Read the numbers and tell me with a straight face that this country gives a shit about families.
Children under five, down fifteen percent in America’s biggest cities in one decade. Not because people stopped wanting kids. Because nobody who works for a living can afford to raise them there. A firefighter — a goddamn firefighter — had to leave San Jose and fly back every week because he couldn’t buy a home and daycare was eating $25,000 a year per kid. A mailman in Queens was spending a quarter of his paycheck on a single room, applied for affordable housing through a lottery — a lottery — and never got picked. So he left too. His son was born somewhere else, somewhere he could actually breathe.
You need $334,000 a year in New York to comfortably afford childcare for one two-year-old. One. Three-bedroom rent is $5,495 a month. And the economists in the article say the cities replacing families with rich childless people are “avoiding decline.” They priced out the people who build a place and kept the people who consume it, and some spreadsheet jockey calls that healthy.
This is what forty years of family-values horseshit looks like when the receipt prints. Every politician who ever stood at a podium and said “strong families” while cutting childcare subsidies, blocking paid leave, deregulating housing speculation, and handing tax breaks to the same donors who jack up the rent — you built this. Every governor, every senator, every think-tank ghoul who called affordable childcare “government overreach” while a working mother pays more for daycare than her mortgage — you did this.
They didn’t forget the forgotten family. They charged it until it left.
Eat shit. The kids are gone. The receipt is on the table.
Source story: U.S. big cities lose children as families move due to costs.