John Lorinc is a freelance journalist specializing in cities, climate, and technology. He can be reached at lorinc@rogers.com.  

They were everywhere — an artifact of the space race, but for kids. Then they were gone.

In the 1960s and 70s, rocket-shaped play structures dotted hundreds of playgrounds in the US, including in Temple City, east of Los Angeles. “It was such a fond memory,” says Adam Matsumoto, who grew up locally. “[People] always talked about it.”

But city officials didn’t forget. An updated version, compliant with current safety standards, is now one of the centerpieces of a new park that opened earlier this year. The result is a vibrant space with lively colors, ample seating, and equipment for toddlers.

Matsumoto, now the city’s parks and recreation director, says his team took to heart feedback that resurrecting the rocket would encourage older people who grew up in the neighborhood to take their grandchildren there. “They can talk about how they used to play on the rocket that was there. That creates new memories for our current generation and future youth to come.”

Yet there’s more to this story than just updated memories. A decade ago, LA County found that Temple City was one of the region’s most open space-deficient places. The process of acquiring and transforming properties (including an underused parking lot) into parks involved consultations and some space reconfigurations, all in the service of creating parks for families and multigenerational activities.

Urban cities everywhere want families. Houston in 2023 became the first U.S. city to partner with UNICEF to incorporate feedback from children and youth in decision-making about planning, safety, services, and mobility. By contrast, Rotterdam, Netherlands, in 2006 was ranked as one of the least desirable places to grow up in. Chagrined, city officials began a long campaign to invest in “wild spaces,” greening, bike infrastructure, and other family amenities, especially in lower-income neighborhoods.

More recently, this topic has seen a surge of interest after Bloomberg City Lab critic Alexandra Lange received a Pulitzer Prize for a series on how inclusive architecture, public-spirited urban design, and well-planned amenities — from skate parks to mental health clinics — make cities more welcoming for children and their parents.

However, planning experts caution that many of these transformations never get beyond feel-good slogans. Seattle attempted to position itself as family-friendly in the 1990s to attract residential development downtown. But the city gave up after builders didn’t see a business case for family-sized apartments.

In fact, a 2008 American Planning Association survey found that over half of municipal planners believed that families did not generate enough tax revenue to cover the costs of services they demanded. “A lot of city regeneration efforts were focused on young singles or empty nesters,” observes Mildred E. Warner, professor of city and regional planning at Cornell University. “They thought they needed bars for people to go hang out in and small apartments because they didn’t need a lot of space. They were expressly designed not to be inclusive of families.”

But that dynamic has since shifted, partly because all those young singles didn’t want to leave for the suburbs when they had kids. A 2013 survey concluded that families with children are critical to the local economy and communities that “keep people for their entire lifespan are more vibrant.” The wrinkle is that many cities still don’t have sufficient, affordable family-sized housing or services. According to planning consultant Brent Toderian, unless cities build the right kind of housing and furnish these districts with schools, child care, and recreational amenities, family-oriented urban design moves will fall flat.

“This order is critical,” he says, and two- and three-bedroom apartments are the linchpin. “If you don’t have that, it’s game over.”

The Downtown Sacramento Partnership in 2023 hired Toderian to partner with them to shape a livability strategy for the city’s core, hoping to take advantage of the foot traffic generated by a new arena. He identified six big moves, two focused on kickstarting condos with multiple bedrooms. The downtown has plenty of small rental apartments, but few for families with kids. The exercise fed into a consultation about Sacramento’s 2040 general plan, approved last year.

The former chief planner for Vancouver, British Columbia, Toderian has some significant wins that validate his recommendations. In the late 1980s, officials set out to add a lot of density to downtown Vancouver’s west end. The city mandated that developers provide family-sized apartments. A quarter had to have two bedrooms. Eventually, a further 10% had to be three bedrooms. They allowed additional density and height as an incentive to deliver amenities such as childcare and playgrounds. These contributions, says Toderian, “solved the chicken-and-egg problem of which comes first: the families or the services they need.”

Today, the area is home to over 9,000 kids and teens, and the local board of education is building its fourth elementary school. The goal is to provide enough space and amenities so parents with one, two, or even more children don’t leave for the suburbs. “When you plan and design for kids,” Toderian says, “you’ll get kids and more.”

Planning scholars have confirmed the success of “Vancouverism.” In a 2020 paper in the Journal of the American Planning Association, Louis L. Thomas said that while Vancouver overall witnessed a slight decline in children between 1996 and 2016, the downtown west end had seen a 171% increase. “Many [parents] consider amenity-rich, dense, diverse neighborhoods ideal,” he wrote. “Some are committed to city living. Others are ‘won over’ by the policy-provided amenities and well-programmed public realm.”

Cities that are serious about this shift will need to partner with other agencies, employers, and affordable housing developers to secure funding for child care, says Warner. She points to pioneering work done by two California planning consultants, Kristen Anderson and Ellen Dektar, who figured out how to broker funding deals for child care projects, such as one co-located with a BART station in Oakland. “California was doing all this work county by county to get child care ‘by right’ in residential zones,” she says. “That’s what planners do. They bring all the parties together to figure out solutions.”

Cities focused on families must also clear thornier regulatory obstacles, such as zoning restrictions on child care or disincentives to ownership in multifamily housing. A choice example: 10-year construction defect rules force condo developers to hold liability insurance to fend off lawsuits. A 2022 analysis by the Urban Institute found those costs helped cast a chill over condo development.

San Francisco’s latest general plan aims to diversify housing types, including accessory dwelling units and multifamily buildings, to reverse the exodus of households with two or more children. According to city data, the number of households with one child grew by 12% between 1990 and 2015, but the number of two-child households plunged by almost 10% between 2000 and 2015. The city is also considering a family-zoning plan, with greater densities along transit and commercial corridors.

Housing and services for kids aren’t the end of the story. Communities that intentionally plan for families pay attention to urban design considerations, such as walkability and road safety. For example, Manteca in the Central Valley expects to add more than 50,000 residents in the next two decades, many of them families priced out of the Bay Area. Its general plan reflects that out-migration. For the city, an important piece involves quality-of-life planning.

City Manager Toni Lundgren points to Manteca’s network of 80 parks, bike trails, and walking paths. “We’re also looking to expand upon that as our city grows in the outer layers,” she says.

Yet cities looking to attract families with school-age kids to core areas struggle with these kinds of public space amenities. “You can’t have fast-moving vehicular traffic and have a family-friendly or kid-friendly place,” comments Josh Fullan, founder of Toronto-based Maximum City, which works extensively with children and youth on public space issues. “[That] is correlated strongly to another thing that comes up a lot for families, and that’s safety.”

Fullan recently presented his findings at the annual ESRI User conference in San Diego. “When we work with kids and ask them to tell us what they value in urban environments,” he says, “they consistently rank dense, walkable, active neighborhoods with lots of stuff as the kind of places they like — the old kind of Main Street.”

That kid-level perspective points towards a lingering tension: whether families with children even belong in urban cores. Toderian hears this sentiment expressed by some urbanists and those who don’t work in planning at all. “Some still insist ‘downtowns will never attract kids and shouldn’t try to attract kids,’” he notes. “Then they design downtown to virtually repel kids, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Vancouver proves the opposite can be true by showing what a successful North American downtown for kids can be like.”

Warner agrees. She cites economic analysis demonstrating that adequate child care is essential to labor force retention, productivity, and child development. “The multiplier effect is around $2 for $1 [invested] and a half job for every job that’s created in the child care sector.”

The economic development logic holds in smaller cities. Lundgren says Manteca later this year will begin looking for partners for a 150-acre Family Entertainment Zone (FEZ Manteca), a multi-phase retail, entertainment, and public spaces project. FEZ aims to attract investment, out-of-town visitors, sales taxes, and jobs, but also to serve as an amenity for residents and the surrounding communities.

Craig Schlatter, director of community development for Ukiah in Mendocino County, adds that cities need to reconcile their land use goals with their economic development objectives, for example, by looking to strengthen partnerships, such as sharing facilities with local schools, adding parks, and attracting businesses that offer recreational programming for children and teens.

“In my view,” Schlatter says, “we always have to dream and help our communities dream as well. We need to find ways to bridge the gaps between people, even if their dreams are aspirational, because it helps our community see a betterway forward.”