Sorry, NYT. This is a great place to have three kids.

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Living in New York City is super expensive. This is true. Having three kids is super expensive. This is also true. And when you look closely at the overlapping part of this Venn diagram, you get the perfect recipe for Thursday’s article in the New York Times about people living both of these experiences at the same time. And the takeaway, for those nonwealthy parents who insist on doing both? Unfortunately, you’re doomed to some limited choices. Stay, and raise your family of five in a constant state of want. Or leave the city, get your bigger piece of the housing pie, but wish that things could have turned out differently.

But what if there’s another option? Being ultrarich and carefree, you say? Well, sure, but that’s not what I’m getting at. What if you and your partner could have three kids, work full time, live on top of each other, and still somehow squeeze some joy out of life?

The nugget at the core of this Times article is this data point: Families with three or more children are less and less common in the city, with the total number of such families dropping 17 percent in the past decade. Housing is too expensive (yes). Day care is too expensive (yes). And what do you get, at the end of the day? According to those middle-class and upper-middle-class New Yorkers the Times picked to be interviewed here, you’re living in a tiny apartment. You have to dress your kids in hand-me-downs. There’s a cargo bike involved. Birthday parties are at the park instead of, I guess, some place like Chuck E. Cheese.

My point is not to say that it’s easy to raise three kids in the city. But I take issue with this portrayal of a big family stretched to the brink as a uniquely New York way of life. Living here as a not-megawealthy family of five can still be awesome, even if it feels as if it takes all you’ve got to keep your head above water. Everyone here does birthday parties in the park, and nobody feels that we’re slumming it. We ride our bikes to actually commute places, and it’s fun as hell. Instead of looking at all these examples as arguments for leaving, I’d like to flip them into more reasons to tough it out and stay.

Here’s where I’m coming from. We live in a two-floor, two-bedroom attached house in Astoria, Queens, a neighborhood where we’ve lived since 2007, with our three boys, ages 10, 8, and almost 3. The house was built in 1920, we bought it in 2011 when the interest rates were low, and it’s on a residential block full of similar buildings. Ours is 16 feet wide by 35 feet long, and it’s an absolute money pit, seeming to require major repairs yearly. My wife is a lawyer for a bank. I’m pulling up the rear making podcasts here at Slate. We are comfortably middle-class by New York City standards. I never want to leave, no matter how much bigger the lawns are in the suburbs.

Don’t get me wrong—it would be nice to have maybe just a little more space. For better or worse, we’re definitely limited to what we can fit in the house. So many birthday and Christmas presents from relatives and friends have had to be returned right away, and the children compensated with smaller treats, due to a lack of space. And day-to-day logistics can get wacky. My wife is in the office full time, and I work mostly from home, but if there’s ever any overlap, one of us winds up working on the couch. Every so often, we take a look at what else might be out there, but we are now decidedly priced out of a bigger space.

But there are upsides to all of this. First, living in tight quarters can be more efficient. Our two older boys have bunk beds, and the baby is in a crib on the other side of a room probably the size of the sleeping quarters of a submarine. He can get in and out by himself now, and we eventually have to buy either one of the triple bunks mentioned in the Times piece or a lofted bed to replace the crib, a move that would actually free up some space for a desk underneath. (I am in favor of the second option, so please comment in support of this decision so I can show my wife that it’s a better idea.)

Bedtime is chaos. The boys do not go down easily. They’ll be quiet for a few minutes before one of them wakes up the other two. It’s like a game of little-kid Whac-a-Mole, where the more I try to calm them down, the crazier everyone seems to get. We’re lucky if they are truly asleep by 10 p.m. Which sounds like bad parenting, right? Except in order to actually get them quiet, we usually have to spend time in the room, reading books with them. I’ve read a ton, out loud (we’re currently on the second-to-last of Lemony Snicket’s 13-book Baudelaire saga), until everyone is truly out. The lack of space forces us to be closer than maybe we’d be if we had the bedrooms to really spread out.

Mornings are equally chaotic. We have one shower. There’s another half bath on the first floor. If you ask me, the limited space helps streamline our daily routine. When we get up in the morning to get the kids out the door, there is nowhere for these suckers to hide. We have the routine down to a solid 30 minutes, and that’s possible only because we don’t have the space to do otherwise. If I had to go to multiple bathrooms to check if kids were brushing their teeth? If ripping the blankets off my sleeping babies required going door to door? They’d still be home right now, and I’d be getting a visit from the truancy police.

When being cooped up inside gets unbearable, which it does after more than a few hours, we go outside. Living through COVID-19 in the same house we’re in now, we found an escape from the insanity by just walking around for hours, a habit we’ve kept up to this day. Trader Joe’s is more than 2 miles away from our place, so every Sunday we all walk there, the baby in and out of the stroller when he gets tired. We stop at playgrounds to break up the hike. We get boba tea and souvlaki and hot pot and yakitori and the best pizza in the world along the way. When the kids complain that they’re bored, we play stupid games like “Who can spot the most Cadillacs on the road?” or “How many Pokémon can you name without drawing a blank?”

Everything is within walking distance. The best museums and parks are a bus or subway ride away. Just taking the train is still enough of an adventure for the baby; for the older boys, when that novelty wears off, I can see them growing more independent, as using public transportation becomes second nature.

To be crystal clear, the point I’m making is not that the government shouldn’t be more active in lowering costs for working families in our wonderful city. We all need a break. Say what you want about Bill de Blasio, but the guy delivered on probably the biggest quality-of-life increase in memory for anyone in the city who has kids. We’ve only ever known a New York where child care is basically covered starting at 4 years old. Our youngest gets 3K for free this year, which is a first for us, and I can’t tell you the weight it takes off our shoulders.

Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani’s proposed universal free day care should be a benefit that every citizen of this city would fight to the death for. When our oldest two were in day care at the same time, it was the biggest monthly payment on our list of bills, and it made those years easily the most stressful period of our lives. Of course that situation is contributing to the exodus of families (and the choices of some others to stick to one or two kids), and we should be as committed to making day care costs free as we are to taxpayer-funded schools. The same goes for housing. Prices are only going up, and there’s a point where every family must make a decision about what they can string together to make city life work. Our elected officials need to use the powers of the state to keep more families from leaving.

Both my wife and I grew up on Long Island, so I understand the notes this Times piece is trying to hit. When you live in the suburbs, you generally have more of some things. Multiple cars per family is normal. Houses are bigger, and there’s usually a yard and probably a basement where, even though it’s finished and livable, there are always cave crickets that jump at your face when you turn on the lights.

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But having kids in general is expensive, whether you’re in the city or somewhere else. And the sky-high property taxes in New York’s suburbs put a huge dent in the argument that moving to within bridge-and-tunnel distance is somehow more affordable. Since we’ve had kids, day-to-day life has been hectic, and expenses have been higher than we ever could have imagined before we became parents. But isn’t that what it’s like for anyone who has little kids? I feel safe saying that we’d be as frenzied and stretched if we lived anywhere else. Maybe there’d be more house to keep clean. But schedules would still be tight. Homework would need to get done, and dinner put on the table. And birthday parties at Chuck E. Cheese would be just as overpriced as they are here in New York.

Will we ever not just want but need a bigger space? Will the biological reality of what’s coming force our hands? Our oldest is already almost as tall as his mom. What’s it going to be like, five or 10 years from now, when we have three man-sized humans trying to coexist in such a tight space? I’d be lying if I told you we have that figured out. But I’m telling the truth when I say we never had a solid plan for having three kids in our extremely tight quarters to begin with. And somehow, we’ve had a blast.

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