I'm always pleased to run across one of Tim Egan's articles in the New York Times. Egan is the Times' Pacific Northwest reporter, I'm a native Seattleite, and somehow I've always felt a certain simpatico with Egan's preoccupations and writing style.

Last March I noticed Egan's byline on a Times sitting in the bottom compartment of a blue mesh drugstore newspaper dispenser, so I picked up the paper, only to be quickly bummed out by a statistic about my hometown. The statistic? Seattle is now home to more dogs than children.

Now, it's not that I'm opposed to dogs. But Seattle – and here I mean the city of Seattle proper, where I spent my boyhood – used to be such a great place for kids. How could it be possible that there are now fewer people under eighteen percentage-wise in Seattle than in any city in the country besides San Francisco?

But on a recent trip home for my sister's wedding I ran into proof positive that the numbers cited in Egan's article do not lie. I had taken my four-year-old son to check out a big new playground at Magnuson Park, located on the gorgeous, windswept site of the old Sand Point Naval Air Station on Lake Washington.

I used to go to Magnuson Park on my bike as a teenager looking for solitude, so I wasn't surprised to see only two or three kid-parent units at the playground. The park, while well used and loved, had always been a quiet, moody place.

Not, however, the new fenced dog run adjacent to the play structures. Here a pack of at least twenty-five delighted pooches yipped and caroused. Many of the dogs were purebreds, and most were large. A closer look revealed that the bulk of the happy canines were enrolled in doggie day care arrangements, professionally babysat while their doting masters and mistresses were away at work.

Several day care packs cycled through the dog run while my son moved up and down innovative faux rock climbing structures. Meanwhile one of the three families who were at the playground when we arrived drifted home for lunch.

Childless from San Francisco to Seoul

Seattle is hardly the only child poor US city. According to Egan's article, Boston, Honolulu, Washington, Miami, Atlanta, Austin, Portland, Pittsburgh, and Denver join Seattle and San Francisco on the list of cities with the lowest percentage of kids under 18. The hipper and more stylish the city, it would seem, the fewer the kids. Pittsburgh's inclusion on the list may only be the exception that proves the rule.

The same trend is well advanced in other rich countries. Paris, the original hip and stylish city, has long struggled without great success to coax young French couples to have babies. Seoul's birth rate has fallen 33 percent since 1993, according to writer and urbanist Joel Kotkin, and South Korea as a whole is quite suddenly on a fast track toward becoming an "ultra-aged" society.

Of course, there are a few places that run counter to the trend. Brooklyn New York, where I lived for seven years before moving to my current home in Sacramento, was both highly hip and loaded with kids. In many neighborhoods it felt like you had to be careful not to get run down by mamas with strollers on the sidewalk.

On the other hand, Brooklyn's surplus of small children always felt like a mirror to the relative deficit of kids across the river in Manhattan. Brooklyn is also lucky to yet again be a destination of choice for aspiring (and fecund) immigrants from around the world.

Prosperity without abundance

But fortune has clearly shined in her own way on Seattle. In contrast to Brooklyn, moreover, Seattle looks on the surface like an incredibly attractive place to raise kids. The city enjoys a wealth of great parks and playgrounds, excellent branch libraries, a solid aquarium, and a world-class zoo. The public transportation system is imperfect but much better than in most American cities, providing teenagers real mobility without the need to drive. Even the public schools are hardly an urban basket case. My high school alma mater, named after Teddy Roosevelt, has reliably churned out college bound students for generations. Its jazz band wins national awards. Millions are currently being invested in Roosevelt's physical plant, as construction crews gut the interior of the fond old brick pile and rebuild a modern school from within.

Seattle, in other words, hardly lacks for child-friendly amenities and public investments. The city is also rich – far wealthier than was the case when I was growing up there. But the new wealth is, almost without a doubt, a big part of the reason for the lack of kids. Housing prices are through the roof, and the new culture imposed by the new high tech economy is all about long hours, dedication to the cause, and personal identity as a full-time project. Even the suburbs are no longer an escape. Microsoft after all is headquartered in suburban Redmond.

In a way, prosperity has robbed Seattle of some of its sense of spaciousness and abundance. It certainly seems to have contributed to the evolution of city with fewer children.

Choice

The reasons behind the lack of children in hip cities like Seattle, I think, run deeper than expensive real estate and hectic lifestyles and the related downsides of prosperity. To a large degree low birthrates are a matter of choice.

Conservative intellectual Stanley Kurtz formulates one rather bald version of this case. "Secularism, individualism, and feminism are tied to a social system that discourages fertility. If a low fertility world is unsustainable, then these cultural trends may be unsustainable was well."

I'm personally fond of secularism, individualism, and feminism. But Kurtz is onto something real. Women have recently enjoyed previously unavailable freedoms not to have children, and are exercising these freedoms. This is true globally, not just in big first world cities like Seattle and Seoul, but in places like Mexico and the Middle East associated in the popular imagination with high birthrates. In China, the one-child policy is producing lots of families with one child – not to mention a lack of girl children that may eventually "lock-in" population decline. Worldwide, the United Nations projects that population will continue to increase over the near-term. But the bulk of that increase will consist of aging people living in societies where there are fewer children.

Writer Philip Longman, in his 2004 book The Empty Cradle makes an extended case for why everyone, not just conservatives like Kurtz, should be troubled about the shift to a world with lots of old people but few kids. Perhaps the most fundamental reason he cites is that while falling birthrates may actually induce economic growth in the short-term (as young people invest in their own human capital rather than in their children's), there are effectively no historical examples of economic growth in the context of a long-term decline in birthrates.

In a way it is easy to see why this might be the case. Economists have long observed that an expanding division of labor (abetted by technological change) drives economic growth. Adam Smith's famous dictum that the "division of labor is limited only by the extent of the market" applies. An excessively low fertility world limits the extent of the market.

On the other hand, perhaps Longman (and Kurtz) shouldn't worry so much. Thinkers from Thomas Malthus down to Paul Erlich have predicted dire consequences from excessive population growth that have by and large not come to pass. Perhaps the predicted dire consequences from lack of population growth will also fail to materialize.

To work or not to work?

But let's seriously entertain the possibility that Longman is right, that low birthrates really are a problem, and that cities like Seattle are just canaries in the coal mine of a global trend.

Following the example of Seattle (and Brooklyn) a bit further, let's also assume for arguments' sake that making a city feel clean and "kid friendly" won't by itself much affect the birthrate. From experience I can say that Brooklyn has a much grittier vibe than Seattle. On balance it also has worse schools, not to mention far more deeply entrenched problems with poverty and unemployment. Yet the 2000 Census showed that 38.2 percent of Brooklyn households included a person under 18 years of age. The comparable figure for Seattle was 19.6 percent.

So if low birthrates matter, and if low birthrates won't be much affected by superficial efforts to make cities more clean and friendly, what actually would affect young urbanites' decisions have children?

It would be false to say that I knew for sure. But personal experience suggests that the issue of work is fundamental – or perhaps more specifically, the issue of not working.

Recently I met a fellow stay-at-home parent at a party at my son's preschool. Like me this person was in her late 30s, with long experience in the work world. She volunteered that being at home with her two kids leaves her floating on a rope swing back and forth between happiness and despondency. This really stuck with me. Those two words – happy and despondent – described my own experience with being a stay-at-home dad just about perfectly.

I didn't press my new friend too much about the despondent part. But for me, and this may or may not be heavily influenced by being a guy, what comes up is a feeling of near desperation about being out of the loop on professional life. I meet friends who have jobs, and often I can't help but feel like a social equal on one level but a different (definitely lesser) form of being on another.

Of course the happy feeling my friend mentioned is there too. Just as often as I feel despondent, and maybe just enough more to keep sane, I actually feel the old cliché about doing "the most important job in the world." The cliché was probably designed to make people (mostly women) whose work revolves around care giving feel better about their low status jobs. But that doesn't mean that the cliché is false. There are few things sweeter than quietly enjoying an In-N-Out Burger in the front seat of the car with your amazing four year-old-boy, as the December rain beats down next to an old cork oak tree and your baby sleeps quietly in the back seat. No matter that the baby will soon be crying and the four-year-old will soon be badgering you for more root beer.

The juicy question

At a bigger level, thinking about parenting as a work choice (or not work choice) may get us somewhere with regard to the fertility question. Why not frame the issue this way: why would a young city dweller – a person with ambitions and prospects – go out and choose to take up a job – even a part-time job – that like parenting is physically and emotionally taxing, financially draining, and confers little in the way of social status?

There are several reasons why the "Why choose the parent job?" question is so juicy, possibly even the key to a progressive politics around the issue of low birthrates. Here are two big reasons.

First, for anyone remotely interested in giving the parent job a whirl, the question raises the prospect of spending a lot less time at paid work. This is a healthy thought in itself, especially for Americans. Those really interested in the job might even one day organize to demand things that would make spending time with the kids possible – things like paid family leave, a minimum of three weeks paid vacation for all workers, adequate sick time, and most critically a single payer health care system where benefits are a right, not just a perk connected to an ever shrinking number of desirable jobs.

Second, the question challenges men to think about choosing the parent job. Few men perhaps will ever want to be full-time stay at home fathers. But what if more men consciously aspired to work only part-time outside of the home while their kids were little?

Recently I spoke with a guy friend in the high tech industry who is contemplating having kids. Without prompting on my part he volunteered, I thought tellingly, that staying home part time would be tantamount to "career suicide." Perhaps so, but this sucks!

Not only does it suck, but the work culture in industries like high-tech is formed overwhelmingly by men. We've conspired to build a completely unbalanced situation, and lack the sense of brotherhood required to end the conspiracy, much less break down institutions that contribute to overwork.

Possibly us guys are so hard-wired for status and competition that we can't help but build unbalanced work cultures. By the same token though, maybe it's possible to make staying at home with the kids feel like a cool enough, desirable enough job that more of us will compete to get it.

Even the existence of a publication like mamazine.com shows that many women sense that there is something really cool and desirable (if often really hard) about stepping back to spend serious time as a parent. Some men also have this sense, but it's guaranteed that few of us will go anywhere with it unless more of us grow up looking forward to spending some time in the parent job, and if the parent job itself comes with enough social perks that we'll actually compete to land it.

Taking it back home

Going back to those kids and dogs at Magnuson Park in Seattle, is there anything practical that can be done by the city fathers (and mothers) in Seattle and elsewhere to affect birthrates? The big answer I just gave about reforming attitudes and institutions connected to the actual job of parenting probably isn't going to much help a mayor or city council person who happens to care about keeping elementary schools open.

At the risk of succumbing to the classic political liberal's compulsion to propose a small answer to a big question, I'd personally advise those city fathers and mothers to focus first and foremost on affordable housing.

A fast run-up in real estate prices like we've recently experienced creates winners and losers. Older people tend to be more often among the winners simply by virtue of having the opportunity to buy when prices were low. Younger, more fertile people tend to be more often among the losers.

Local governments don't determine real estate prices, but mayors and city council people have a much larger say over matters of land use and real estate than they do over other areas of public policy (say, paid family leave laws or health care policy or even education). Creating more affordable housing for young families would require an activist local governments willing to interfere in the market through housing-oriented redevelopment projects, and a local government willing to let the market work by allowing practically all housing construction to occur "as of right" as long as it complies with broad design and building quality guidelines.

Certain cities may want to go further by actively building a "brand" (or at least image) for themselves as a choice destination for young people interested in both an urban lifestyle and in raising families. This might be a bit of a challenge at this stage for Seattle – the city's phenomenal success over the past couple of decades has already spawned an overlapping set of images (think grunge, software money, coffee culture, Fraser) that has little to do with family life and may take time to refashion.

On the other hand I think such a 'branding" strategy is tailor-made for my present home base of Sacramento. The last big time TV program set here, after all, was the late 1970s vintage Eight is Enough, chronicling the lives of father Tom Bradford, mother Joan Bradford, and their eight children. The city is currently undergoing a quiet but decided densification, evolving into something that looks much more like a "real" city. Within the past year local government institutions have poached not one but two of the senior architects of Portland, Oregon's famous urban renaissance. Could Sacramento build a brand for itself as "Portland, but more diverse and with kids?" Only time will tell, but it seems worth a go.

Matt Mitchell is a freelance writer and urban planner based in Sacramento, California. He is principal of Frameworks, a consulting firm dedicated to urban economic development and sustainability.