Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 284

The 15-minute city is a popular topic these days. So here is a recent study that used GPS data from 40 million US mobile phones to estimate the percentage of consumption-related trips that actually adhere to this concept. The unsurprising result :

The overwhelming majority of Americans have never experienced anything resembling a 15-minute city. The median resident, we found, makes only 14% of their consumption trips within a 15-minute walking radius.

There is, of course, regional variation. For New York City, the data suggests that 42% of consumption-related trips occur within a 15-minute walking radius. Whereas in more sprawling cities like Atlanta, it's only 10% of trips. Again, this is not surprising. But it begs the question: What should we do?

The challenge is that 15-minute cities generally require built environments that are dense, conducive to walking, and filled with a concentration of different amenities. And this is more or less the opposite of the prototypical suburban model, where the car and single-use zoning tends to spread everything out.

The good news is that zoning is relatively easy to change. For instance, if we want to allow corner stores in our residential neighborhoods, that is a decision we can make . The greater hurdle will be transforming car-oriented communities into places where people might actually want to walk. This is much more difficult.

But of course, it too can be done.

If you're looking to block new development, drive up the cost of housing, and appear "progressive" all at the same time, one generally effective technique is to do it under the guise of historic preservation. San Francisco is really good at this, as are many other cities. And it works because, who doesn't think that history is important?

This exact thing just transpired in San Francisco, where earlier this year Supervisor Aaron Peskin passed an ordinance enacting new density controls for most development in the Northeast Waterfront Historic District, the Jackson Square Historic District, and the Jackson Square Historic District Extension (solid neighborhood names).

Of course, sometimes you can run into resistance when you're trying to push through new anti-housing policies. And in this case, San Francisco Mayor London Breed actually vetoed Peskin's bill . In a letter dated March 14, 2024, she wrote :

Restricting new housing runs counter to the goals of our Housing Element, which the Board of Supervisors unanimously approved just over a year ago. It also runs counter to what we need to do to make this City a place that creates opportunities for new homes for the people who need them today and for future generations growing up in San Francisco.

This ordinance passes off anti-housing policy in the guise of historic protections. Existing rules already protect against impacts to historic resources. I believe we can add new homes while also supporting and improving the vibrancy of our unique neighborhoods. Many areas of San Francisco, including eastern neighborhoods like the South of Market, Potrero Hill, and the Mission, have also already removed density limits to encourage new housing.

However, her veto was ultimately overridden by the Board of Supervisors and so, as far as I understand it, the above density controls stand.

What's particularly frustrating about this outcome -- sarcasm now firmly off -- is that it so obviously reeks of NIMBY selfishness . Here's an elaborate infographic created by Max Dubler explaining what many in San Francisco believe is the real reason behind this downzoning:

Here is also a street view image from the area, along The Embarcadero:

But like I said, San Francisco seems to be really adept at this sort of maneuvering.

In 2023, there were 379,000 babies born in Italy. This is down from 393,000 babies in the prior year and represents a new record low. Already in 2022, the number of births was noted as being the fewest since Italy's unification in 1861. The result is a " demographic winter. " Of course, this challenge is not unique to Italy. It is happening in most developed countries. Korea, for example, has a fertility rate somewhere around 0.72 babies per woman. Because of this, there are a lot of people in the world trying to figure out how to encourage more births.

Here is Italy's Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni:

Meloni, herself a mother of a single child, has said it is a priority for her government to increase the birth rate and encourage women to have more babies “for the simple reason that we want Italy to have a future again”.

So what's causing this?

One seemingly logical explanation could be that the employment rates for women and men are basically the same now. Fewer women are staying at home and so there's less time to have and raise children. In fact, the opposite is true. If you look at fertility rates across Europe, high birth rates tend to correlate with high employment rates for women. I guess families need to be able to afford children. Here's an excerpt from a Guardian article (c. 2015) on the topic of fertility:

The map of the fertility rate in European countries more or less overlaps with that of women in work. In countries with relatively buoyant populations, such as France and Scandinavia, women play an important part in the labour market.  According to data for 2010  published by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development,  the employment rate for women aged 24 to 54 in work was 83.8%  in France, 84.4% in Finland, 85.6% in Denmark and 87.5% in Sweden, barely lower than the equivalent figures for men. In contrast, in southern Europe and Japan the share of women in work was much lower: only 64.4% of them had a job in Italy, 71.6% in Japan, 72.2% in Greece and 78.3% in Spain.

Staying on the theme of being able to afford kids, another possible explanation might be that kids are expensive and so you need strong family-friendly government policies to help support them. While this I'm sure helps, there's data to suggest that the correlation between these policies and birth rates is actually fairly weak. That's why, even though many developed countries have expanded such policies, birth rates continue to fall. Here's a graphic by John Burn-Murdoch from FT :

So what the hell is it then? Well there is another possible explanation and it is that it's more of a cultural thing. In the above article, John makes the argument that a number of other more important factors are leading to declining birth rates. Namely, more people are choosing to live alone, and not as a couple. Priorities have shifted, where family formation is no longer seen as central to a fulfilling life. And more young people are generally anxious. (He doesn't get into why but I'm sure that it's possible to blame TikTok.)

But what really stood out to me was this graphic:

Since the 1960s, parenting has gotten systematically more intense for parents. The average number of hours per day spent by mothers on "hands-on parenting activities" has grown significantly in most developed countries. However, there is one clear exception: France. It turns out that the French are, at least based on this data, less likely to be so-called helicopter parents. Parenting is less hands-on, kids get more freedom and -- perhaps because of this -- France has the highest fertility rate in Europe at over 1.8 babies per woman.

This is not to say that France's family-friendly policies aren't doing something as well. I would imagine they are. But the above makes intuitive sense to me. If you create an environment where the threshold to be considered a good parent is constantly becoming more duanting and more life-consuming, it's no surprise to me that more and more people are simply saying, no thank you.