A baby in New York will condemn you to a life in the suburbs, cutting years off your absolutely necessary $20 martini nights at the club.
People in New York have fewer children because:
1. We marry a lot later. This is one of the few cities in the world where it's not stigmatized to be over 30 and unmarried.
2. The housing situation is, indeed, shitty. It's not as bad as you say, with the condemnation to suburbs that you depict as inexorable, but having kids will accelerate the outright theft of your savings by the property-owning class.
There's a constant stream of urban liberal editorials/articles on red state teen pregnancies. I think it's because at some level liberals are freaked out about being out-bred by such a wide margin.
This "constant stream" of articles exists for a reason. Religious conservatives are trying to push their social model on us. We're pointing out that it doesn't work well even on its home turf. This isn't about "chastising the hicks". The victims of the red-state family breakdowns are, obviously, people in the red states.
This is why Palin and her family freaks out a lot of liberal women SOO badly. She's a stark reminder of their infertility.
Although I'm a man, I'll point out that Palin scares anyone with a brain. This has nothing to do with fertility. 1. She has an extremely narrow-minded view, which is completely inappropriate for someone running for high public office. 2. She stands for everything that is consumptive ("drill, baby, drill"), self-indulgent, mean-spirited, wrong and stupid about this country. 3. Although she was picked to rally middle-of-the-road women, she failed completely at that... but is great at stoking the lowest common denominator bottom-feeders, as the people who show up at Palin rallies (racists, paranoids) are loathsome.
New Yorkers don't despise people who choose to have large families. We despise those who do so irresponsibly, and we despise the very rich who have large families to show off (a Manhattan/Boston phenomenon) their means, such as Mitt Romney, because of their effect on housing prices... but we don't have a knee-jerk animosity toward people in general who choose to have four or five kids.
People in New York have fewer children because:
1. We marry a lot later. This is one of the few cities in the world where it's not stigmatized to be over 30 and unmarried.
2. The housing situation is, indeed, shitty. It's not as bad as you say, with the condemnation to suburbs that you depict as inexorable, but having kids will accelerate the outright theft of your savings by the property-owning class.
There's a constant stream of urban liberal editorials/articles on red state teen pregnancies. I think it's because at some level liberals are freaked out about being out-bred by such a wide margin.
This "constant stream" of articles exists for a reason. Religious conservatives are trying to push their social model on us. We're pointing out that it doesn't work well even on its home turf. This isn't about "chastising the hicks". The victims of the red-state family breakdowns are, obviously, people in the red states.
This is why Palin and her family freaks out a lot of liberal women SOO badly. She's a stark reminder of their infertility.
Although I'm a man, I'll point out that Palin scares anyone with a brain. This has nothing to do with fertility. 1. She has an extremely narrow-minded view, which is completely inappropriate for someone running for high public office. 2. She stands for everything that is consumptive ("drill, baby, drill"), self-indulgent, mean-spirited, wrong and stupid about this country. 3. Although she was picked to rally middle-of-the-road women, she failed completely at that... but is great at stoking the lowest common denominator bottom-feeders, as the people who show up at Palin rallies (racists, paranoids) are loathsome.
New Yorkers don't despise people who choose to have large families. We despise those who do so irresponsibly, and we despise the very rich who have large families to show off (a Manhattan/Boston phenomenon) their means, such as Mitt Romney, because of their effect on housing prices... but we don't have a knee-jerk animosity toward people in general who choose to have four or five kids.