Bryan Caplan
Bryan Caplan
If you read the endnotes for Build, Baby, Build, you’ll learn about all of the papers I could find on the connection between fertility and housing prices/housing regulation. I’m afraid the total is only three:
Simon, Curtis, and Robert Tamura. 2009. “Do Higher Rents Discourage Fertility?” Regional Science and Urban Economics 39: 33–42.
Mulder, Clara, and Francesco Billari. 2010. “Homeownership Regimes and Low Fertility.” Housing Studies 25: 527–41.
Shoag, Daniel, and Lauren Russell. 2018. “Land Use Regulations and Fertility Rates.” In One Hundred Years of Zoning and the Future of Cities, edited by Amnon Lehavi, pp.139–49.
All three articles affirm that lower housing prices and/or less housing regulation raises fertility. But to be honest, the main reason I’m convinced of the natalist power of housing deregulation is not the research but common sense. Specifically:
Higher housing prices make young adults more likely to keep living with their parents.
Young adults who live with their parents are unlikely to marry.
Even married young adults who live with their parents are unlikely to have kids.
I call this the problem of “basement fertility”: Living in your parents’ basement is a powerful form of contraception. Make housing a lot cheaper, and young adults will form new households — and new families — sooner.
The main doubt: Housing deregulation allows greater population density, and some smart people are convinced that density causally reduces fertility. Several people have recently waved Rotella et al.’s “Increasing Population Densities Predict Decreasing Fertility Rates Over Time: A 174‐Nation Investigation” (American Psychologist, 2021) in my virtual face. While Rotella et al. admit that their main evidence is not really causal, they appeal to animal experiments where density per se slashes fertility:
In nonhuman animal studies, higher population densities have been associated with reduced reproduction rates (Fowler, 1981, 1987). Further, » Read More
https://www.cato.org/blog/building-babies-build-baby-build-fertility