The Real Reason Birth Rates Are Falling - Lyman Stone

How did you get into neighborhood design beef on Twitter?

Uh. (laughs) Uh, 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 a-" I forget what exactly it was, but they were 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. Um, it doesn't have, like, a big highway cutting through it or anything. Um, I Street View'd the neighborhood. There's a bunch of parks in the neighborhood. Like, there's- y- you- 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, in this neighborhood are... Like, people clearly want to live here from the prices they're paying. So I said, like, "You know, I don't know. It, it looks like a nice neighborhood." Like, it looks, 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 considerally- considerably above the US average, right? And if you look at the, the street grid, like, it's- it's quite compact lots. These are not, like, half-acre lots or something. They're, like, quite compact lots. You can 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. Um, but people really were mad that I called this neighborhood walkable. They were like, "Nothing in Phoenix is walkable! It's 110 degrees in the summer." And 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. Um, so yeah. People didn't like the take.

What... W- where do you think that's coming from? What's the underlying impetus of that, the motivation for them being so upset at you?

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 l- 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.