Mar 4, 2026 06:44 PM
https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-...h-control/
INTRO: Economists have watched the American birth rate plummet and wondered exactly what caused it. We’ve heard back about childcare costs, shifting cultural norms, lack of suitable partners, and even student debt. To be fair, the problem of birth rates well below the 2.1 children per woman replacement level is shared by virtually all developed nations.
Now, a new study cuts through the noise. It turns out that soaring home prices, and specifically the premium on extra bedrooms, act as the ultimate birth control.
Benjamin K. Couillard, a doctoral candidate in economics at the University of Toronto, built a sophisticated new framework to understand this crisis. He found that between 1990 and 2020, average rents in the United States shot up by 149 percent. During that exact same window, the total fertility rate dropped from a sustainable 2.08 births per woman down to a record low of 1.599 last year. Had housing costs remained stable since 1990, 13 million more children would have been born between 1990 and 2020.
But his paper also reveals that the housing market’s failure to provide three-bedroom units is a massive driver of our demographic decline. Analysis of public data suggests that adequate stocks of three-bedroom or larger units would increase births 2.3 times more than spending the equivalent amount on a larger quantity of small units.
You might wonder why it took so long for researchers to show that expensive housing stops people from having babies. It sounds like common sense.
But measuring this link accurately is notoriously tricky. People who want large families tend to move away from expensive urban centers to find cheaper housing. This geographic shuffle, known as “sorting bias,” often masks the true impact of housing costs on local fertility data.
Many cities currently push for high-density development, churning out studio apartments and one-bedroom units. This approach helps ease overall rent prices, but Couillard’s model exposes a critical flaw: it does not actually solve the fertility crisis.
If you want people to start families, you have to build homes designed for families... (MORE - details)
INTRO: Economists have watched the American birth rate plummet and wondered exactly what caused it. We’ve heard back about childcare costs, shifting cultural norms, lack of suitable partners, and even student debt. To be fair, the problem of birth rates well below the 2.1 children per woman replacement level is shared by virtually all developed nations.
Now, a new study cuts through the noise. It turns out that soaring home prices, and specifically the premium on extra bedrooms, act as the ultimate birth control.
Benjamin K. Couillard, a doctoral candidate in economics at the University of Toronto, built a sophisticated new framework to understand this crisis. He found that between 1990 and 2020, average rents in the United States shot up by 149 percent. During that exact same window, the total fertility rate dropped from a sustainable 2.08 births per woman down to a record low of 1.599 last year. Had housing costs remained stable since 1990, 13 million more children would have been born between 1990 and 2020.
But his paper also reveals that the housing market’s failure to provide three-bedroom units is a massive driver of our demographic decline. Analysis of public data suggests that adequate stocks of three-bedroom or larger units would increase births 2.3 times more than spending the equivalent amount on a larger quantity of small units.
You might wonder why it took so long for researchers to show that expensive housing stops people from having babies. It sounds like common sense.
But measuring this link accurately is notoriously tricky. People who want large families tend to move away from expensive urban centers to find cheaper housing. This geographic shuffle, known as “sorting bias,” often masks the true impact of housing costs on local fertility data.
Many cities currently push for high-density development, churning out studio apartments and one-bedroom units. This approach helps ease overall rent prices, but Couillard’s model exposes a critical flaw: it does not actually solve the fertility crisis.
If you want people to start families, you have to build homes designed for families... (MORE - details)
