There are no children here: as families and children are increasingly disappearing from our cities, are we aware of the consequences?

WHEN EDWARD HOPPER SOUGHT TO CAPTURE the alienation and loneliness of modern life, the American realist painted empty cities--urban landscapes stripped of the teeming masses that crowd metropolitan boulevards, beaches, and ballparks. Georges Seurat, Childe Hassam, and George Bellows painted avenues, parks, and stadiums jammed with strolling and cheering city dwellers, but on a Hopper canvas empty row houses and shuttered storefronts stare back at us, blank-eyed and desolate. Sidewalks have no pedestrians, and restaurants, hotels, and theaters have just a smattering of patrons. The city is a ghost town.

A growing number of America's older and larger cities are beginning to resemble a Hopper landscape, missing particularly the families and children that had once filled the schools and churches and played in the parks and playgrounds.

On TV and at the movies cities have long been losing their share of families and kids. In the 1950s TV sitcoms like I Love Lucy entertained us with the adventures of urban couples and families, but in the '90s hits like Seinfeld, Frasier, Friends, and Sex and the City, our city dwellers were 20- to 40-something singles with more careers and canines than children, and the cities they inhabit have far more cafes and coffee bars than kindergartens or school cafeterias. When wives and families do show up as major characters in recent shows like Desperate Housewives, the setting is nearly always suburban. Home is where the three-car garage is.

Major dramas set in our big cities also make little room for children. Because Americans want their presidents to practice family values, Jed Bartlet (Martin Sheen) has a wife and children that sometimes appear on The West Wing, but his young and restless staffers are all single members of an urban elite with little time for children or spouses. And on crime drama franchises like Law & Order and CSI the prosecutors and investigators fighting big city crime have no families to speak of.

At the movies, too, cities seem to be largely devoid of children and families. Films set in major American cities (but photographed in a look-alike Canadian metropolis) are either romantic comedies (Must Love Dogs), crime dramas (Four Brothers), or tales of superheroes (Barman Begins) saving New York's comic book clones--Gotham and Metropolis--from civilization-destroying archfiends. Occasionally a lost child (Home Alone 2: Lost in New York) or a family raising a mouse (Stuart Little) shows up in a city movie, but generally children get left on the cutting-room floor.

CITIES WEREN'T ALWAYS UNFRIENDLY TO FAMILIES. WHEN the industrial revolution hit in the 19th century, tens of millions of Europeans and Americans fled the farms and villages where their families and ancestors had eked out a living and poured into sprawling, smoke-billowing cities crammed with factories and tenements. Manufacturing jobs and the rich political, cultural, and economic life of the city offered the children of sharecroppers and immigrants undreamed of opportunities, and in the working-class neighborhoods where they struggled for a better life, schools, churches, libraries, hospitals, and parks flourished. And as the children of these factory workers got the education, jobs, homes, and health care their parents had dreamed of, cities became cleaner and safer places to raise families, replete with museums, symphonies, theaters, and occasionally a winning ball club.

The last half century has seen a steady decline in many of America's cities as manufacturing jobs moved from the Rust Belt to the Sun Belt and beyond, and urban blight spread through working-class neighborhoods. For decades the populations of cities like Detroit, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and Baltimore dropped as people moved elsewhere in search of better jobs and schools and safer streets and neighborhoods.

But even cities that have successfully reinvented themselves as dot-com havens or tourist resorts have been hemorrhaging families and children. Places like San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Honolulu, and Miami attract young urban professionals and the recently retired in droves, offering an assortment of cultural and culinary delights that include great restaurants, exciting theater, hip museums, and a variety of recreational opportunities.

Still, these adult theme park cities offer fewer and fewer decent places for families to live or for their children to go to school or play. The soaring housing markets in Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland have driven all but the most resolute to seek shelter in the suburbs or other, more family-friendly cities.

An average house in Gilbert, Arizona, last year's fastest growing U.S. city, costs around $220,000. The average home in San Francisco runs more than three times that much--probably four by the time you finish reading this paragraph. And the schools and parks in these boutique cities are not as good as they might be. So young people spend a few years living it up in one of America's playground cities but move to places like Phoenix or Boise, Idaho to raise a family.

THE FLIGHT OF FAMILIES AND CHILDREN from cities has a number of unfavorable effects. The public and private schools that anchor and strengthen neighborhoods begin to disappear. Portland, which has lost 10,000 students since the mid-1990s, closed six schools this spring and expects to close three to four grade schools a year for the foreseeable future. Catholic schools in Philadelphia and Boston and other major cities are closing at a similar pace.

Families also bind the generations of a city to one another, making connections between a town's rich past and promising future. Families are grounded in and committed to cities in ways that young singles or retirees are not. People who are raising their children and grandchildren in a neighborhood have a greater stake in its future and more reason to get involved in local programs and politics.

Disappearing families can also rob cities of a stable middle class, creating a tale of two cities, one rich and one poor. Wealthy urbanites live in high rise condominiums and shop in boutique grocery stores while a rising tide of homeless crowds into shelters and tent cities.

For millennia philosophers and believers have argued that cities must be communities of justice that nurture and support their citizens, providing individuals and families with the goods and rights they need to be fully human.

Plato's Republic tells us how to build a just city, and when Aristotle argues that humans are political animals he means that we are meant to live and flourish in the polis, or city, and to find ourselves by contributing to a common good larger than the family or tribe. The city is a symbol of a human community transcending the boundaries of blood or tongue, a place where we recognize the common dignity and humanity of people who are different from ourselves.

THE AFRICAN ADAGE THAT "IT TAKES a village to raise a child," reminds us of the importance of our cities and towns, the places that provide not just our restaurants and museums but also our schools, parks, and hospitals. It takes a city to raise and humanize a child. But it also takes children and families to raise a city, to create a rich and diverse community grounded in the past and committed to the future. Cities devastated by urban blight or redecorated as resorts pale against the sorts of cities that make room for families and children, for these are the places that will give birth to our future.

By PATRICK MCCORMICK, professor of Christian ethics at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington.