In his opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal, The Rise of Family-Friendly Cities, Joel Kotkin sets up an either/or set of economic development and lifestyle choices that simply doesn't exist.

Where, exactly, does Kotkin think these married couples he extols come from?

Hint: The median age of first marriage among all U.S. women is now 26, older for college-educated women. A typical young women today spends at least five years after college, usually pursuing a career, before a first marriage. By the time she's in her late 20s or early 30s she -- and her partner--have typically put down roots in a particular metropolitan area.

The reason Raleigh and Charlotte score so well in gaining families is that they are the biggest gainers of younger, well-educated adults, particularly singles.

It is plainly a lot easier to hang on to the young adults who live in your city rather than recruiting them from other places. That's why cities should pay particular attention to young singles when they are at their most mobile and also build on their family friendliness as a way of retaining these talented and energetic people.

But does being family friendly require a fundamentally different set of urban attributes? Not really.

Schools certainly move up on the priority list. But in a national survey of college-educated 25 to 34 year-olds for CEOs for Cities, we found that the top five attributes they seek in cities are these: clean and attractive; opportunity to live the life I want to lead; safe; green; and availability of the type of housing I want at an affordable price. That sounds pretty family-friendly to me.

And does anyone really believe that one loses one's taste for latte when one starts pushing a stroller?

We can do a lot more to advance the discussion about the kind of community attributes that we all value ˜ singles and married couples alike ˜ without creating phony and divisive distinctions.

Family-friendly cities are not terribly different from other cities. Ask business and civic leaders around the nation what‚s driving their concern about whether their city appeals to young people, and they will first tell you they are needed for the labor force. But what really worries many of them hits much closer to home. They worry their own kids won't return after college. Being family-friendly has a lot of surprising dimensions.

Christopher Patton, November 30, 2007

While I agree that assets that could be marketed as "family friendly" are the same assets that are valuable for all urban environments, there is something to be said for planning cities and neighborhoods so that they can transition from mostly young singles to families with relative ease, so that residents can grow within a community and establish roots and ties.

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