New Geography

Author: Zina Klapper

  • “Little Monsters”? Children and the Environment

    The idea has bubbled around the edges of the environmental pond for a while: choosing to be childfree expressly for the purpose of reducing one’s carbon footprint. An environmental correspondent at Mother Jones, for example, has pointed out that “…Nothing else you can do — driving a more fuel efficient car, driving less, installing energy-efficient windows, replacing light bulbs, replacing refrigerators, recycling — comes even close to simply not having that child… Why are we pretending that because they’re cute they’re harmless? Little monsters.”

    A Planet Green channel segment on the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, the organization that offers voluntary human extinction as “a solution to involuntary human extinction” (slogan: “May we live long and die out”), cites the group’s 4000 Facebook friends.

    As absurd as it may seem, the concept has picked up supporters, and is actually inching into mainstream environmental thinking. It’s a trend that poses dangers, most of all to the green movement’s own sustainability.

    Attention a couple of years back focused on Australia, where the issue of a tax on (greenhouse gas emitting) newborns was raised. This month, a Princeton bioethicist, in a New York Times opinion blog headlined, Should This Be The Last Generation? eventually concluded, “In my judgment, for most people, life is worth living,” but then tamped down this irrational exuberance by questioning whether “the continuance of our species” really is justifiable.

    Earlier, a blog at the Nature Conservancy — the deservedly well-respected environmental group — made the case that it’s pointless to blame Bangladesh for its high birth rate when our own reproductive decisions have far greater environmental impact. The mixed reader response to author Peter Kareiva ranged from enthused zero population growth supporters — “..ninety percent of us could die without affecting our genetic diversity,” — to the head-scratching “…wonder if it’s perhaps a little short-sighted,” and “..Removing ourselves from the gene pool isn’t necessarily the best idea, no?”

    Notably absent from the commentary is the potential cost to the credibility of the environmental movement. Should we accept childlessness as the ultimate pathway to carbon neutrality? Or that eco-brownie points for sidestepping the egotism and self-indulgence of procreation accrue to future generations (in absentia)? That children are yet another impulse “buy”, thrown into the shopping cart of degenerate conspicuous consumption?

    The resurgence of support for zero population growth — or even negative population growth — as a means of preserving the earth represents a twist on our nation’s spiritual — and very green — heritage. Thoreau, other transcendentalists, and essayists both before and after him recognized America’s wilderness as a spiritual sanctuary. Reverence for our natural bounty and, more broadly, the planet, is now shared by countless Americans.

    But anti-natalism takes the religion of conservation well beyond respect for the natural world, to view the very existence of humans as defilement. It rejects the notion — powerful since the 19th Century — that children are the essence of purity. Now they’re unwitting agents of the sinful pollution of nature. An earlier era’s worry over Youth’s loss of innocence through exposure to the wild world is being replaced by the opposite concern: Youth is now seen as the destroyer of the world by its mere existence.

    We’ve come full circle from the early twentieth century national hysteria over Margaret Sanger, the great birth control pioneer who was condemned by members of the old Anglo-Saxon elite for hastening the extinction of America’s “native stock”. In that era, the impulse of families to restrict their size was seen as a selfish quest for mere personal fulfillment, harmful to the growth of the nation. Today, we see the opposite: An impulse to cast procreation as a personal indulgence at the expense of the larger society.

    The reasoning is, of course, that the choice to be child-free is not merely a personal decision, but rather a laudable contribution to a more sustainable world. But as a response to global population trends — widespread fertility declines, particularly in the West, combined with record high overall global population — it’s very different than offering birth control options to those who want them.

    This particular manifestation of environmentalism — the concept of solving humanity’s problems by eliminating, as much as possible, human beings — while positioning itself as both future-focused and statistically supported, is remarkably oblivious to the worldwide drop in birthrates and its economic implications. The demographic transition, which in Europe began before the mid-1800s, is bringing us both an aging population and more widespread participation, particularly among women, in the wealth of the modern economy.

    Today’s environmental movement has always included strands of Luddites. But, like other ultra-ascetic religions, and as even the anti-natalists themselves ruefully admit, the idea is not about to conquer the world.

    The demon-seed statistical projections on the carbon output of a single infant born today are based on the premise that the world’s energy use and methods will change not one iota during its lifetime. And the calculations usually include a reproductive chain over the next century or two. The assumption that the grandkids of today’s infants will be tucking AAA batteries into their toys or gassing up their Grand Cherokees isn’t — despite the impressive spreadsheets — objective or scientific.

    Of course, religion, guilt, and the quest for purity have a long, shared history, with holiness as the garlic that wards off Armageddon. The urge to condemn anything short of perfection reeks of fundamentalism. The witch-hunt for hypocrisy has been relentless by critics of environmentalism who believe that dangers to the ecosystem have been exaggerated: Does anyone in America not now know that Al Gore has a big house with a lot of light bulbs, and that he flies around on (gasp) planes?

    Now the annoying Puritanical fervor has been taken up those who think environmental dangers have been minimized. With fundamentalist zeal, they’ve one-upped their fellow environmentalists with a soul-purifying — and seemingly bulletproof — sacrifice of the urge to reproduce. This particular fast-track to holiness doesn’t require chastity; sex is allowed for everything except procreation. And, when considering a society where reproduction is denigrated, please imagine the mental health of children raised with the philosophy that the world would be a whole lot better off without them.

    Why has this issue gained such traction right now? The Age of Anxiety morphed into a Prozac Nation, but maybe the depression lingered on, marked by an inability to project positive outcomes, including the potential benefits of today’s infants over the coming years. The phenomenon’s growth can also be at least partly attributed to the unprecedented internet-age ability to connect with masses of like-minded individuals for group reinforcement.

    The choice to have a child or not is a purely personal decision. “Breeders,” as their critics sometimes describe them, shouldn’t need to justify their offspring with cost-benefit analysis’ showing that we need children to balance the national books (with social security payments) or to renew our civilization. Childless men and women still — even in our more-open-than-ever-society — encounter prejudice. To respond by claiming a ‘sacred’ justification as a guardian of the earth might appeal in a moment of self-righteousness. But it stands to reason that the custodian of a precious resource shouldn’t begrudge the very existence of its future inheritors.

    Photo derived from Face_0110

    Zina Klapper is a Los Angeles-based journalist, and Deputy Editor of newgeography.com.

  • The “To Do” List for Middle-Class New Yorkers

    This month, a new report from The Center For An Urban Future, Reviving The City of Aspiration, examines the squeeze on middle class New Yorkers.

    The struggle to afford life’s basics—and a few indulgences, too—is nothing new to urbanites of modest means. A 1907 New York Times piece headlined ‘Very Soon New York Will Be A City Without Resident Citizens’ reported, “Life in the big city is becoming impossible to the average householder, living on an average income.” ‘Average’ necessities were identified as rent, home-cooked meals, servants wages, ice, and coal. Occasional luxuries included theater and restaurant visits.

    Over the hundred-plus years that have followed, the list of must-haves for the “average” New Yorker has evolved a bit. Herewith, a historical and current

    New York Middle-Class “To Do” List

    1) Buy A Home: In the 1950s, the blue and white collar families who bought homes in the city’s boroughs — Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, Staten Island — were still considered ‘typical’ New Yorkers. A 1960s Times feature profiled the spending habits of one Queens family: truck driver, at-home-mother, and kids. They owned a two-family house, drove an eight-year-old Buick, carried no debt, and had some savings. Butcher bills were a headache. “Incidentals” were small appliances and occasional take-out meals, movies, ballpark tickets, ice cream and candy, alcohol, and birthday gifts, as well as carpeting and the kids’ music lessons.

    2) Or Rent An Apartment: Ira Levin’s bestselling 1960s novel, Rosemary’s Baby, depicted a newlywed couple’s life in a gothic Upper Westside apartment on the income of a marginally employed actor. The film version became a celebrated ode to The Dakota apartments. While Hollywood has a history of grandiosification, this particular scenario was described by New Yorker film critic Renata Adler as “almost too extremely plausible”. The neighborhood really was a Mecca for barely middle-class bohos and academics. By 2008, the price for an apartment in The Dakota hit $20 million.

    3) Pay Painlessly for The Basics: Says Kevin Finnegan, a union attorney for health care aides at the low end of New York’s middle class, “Our workers live in poor neighborhoods in the boroughs. They decide between groceries and Metro tickets. Their kids, if they finish school, might work in retail and move into somewhat better neighborhoods, but there are many parts of Brooklyn that they couldn’t possibly afford. The inner suburbs are way out of financial reach, except for a couple of small pockets. As for the distant suburbs, even if they could find something affordable, they couldn’t pay for the commute. When I worked on Wall Street, I saw a different situation. There, the secretaries and managers” — New York’s traditional center middle class — “commuted from as far as Pennsylvania, some of them two hours each way.”

    4) Take An Occasional Vacation And Night On The Town: Congressional researchers cite “the relative income hypothesis”: You measure your financial comfort in comparison to that of your neighbors. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the environs of Wall Street during the ascension of upper-middle-class yuppies and wealthy “have mores” during the 1980s. The perception of a “little” middle-class luxury leaped from good seats at a Yankees game to, say, a week at a Southwestern spa.

    5) Send the Kids — All of Them — To College: “The key ingredient for upward mobility in the middle class formula is higher education,” wrote New York journalist William Kowinski in 1980. “Some families are pressed because they are trying to send two or three children through college simultaneously, whereas their own parents might have attempted to send only one at a time… ”

    6) Safety First — Relocate That Home! Influential Harvard economist Elizabeth Warren, recently tapped by the Obama administration, has identified another key to middle class identity. Along with education she cites safety, saying that both are perceived to be more elusive now than a generation ago, with middle class families stretched to the breaking point to afford homes in safe neighborhoods and “better” school districts. “The cost of being middle class has shot out of the reach of the median family,” says Warren.

    7) Use Quality Day Care: Until the 1990s, this item was labeled ‘Family Has A Stay-At-Home Mom’. The trick for urbanites since then has become for both parents together to earn enough to afford good day care…if they can find it.

    8) Access Good Health Care: In New York City, this can be as difficult for the center and upper tiers of the middle class as it is for the lower rungs. In the boroughs, where health workers constitute perhaps a third of private-sector employees, some receive benefits through their union, Service Employees district 1199. Government clerks and managers, along with municipal police officers, firefighters, and teachers are also protected. But the issue has escalated for workers and managers at small companies, and even for corporate employees, where co-pays now take a substantial bite. Hardest hit are the self-employed: small retailers, manufacturers, restaurateurs (including donut shop and pizzeria owners), and artisans, as well as waiters, bartenders, cabbies, writers, artists, and performers.

    9) Stay Out of Debt: The average cost nationally of a middle-class family to raise one child is estimated at $269,000. But that’s only until age 17. It doesn’t include High School senior year, or education costs, or college. There’s no bulk discount for siblings, either. To parents in New York and everywhere else, credit cards and home equity loans have been the — increasingly rare — coin of the realm.

    10) Save For Retirement: Fuggedaboudit. Scratch this item off the list, too. One breezy but well-circulated estimate recently put the value of a New York dollar at 76 cents. Incorporate the costs above and think twice before you dare do the math.

    One more important measure defines membership in the middle class: the often-maligned “striving” urge. It’s the expectation that one’s life, and that of one’s children, is moving upwards. City dwellers everywhere are notoriously tough, and New Yorkers are famously resilient. But if this hope were to be lost, then the New York “without resident citizens” — a century in the making — might actually come to pass.

    Zina Klapper is Deputy Editor of New Geography.

  • Zina Klapper

  • The Kids are All Ride

    My eldest child tells me that when she arrived at an East Coast college her classmates—many of whom had never visited LA—would ask, “Does your family live in the city, or outside of it?” Her answer, she says, was always long — really long — and of eye-glazing complexity.

    Anyone who has raised kids in the middle-class neighborhoods of multipolar LA might chuckle at the thought of trying to define urban or suburban. In “inner” San Fernando Valley Barbecue Belt communities like Encino, Sherman Oaks, and Studio City, your family can call for a Deli delivery at 2AM. You might run into entertainment industry executives or movie craft workers lunching at the local coffee shop; many of their offices and studios are right in the neighborhood, as are numerous other “knowledge worker” businesses. And you’re spitting distance (in LA terms, less than a half hour on the freeway) from downtown Hollywood the Getty, or UCLA. If you judge by the restaurant/ workplace/ club scene/ museum index alone, this part of town should qualify as “city,” not “suburb”.

    But you’re also likely to enjoy an unattached home: ranch (modest or luxurious), bungalow (tiny and deteriorating or spiffy and renovated), or McMansion. If you’re in an apartment, it’s likely to be garden style, not a high rise.

    The best of both worlds. Two geographies, joined at the hip? Not quite: it’s a marriage of convenience with a few downsides. First, you can’t talk about being an LA parent without talking transportation. Whether you are in the less dense communities of the valley, the hills, and the beach areas, or in the more urban-feeling neighborhoods like Hollywood, if you’re an LA parent you are tethered to your car.

    When the suburban car-dependent culture melds with urban fear of crime and nightmarish traffic, the end game can be the worst of both worlds.

    Everyone knows that LA’s geography sprawls, and one result has been limited public transportation. To take the subway, we need to drive to the station (8 miles, in our case), and then find parking. Buses are more prevalent, but often stop far from a journey’s start or finish.

    Think it’s just another LA whine about a walk further than curb to car door? I’m a native New Yorker who—I believe—feels more positively about public transportation than many who write for this site. But I challenge you to walk three quarters of a mile on a 108 degree day with a couple of little kids to catch a bus.

    For adolescents, a certain lack of independence is an inevitable result; for parents, the urge to infantilize is rampant. I can say without exaggeration that our first daughter never once stepped out our front door and walked to a specific destination. We lived in the hills — no shops or friends within a couple of miles — surrounded by country-like winding roads… packed with high speed commuter traffic. The local school was only about a mile away, but it was down a sidewalk-free canyon, often littered with dead dogs, cats, coyotes, and the occasional deer, mowed down at the nexus of city and country. Like many LA parents, we drove our kid everywhere.

    We tried a different approach with our second daughter: a street close to busses and the neighborhood’s main drag. Initially, the strategy didn’t work too well. Few of her fourteen-year-old friends would ride a bus. Some had never crossed a commercial street and were afraid to try, and a couple were not permitted to do so (yes, there’s a crosswalk and traffic light).

    The parental DDQ (Daily Drive Quotient) here is magnified by the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), which does not provide school buses for local kids to reach their district schools. A four mile round trip can become a 40-minutes-twice-a-day time warp. Walk? Sure, if your route has sidewalks; many don’t. Car pool? There’s a reason that school driveways are clogged with Navigators, Yukons and Suburbans. Working parents often need to get to work on time. That translates into the sought-after one-drive-per-week carpool. But only the biggest SUVs can accommodate five families. And for those with kids in two or three different schools, it’s two carpools and all chauffeuring all the time.

    Long commutes to school are a plague in many remote locations. But in Los Angeles, the school system is at the same time famously beset with typical urban education problems: a large poor and non–English speaking population, aging physical plants, and a mind-boggling administrative bureaucracy.

    Our kids attended public elementary school in Bel Air. Sounds classy, doesn’t it? Check out the rest rooms; make that singular (the second one did not function during either of their stints). The principal claimed that she could not find a janitor willing to drive to the relatively remote site for the part time job. Our kid’s second grade teacher asked parents to please bring in writing paper because “I would like them to do creative writing, and if everyone pitches in we can make it happen.”

    How could LAUSD be anything but dysfunctional? It’s a behemoth. The student population has now dropped to just below 700,000, but it still has more students than Vermont, Alaska, or Boston has total residents; its population is about twice that of Cincinnati.

    Los Angeles has numerous poor neighborhoods, but you don’t need to raise your children in Beverly Hills to incur the stratospheric costs common to elite cities. Many LA neighborhoods may look like déclassé small towns from the perspective of Malibu or Beverly Hills. But in a ‘real’ small town or city, a teenager on a night out might pay $3.50 for a grilled cheese sandwich with fries (I have a 2008 Wilkes Barre, PA receipt as documentation), instead of about $10 here. And housing costs here, even in extremely modest neighborhoods, and even during the current real estate cataclysm, soar above the national average.

    It’s not just the economics of child-raising in LA that suffer from a clash of suburban and urban. The social blend of the two geographies can also be uncomfortable. I’ve lived in Los Angeles for 25 years, and truly love many aspects of life here. But “it takes a village” are fighting words in a place where it can be a challenge to identify—let alone mobilize—the people next door.

    A neighbor on our street recently won a brand-sponsored contest for an ice cream Block Party. We walked over with our daughter and discovered that, as we had suspected, several other teenagers lived within a few houses.

    The older residents explained that ‘everyone here used to know each other, when we all had little kids the same age.’

    The teenagers, of course, went to a variety of schools; parents here often move their kids between private schools, public magnets, and district schools. They had a friendly chat and discovered some friends in common. But I don’t think they will ever meet again. If they do, it will undoubtedly be through some social network that’s irrelevant to the geography of this LA street.

    Zina Klapper is a writer and editor based in the Los Angeles area. She is a partner in Pop Twist Entertainment and a former editor of Mother Jones.