I wrote on this website in 2021 about my puzzlement regarding the fact that the most “bike-friendly” cities in the country seemed to be rather unfriendly to kids and young families. The reasons eluded me then and now.
There is also a strong correlation between a city’s overall bike-friendliness “score” and a host of other liberal/progressive, “urbanist” policies. Indeed, with some outliers, the most bike-friendly cities in the U.S. tend to be at the vanguard of progressive urban policy. Thus, in this essay, the “People for Bikes” bike-friendliness scores will be used as a proxy score for a city’s overall embrace or implementation of a wide range of progressive/urbanist policies and cultural beliefs. Since Streets.mn is a forum for sharing many of those very ideas about the local Twin Cities community, I think it is an appropriate forum to grapple with what will probably be an unwelcome, topic.
The Importance of Young Families
Thriving young families are a good indicator for the prosperity and health of a community, and families, particularly families with children, are leaving progressive/urbanist communities at an alarming rate. With the usual caveats regarding correlation and causality, it’s time to give serious and critical thought to the possibility that these progressive policies, as a packaged whole, are failing.
It’s tempting to dismiss that notion without consideration in the context of current right-wing political messaging, in which unserious imbeciles repeatedly depict American cities as hellscapes and demonize migrants. The reflexive oppositional response is to believe that cities — especially “blue” cities — must therefore be unqualified successes. Q.E.D. However, even broken clocks contain roughly 0.01% truth. Tribal opposition doesn’t serve anyone, nor does it change the demographic data or account for the fact that there might be a tiny grain of truth within the buffoonish lies — enough to grab some adherents who aren’t simply politically wedded to burning it all down. Something might very well be wrong.
The COVID-19 pandemic dealt a terrible blow to large American cities in general, which saw their population of young families decline precipitously. When given the opportunity to work remotely, people fled in droves — hardly an endorsement for cities. Since the pandemic, data from the Economic Innovation Group (EIG) shows the trends have reversed for a great many large metros, yet are continuing downward for municipalities that are known as laboratories of “blue” progressive urban policies and happen to be many of the most bike-friendly places in the nation. Out-migration in these places remains at twice the pre-pandemic rate.
The trends are alarming, with many of those communities losing 10% or more of their population of children under 5 in the years 2020-2024. According to sociologists, a 10% drop in the young child population is a veritable seismic demographic event with ill portents for the community’s future. That drop, unreversed, will first play out in the schools, which will struggle to maintain their fixed infrastructure costs with an ever-shrinking enrollment. Those struggles can then snowball, driving more young families away as ever fewer parents remain to advocate for the amenities a city needs for its children. Over time, policies and policy advocates become ever more distant from the needs of families, accelerating the decay.
A striking illustration of the complex and even counterintuitive nature of the puzzle is the fact that young families are choosing places identified by the University of Georgia as “play deserts.” Public and accessible play spaces are laudable hallmarks of family-friendly progressive/urbanist policy. However, families are opting out of them because they happen to be enmeshed in a package of progressive/urbanist policies and culture in which parents don’t feel their children are safe in the play spaces. Additionally, they’re often only notionally accessible, requiring high levels of parental vigilance to navigate to. Should a parent choose to let a child freely wander to the play space, they risk running afoul of progressives who will report them to Child Protective Services. Given that situation, it seems an easy choice to privatize family life with a large yard, some “stroads” and parking lots with Chick-fil-A play-places where parents will always feel their children are safe. As an added bonus, dinner is taken care of, and they can sip on a delicious, frosted lemonade while catching up on work with the Wi-Fi.
Should I Stay, or Should I Go . . . Now?
Many of these “blue” communities are being kept on life support by an influx of immigrants, particularly young immigrant families with their children. Working immigrants are often what keeps the local labor market and even the overall economy in these cities from virtual collapse. However, while it is verboten to discuss in white-liberal circles, immigrant families — particularly in large numbers with children — also impose sometimes steep short-term costs and burdens on the community, especially on school budgets. This creates an oppositional force: While immigrants may enrich a city in the long run, the initial costs and particularly the strain on the schools can motivate young families with the means to move elsewhere. (And no, it’s not racist to look at objective structural and budgetary problems and opt to find better opportunities for your kids with the one childhood they have.) Texas and Florida have also seen immigrants boost their population of children significantly, but paired with an added influx of intra-U.S. immigration of school-age children, the costs for school districts are largely offset.
So how bad is the child population decline in the Twin Cities? Bad. Minneapolis is down 9.1% and falling. St. Paul is doing even worse, losing 12.2% of its population of young children. Here is a list of the top 10 large metros for cycling, according to People For Bikes, along with their decline in young children according to EIG. Recall that these rankings are being used here as a proxy for broader policy packages. This is not about bike-friendliness per se, though in some ways it is by association.
| People for Bike Ranking | City | Change in young population |
| 1. | Minneapolis, Minnesota | -9.1% |
| 2. | Seattle, Washington | -8.8% |
| 3. | San Francisco, California | -15.4% |
| 4. | St. Paul, Minnesota | -12.2% |
| 5. | Philadelphia, Pennsylvania | -10.5% |
| 6. | New York City, New York | -20% |
| 7. | Washington, D.C | -9.7% |
| 8. | Denver, Colorado | -6% |
| 9. | Milwaukee, Wisconsin | -9.1% |
| 10. | Oakland, California | -11.2% |
If 10% is seismic, New York City’s decline of 20% is practically apocalyptic, like a demographic asteroid. St. Paul’s numbers are not too far off from Chicago and Los Angeles (-14.6% and -14.2%, respectively), which are not particularly bike-friendly places but are still known as centers of progressive urbanism. The fact that St. Paul is losing more young families than Philadelphia and Oakland is, quite frankly, embarrassing. Additionally, because EIG’s numbers are at the county level, Minneapolis could be far worse than the 9.1% figure indicates. Hennepin County encompasses a number of suburban and exurban areas — think Edina and Minnetonka — that are among the types of places not experiencing these declines.
Housing is the looming shadow over all the migration trends, and it is a significant player. In fact, Streets.mn readers will likely reflexively dismiss criticism of the gestalt of progressive/urbanist policy and declare that housing cost is the sole culprit of young family decline. They might suggest that even more progressive/urbanist policy can fix this, despite the fact that it hasn’t anywhere else.
Fortunately, the Minnesota culture of boosterism also provides the ready rebuttal. Specifically, a recent essay on Streets.mn by board member Joe Harrington highlighted the relative affordability of Minneapolis, as identified by a techy real-estate aggregator and The New York Times, as a compelling reason to move here. The Twin Cities can’t simultaneously top a list for life destinations based partially on housing affordability and also be driving young families away because of housing unaffordability. Since logic clearly dictates that it can’t be both, it is worth examining the notion that the aggregate package of progressive/urbanist policy, beyond the simple expedient of housing expense, is making all of these cities inhospitable, which is why Minneapolis and St. Paul show equivalent declines to truly unaffordable places like Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.
It might be tempting as well to simply blame falling birth rates nationwide, particularly in urban centers, but recovery and migration trends are geographically and, dare we say politically, uneven.
Perhaps it is simply a large-metro problem, driven exclusively by housing costs, declining birth-rates, and the collision of those factors with COVID-19 and the advent of remote work. As previously mentioned, COVID-19 was particularly cruel to large cities (and crueler yet to large “blue” cities through prolonged, self-inflicted wounds).
In that case, what about smaller communities that are embracing liberal/progressive urban policy? We’ll continue to use bike-friendliness as a correlated proxy measure for the successful and widespread implementation of a host of liberal/progressive policies, and then look at People For Bikes’ top 10 overall cycling communities, all of which happen to be much smaller towns.
| People for Bike Ranking | City | Change in young population |
| 1. | Mackinac Island, Michigan | -10.9% |
| 2. | Provincetown, Massachusetts | -6.9% |
| 3. | Harbor Springs, Michigan | -9.2% |
| 4. | Springdale, Utah | +4.9% |
| 5. | Washburn, Wisconsin | -7.1% |
| 6. | Fort Yates, North Dakota | -10.8% |
| 7. | Crested Butte, Colorado | +1.8% |
| 8. | Blue Diamond, Nevada | -5.2% |
| 9. | Murdock, Nebraska | +1.8% |
| 10. | Sewanee, Tennessee | +4.2% |
The results are more mixed, and it’s worth noting that the population of some of these communities make the sample all but meaningless. Outliers like Fort Yates are not only so tiny that a single family moving could constitute a 10% drop, but the picture is also complicated by being tribal territory. The No. 1 bike-friendly city had the steepest decline of all, but it’s both an island (so, easily bike-friendly) and has a population as tiny as Fort Yates with the same statistical validity complications.
However, the overall trend remains that the towns on the list with the largest declines in the population of young children are the ones at least regionally correlated with liberal/progressive city policies. (I imagine that Mackinac Island is probably incredibly bike-friendly for kids; maybe the only thing more bike-friendly for kids than a cul-de-sac riddled suburb is a small island.)
Perhaps mid-size communities are a more statistically valid test. According to People for Bikes, in the population range 50,000 to 300,000, the top ten cycling cities are:
| People for Bike Ranking | City | Change in young population |
| 1 | Davis, California | -11.4% |
| 2 | Cambridge, Massachusetts | -4.1% |
| 3 | Berkeley, California | -11.2% |
| 4 | Boulder, Colorado | -10.1% |
| 5 | Corvallis, Oregon | -12.1% |
| 6 | Ankeny, Iowa | -4.9% |
| 7 | Ames, Iowa | -2.1% |
| 8 | Anchorage, Alaska | -11.6% |
| 9 | Hoboken, New Jersey | -14.9% |
| 10 | Grand Forks, North Dakota | -11.7% |
The correlates remain largely the same, with Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Grand Forks, North Dakota, dramatically bucking the respective trends. But, on the whole, mid-size towns strongly associated with an entire package of progressive urban policies are seeing their young families flee. This is particularly damning considering that at the national level, suburban to mid-size urban areas have seen dramatic reversals in negative population trends.
Most fascinating to me is the stunningly historic decline in the number of children in my old home of Salt Lake City. Salt Lake City has undergone a dramatic progressive/urbanist transformation during approximately the past 15 to 20 years, becoming the kind of place that I advocated for and thought I believed in. It has also become an island in a notably very family-focused state — an island which young families are fleeing.
I’m Your Density . . . I Mean, Your Destiny
Democrats are often fond of paraphrasing French philosopher and mathematician Auguste Comte’s maxim that “demographics are destiny,” believing that long-term demographic trends in a diversifying nation will eventually deliver electoral success and vindicate their policies. First, that’s smug political and policy laziness. Second, if demographics are, in fact, destiny, then the demographic data clearly shows that young families are opting in increasing numbers to raise their children away from those policies, and those children are unlikely, in turn, to suddenly support those policies as future voters.
I believe the larger Democratic party apparatus suspects that something is wrong, which is why Governor Tim Walz is not promising voters across the U.S. that he will help a future President Kamala Harris make all of their communities more like Minneapolis (or St. Paul). Vice President Harris certainly isn’t championing San Francisco as a policy model. They, and the party, know that such a losing message would constitute gross political malpractice. So instead, Governor Walz talks about “greater” Minnesota, and his roots in small-town Nebraska. On the rare occasion that Vice President Harris talks about San Francisco, she often talks about a San Francisco that doesn’t exist anymore.
In 2021 I suggested that the working definition of bike-friendliness in various internet silos (not unlike Streets.mn) was inadequate and largely blind to children. The places that make it easy for kids to ride to their friends’ houses — i.e., cul-de-sac riddled, isolated suburbs — will likely never penetrate an internet listicle of bike-friendly communities because they fail a number of progressive-urbanist design principles.
But the paradox regarding the inverse relationship between bike-friendliness and family and child friendliness is a loop, eating its own tail like a thought-ouroboros. The people who both “score” and define bike-friendliness are often proponents and even architects of the liberal/progressive/urbanist policies that not only correlate with bike-friendly communities, but also correlate with a broader package of policies that stretches far beyond street design. So, just as the definition of bike-friendliness is often difficult for families and children, across the broader policy landscape what looks good “on paper” or “feels right” in a tribal silo is blind to the actual needs of young families and children.
A final note regarding the “scores”: I am highly skeptical of People for Bikes and its methodology, and not simply because they strike me as a very online collection of progressive/urbanist policy advocates. I contacted them once about a high score they gave to a small town I lived in, a score which did not reflect in the slightest my multi-year experience riding there. Asking how they arrived at their determination, they replied that they based it off of Google Maps and some public statements on a webpage. They had never ridden a bike there, nor talked to anyone who had.
A score based on abstraction and messaging can also be subconsciously informed by impressions about overall progressive/urbanist orthodoxy, which aside from the simple correlation between bike-friendliness and those policies, could possibly make their scores a decent proxy for a progressive-urbanism score. Beyond that, they use quantity and quantification to create the impression of scientific rigor. Sadly, even “Bicycling” magazine now simply reposts the “People for Bikes” scores for their rankings.
Most parents probably want a place to live where their kids can safely and freely ride a bike and would seek out that place. A cursory look at the smaller towns that make up the actual top 10 suggests that communities that are very bike friendly but further removed from the entire package of liberal/progressive/urbanist policies are retaining and even growing young families, or at least reversing the trend of family out-migration. This is a problem — a real, “ground truth” kind of problem — and no amount of faith, ideology or virtue signaling will make it vanish.
Easy answers elude, which is why this essay is filled primarily with questions and suppositions, the primary one being that there is an ongoing emergent failure of an entire complex web of policy and culture. To touch on just a few highly complicated parts of the whole — from housing scarcity and byzantine restrictions on the housing market, to schools embracing failed academic theories and ideologies, to unease about general public safety, to just the overall difficulty of being a young family in these places — the gestalt of progressive/urbanist policies and beliefs needs to be critically examined to identify where the failures are. Young families are voting with their feet, and the impact will be felt in the communities they leave behind and perhaps, in time, across the nation as a whole.
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