someone. And it looked like a neighborhood where like, you know, a lot of my friends could get houses. My family could get houses, like we could all live close together and we could walk to each other without having to cross like a major highway or some crap like that. So when I looked at it, I looked at houses clustered close together, houses that look like they have families in them, lots of parks. And I said, oh, there's clearly a neighborhood where there's a lot of whos that you might walk to. My kids are going to have friends in this neighborhood. But basically a lot of people who are going to remain childless until the day they die, looked at it and were like, oh, but where's my boutique concert venue?
Sorry, that was like a really hostile way of putting it.

**Chris Williamson** (3:14)
Well, people who don't have kids and people who do have kids, even people that are married and people who aren't married, have very different-

**Lyman Stone** (3:21)
We look at the world in different ways.

**Chris Williamson** (3:24)
That's correct. Is it not Nassim Taleb that says the world is split into two groups of people, those who have kids and those who don't? Like the second group will never understand the first?

**Lyman Stone** (3:33)
Little things. The neighborhood I lived in in Montreal had a crazy high walk. It's rated one of the most walkable, cyclable neighborhoods in North America. It was lovely. I enjoyed it. But I didn't think it was very walkable. The reason is, yes, there's a lot of stuff around. But Montreal's public works program is basically controlled by the Mafia. They do a terrible job maintaining the roads and the sidewalks. As a result, you really can't push a stroller on half of the sidewalks. They're too hotholed. If I can't push a stroller there, it's not walkable because when I'm walking, I'm pushing a stroller.