by Kaid Benfield, via NRDC’s Switchboard
There is probably no other annual event in American culture that extols the concept of family more than Thanksgiving. I’ll be at my in-laws’ home, watching as much sports as possible while still being friendly.
We romanticize family in our society: just watch TV commercials to confirm that. But does our storytale version of family life resemble real family life? Does it exclude people who are not part of or close to their families? Is the concept of “family” changing, with implications for the planning profession? The answers are, of course, seldom; usually; and definitely.
Why does this matter to communities and sustainability? Because we must plan the future of our cities and neighborhoods to account for reality, not our memories, a rosy version of what some believe today’s households “should” be, or even our own personal situations.
As it turns out, the way households are going to be evolving over the next few decades is toward more singles, empty-nesters, and city-lovers, none of whom particularly want the big yards and long commutes they may have grown up with as kids. There will still be a significant market for those things (for example, my in-laws), but it will be a smaller portion of overall housing demand than it used to be. This means that the communities and businesses that take account of these emerging preferences for smaller, more walkable homes will be the ones that are most successful.
Last week the Census Bureau released some fascinating graphs and data about the current state of American households. People are marrying later than they used to, for example, if they marry at all. Among other relevant statistics, the number and portion of people living alone has risen steadily and significantly for decades. So has the number of unmarried couples living together, nearly eight million today compared with only around three million as recently as 1996. Even the number of unmarried couples with children has doubled in less than 20 years.
The portion of children living with two parents has dropped dramatically from 1960, from just under 90 percent of all children in 1960 to around 70 percent in 2012. Statistically, almost all of the change can be explained by a dramatic increase in the portion of children living with single moms. But it’s not for the old reasons: the percentage of kids living with widowed, separated, and divorced mothers has actually gone down in recent decades. There has been a sharp increase, however, in the portion living with never-married mothers.
In general, married-couple households have declined sharply since the 1950s, from over 75 percent of all households then to about 50 percent now. The major share of that change has been an increase in “nonfamily households” consisting of singles or persons not “related to each other by birth, marriage or adoption.” Average household size has gone down, too, from about 3.7 persons in 1940 to about 2.6 persons now; family households have dropped from about 3.8 persons to about 3.1.
The median age of householders (persons whose names are on deeds or leases) has risen consistently since the 1980s. A strong majority of households are headed by people 45 and older, and the portion has been increasing in recent decades. This prompted the Census Bureau blog to run the headline, “The Graying of American Households.”
For a slim majority (52 percent) of married couples, both spouses are in the labor force. But the portion fitting the 1950s “traditional” model where the husband works and the wife doesn’t is much smaller (about 23 percent). In the remainder of married households, either the wife works and the husband doesn’t, or neither works. There has been a steady decrease in the portion of households where only the husband works since at least the 1980s.
Even for couples with kids under six years old, a majority of households have both spouses in the labor force. But, for married couples with kids under 15, about a quarter have stay-at-home mothers, consistent with the related statistic above. Curiously, the portion of households with kids and stay-at-home mothers is actually higher today than in 1994.
So, as many of us connect with families in one way or another on Thanksgiving, I can’t help but observe that there really is no “typical” American family living under the same roof these days, if there ever was. Rather, we have a diverse and changing array of household types and circumstances that smart planners and businesses will seek to accommodate. The census data show that the growing parts of the housing market are non-family households, smaller households including people living alone, unmarried couples, single-parent households with kids, and older households. The declining parts of the market are larger families, married couples, two-parent households, and couples with only one breadwinner, though each of these categories clings to a significant share of the total..
Interesting stuff, and mostly good for those of us who would like to see less sprawl and more walkable neighborhoods. But also a bit complex.
Kaid Benfield writes about community, development, and the environment on Switchboard and in the national media. This piece was originally published at NRDC’s Switchboard and was reprinted with permission.
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Interesting data, thanks.
People are becoming more inclined to live in smaller homes in cities, but it is also an economic decision. High gas prices make long commutes expensive.
Sprawl has been enabled by an insidious set of economic incentives put in place by homebuilders, local governments, and materials suppliers. Detailing them would require a long article, but if those incentives were removed, our carbon footprint would be reduced and quality of life improved. People would walk and learn, instead of parking in the LaziBoy to watch the NFL while Junior is seething about mowing the lawn, and mom is dying from boredom.
Happy Thanksgiving to all at Climate Progress, including visitors; this site has enriched my life. Our holiday dinner will be a bit unconventional too.
The missing dimension is the economic. The median US household income has fallen by about 8%, I believe, since 2000, after decades of income stagnation. The increasing level of economic stress in the Anglosphere countries, the USA and UK in particular, is being used with consummate cynicism by the Right to attack renewable energy, on the grounds that it is ‘too expensive’. The same Rightwingers who argue and act ceaselessly to destroy unions, drive down wages, make work more contingent and precarious, send jobs off-shore etc, suddenly develop a great concern for the serfs’ welfare, but only when it comes to the cost of renewable energy. And they lie and misrepresent in the process, of course (you can’t teach old dogs new tricks).
Am I mistaken in thinking that certain aspects of these trends are actually sort of bad news, from a climatological perspective? The drift towards city living is, of course, all to the good–but I would have thought that the increased tendency of folks to live alone or in smaller groups isn’t nearly so encouraging. One is going to use a lot less energy maintaining a set of folks if they all live in one house than one would if they were scattered between multiple living spaces, each of which would need to be heated, cooled, provided with electricity, etc., after all.
“the number and portion of people living alone has risen steadily and significantly for decades.”
If you are just interested in the implications of family change for planning, it makes sense to use this sort of data: we need more housing for one person households.
If you are interested in the ways society is changing, you need to take account of the aging of the population. Because people are living longer, there are more single-family households made up of one surviving widow or widower. The survivor might have lived 25 years of adult life as a parent in a leave-it-to-beaver family, but might then live alone for 30 years after her children move out and her husband dies. In 1940, she would have died younger and might have lived alone for only 10 years.
Of course, there has been a shift away from the traditional family, but the numbers you are using exaggerate this shift by not correcting for our longer life expectancy.
Kaid, what a trip! Thanks. A series of charts that describe America’s changing demographic and the challenge “planners” will have to meet those changes in a global climate changing world. Didn’t catch that in your piece.
I take your point. We communicators, activists, panicked believers have to learn how to win the modern American Family to our point of view. Quick!!! Get them to join in huge numbers. That’s called buy-in and how the baggers got started.
These are trends throughout the industrialized West and there are important implications for the environment. Two quick examples: 1. the fewer people per dwelling, the higher per capita the cost of electricity and water (no showering with a friend amongst other things); 2. with an aging population, more are unable to walk long distances or hop on and off public transport with more reliance on private cars, ME
I should add though that us wrinkly ones with our old lungs and cardiovascular systems will be the first to go in a mutated flu pandemic, freeing up a lot of housing (if it hasn’t burnt down by then) and rescuing the health system – unless of course, like last year’s HeN2, the mutation attacks the young and the healthy (a very dirty trick).
But as experience shows all over the world, it doesn’t matter how dissociated people are, either psychologically or physically, when disaster strikes, people work together to make the best of it. To this extent, and catastophe is our future, worrying about our current arrangements is irrelevant, ME