Small courtyard apartment buildings line the Sunnyside neighborhood of New York.
Photographer: Jeenah Moon/Bloomberg
Design
The Answer To Making Cities More Family-Friendly? Courtyards
New housing experiments with courtyards show that this age-old design approach can still deliver for cities struggling to provide homes for families.
Bloomberg News has won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, with a collection of essays for Bloomberg CityLab by contributor Alexandra Lange. Read the series here.
The population of children under five is shrinking across the US. That group has decreased most rapidly in big cities: 14% in Los Angeles County, 18% percent in New York City and 15% percent in Cook County, Illinois, which includes Chicago.