A little over a year ago, I walked up Capitol Hill one morning behind two female staffers. Most staffers are very young — generally twenty-somethings — because they’re either college/grad school interns or just graduated. The two young women were sharing one’s excitement about moving into an apartment in DC. What struck me about the conversation was the two amenities that stood out for her: the kitchen included a spice rack and a dog park had opened on the building grounds.

I briefly commented on this in my grab bag of observations, “Random Ruminations,” reflecting how once upon a time a woman her age might have been far more excited about having a park to take the kids to or a playground next to her apartment building.

I return to this because Brad Wilcox from Virginia’s Institute for Family Studies tweeted precisely on this issue (here). “Dog parks” — places for canines to run and do other essential things — have become the new “amenity” many apartment buildings now offer. The apartment house I just left installed one last year on the front lawn. Wilcox comments that “we are orienting our cities around dogs, not families.” He reposted another writer’s observation that kids’ parks are closing while “dog parks” are going up.

It comes back to the question of how our infrastructure supports (or doesn’t) families. In northern Virginia where I live, the buildings may be putting in dog parks but for most, two bedroom apartments are the max. If you’re a family, you will not rent an apartment in many places. So, buy a house! But good luck with that! The house across from my apartment listed for $1.1 million and was a fixer-upper, i.e., it had a wet basement, 30-year-old roof, and unfinished porches. As young (and not-so-young) people complain, the house-as-American-dream is out of their reach.

Which brings us back to the question: how does our infrastructure support families? It’s a subset of the “new urbanism.”

Timothy Carney’s Family Unfriendly notes the various ways our culture and society does not support families. Among them is infrastructure: the lack of sidewalks. Some people might pooh-pooh that concern, but it was something we noticed when we came to Washington with our eldest daughter as an infant. You reach a point on a street where the sidewalk ends and, if you want to continue, you’re in the street itself. All those kinds of things send the message: families aren’t important.

Dogs, now, apparently, are.

I have nothing against dogs; they’re man’s best friend. But they don’t generally live as long as kids, can be euthanized (admit it or not), generally cost less (unless you have a Bernese Mountain dog going to the vet), and are more likely obedient. Given the challenges of our imploding fertility, Pope Francis was right when he scored the phenomenon of “fur babies.”