Family values, my ass. They priced your kid out of existence.
The numbers are in and they are goddamn ugly.
Children under 5 in big cities dropped fifteen percent in a decade. Not five. Not eight. Fifteen. That is more than double the national decline. These cities are not losing people overall. They are losing the kind of people who have kids.
A postal worker in Queens paid seven hundred and fifty bucks a month for a room. A quarter of his take-home. He applied for affordable housing. He never got a unit. He and his fiancée left for Easton, Pennsylvania, population thirty thousand. Their son was born there. He could not have a family in the city where he worked for the federal government.
To comfortably afford childcare for one two-year-old in New York City, parents need to earn three hundred and thirty-four thousand dollars a year. Median rent on a three-bedroom is five thousand four hundred and ninety-five dollars a month. Since 2000, the city lost eighty thousand households with kids and gained six hundred and seventy thousand without them.
And the party that sold you “family values” for forty years? They cut every program that would make it possible for a working family to raise a child near a job. Medicaid. Food assistance. Childcare subsidies. Paid leave. All of it. Then they gave themselves a tax cut and stood in front of a flag.
They used the word “family” the way a con artist uses a badge. The policy was never pro-child. The policy was pro-donor. And now they wonder why the birth rate is cratering.
You sold families the American dream and billed them for the privilege of leaving. Go to hell.
Source story: U.S. big cities lose children as families move due to costs.