More bedrooms mean more babies
If an economist is a person who is baffled because he cannot explain why people don’t walk up escalators, is then a demographer a person who cannot satisfy himself that more bedrooms mean more babies? As reported in The New York Times:
For the first time in 35 years, America’s total fertility rate — the estimated number of children a woman will have in her lifetime — reached 2.1, the theoretical level required to maintain the country’s population, according to recent data from the National Center for Health Statistics.
Now, why are we making all these babies?
Can I guess?
Might it have something to do with having a place to do it in?
You think?
Demographers caution that it is too soon to say whether the increase is a blip or a trend, or to determine its causes, which may include changes in the economy, immigration and the availability of abortion. “All this could turn around on a dime,” said Stephanie J. Ventura, chief of the reproductive statistics branch of the statistics center.
Future demography cloudy
But at a time when no cocktail conversation is complete without a discussion of real estate, the boomlet raises a question that has long interested social scientists: What is the relationship between fertility and real estate?
For benefit of virginal economists everywhere, I posted about this some months ago, in Who put the bed in bedroom?
Those of us who deal with apartment affordability tend after a while to forget their principal demographic appeal, until we are reminded of it by astonished dowdy-ism of the Gray Lady herself, the New York Times, who has discovered to her white-glove shock that there is sex, sex being used to sell urban living space:
A woman with tousled hair straddles a grinning, shirtless man on a bed alongside the words: “Try This at Home.” This was not an advertisement for beer, perfume or instructional Kama Sutra DVD’s. It was an advertisement for the Herald Towers condominiums in Midtown Manhattan.
Some of the advertisements for new condominiums this year look more like ads for condoms, and that has caused more than a few eyes to linger on traditionally staid real estate listings. These provocative advertisements have also raised eyebrows among real estate and advertising professionals who say sex has never been germane to real estate marketing the way it is, say, to music and underwear.
At this point, your humble correspondent risked falling from his office chair guffawing.
Sex has never been germane to real estate marketing?
A question for those who took economics instead of biology — what happens when you make bedrooms cheaper? Since housing demand is elastic, people use more bedrooms. What do they do in those bedrooms?
In the wide-open mortgage climate early this decade, creative loan products allowed more people than ever to buy homes, often a precursor to having children. In 2006, the babies arrived — a reminder, perhaps, that if you build it, they will toddle.
Is real estate destiny?
Just as zoning is destiny, so is configuration, and tenure.
“It’s something a bunch of us have been thinking about,” said Morris A. Davis, an assistant professor of real estate and urban land economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Business. “If you reduce down-payment constraints, more people can buy homes, or buy bigger homes. Does that encourage them to have more kids? I would say nobody knows.”
Maybe nobody knows– or everybody knows?
Social scientists have long traced a connection between housing and fertility. When homes are scarce or beyond the means of young couples, as in the 1930s, couples delay marriage or have fewer children.
How often have you heard people saying, “we’re buying a home because we’re starting a family”?
This tendency helps account for the relatively dismal birth rates of many developed nations, said Robert Engelman, vice president for programs at the Worldwatch Institute, an environmental research organization, and author of the forthcoming “More: Population, Nature, and What Women Want.”
I know what she’s thinking
I’ve previously described how tight zoning inhibits housing formation, which in turn inhibits demographic growth, leading to stagnation both political (Zoning oneself blue in the states) and economic (Demographic shakers). Now we have a further link: no bedrooms, no baby booms.
But circumstances have thrown us together, sir!
“One reason there are so few children in
As best as I can roughly estimate it, the average American pays one-half, relative to income, for each square foot of space consumed. Unsurprisingly, American homes are much larger than their European counterpart, and they are evolving larger faster than European homes.
Houses are bigger. Fifty years ago, a three-bedroom house was 1,200 square feet. Today that’s a two-bedroom flat, and the median house is 2,500 square feet and rising.
More rooms, more specialized rooms, more places to be private:
Several population specialists emphasized that housing is just one influence on fertility, and difficult to tease out from other factors, like income or optimism. “If you lower the cost of housing, you’re going to lower the cost of raising a child,” said Seth Sanders, director of the Maryland Population Research Center at the University of Maryland. “But if you look at how much it costs to raise a child, only one-third of the cost is housing. So my guess is that the impact is not very large.”
Uh — in my experience, when one is enjoying the delights of one’s new private bedroom, few people are doing cost-benefit calculations about the value of offspring.
I doubt Mommy and Daddy are doing the math on me
But Matthew E. Kahn, an economist at the Institute of the Environment at the
Said another way, what can you do in a home theater that you can’t or shouldn’t do in a public theater?
Caught by Weegee
Does Netflix mean fertility?
The 4,265,996 babies born in 2006, the most since 1961, reflect increases in birth rates for women in all parts of the country and nearly every demographic group studied — including teenagers, whose rate had dropped every year since 1991. The only decline was among girls under 15.
Everybody’s doing it, doing it. Forming households, that is.
We’re looking for households to form
The fertility rates for Hispanic immigrants were higher than those in many of their countries of origin, including
General birth rates were highest in Republican strongholds like
They were lowest in states won by John Kerry in 2004, including
Here is powerful confirmatory evidence that in fact Democrats are zoning themselves blue in the states:
Consider these links in a logic chain:
Only as strong as its weakest link
Land prices correlate with voting. High-cost areas appear blue (Democratic), lower-cost areas appear red (Republican). We know that homeownership changes behavior; does that change extend to voting?
This element would be stronger if we had examples where any formerly red area turned blue as its density increased. Los Angeles comes to mind, but this needs checking.
Zoning drives land pricing. Zoning is destiny, and because land value is a residual, tight zoning drives up land prices.
Land prices squeeze affordability. High land prices mean high development costs and increase the cost-value gap.
Lack of affordability dampens and inhibits economic growth. Via linkage, increased taxes, or otherwise. Not necessarily enough to prevent or even stall it, but to encourage it to relocate.
Affordability influences population growth. Americans are also the most mobile people in history. We go where the jobs are, and where we can afford the housing. When the income-expense ratios get bad (often correlated with high-cost-housing areas), we move.
Now take a look at the difference between the 2000 and 2004 elections (click and toggle). Out of 51 states (counting the District of Columbia), all but three went the same way in 2004 as they had in 2000, but from among those states, Republicans gained +7 electoral votes over 2000. Why the increase? Reapportionment, driven by population change.
The theoretical connection between homes and bedrooms and babies and votes is similarly confirmed by interviews:
In a 2007 survey by the Pew Research Center, 79% of evangelicals said they had children, compared with 73% of nonevangelical Protestants and 62% of those who described themselves as secular. For Catholics and Protestants, the more often they attended services, the more likely they were to have children.
No babies today means no workers tomorrow:
With their low birth rates, Europe, Japan, China and parts of the Middle East face the burden of shrinking productive work forces and aging populations (a vicious cycle: gloomy economic prospects lead to low birth rates, which lead to gloomy economic prospects).
You mean I’m not coming after all?
By the way, married people live longer, stay alert and smart longer, and are healthier throughout.
For the
As it is in life.
This is a sign in a positive direction.
Mr. Rendall considered the cohort born in 1960, at the height of the baby boom. In 2040, when that group turns 80, the people born in 2006 will be in their prime earning years, he said. “The baby boom peak will be benefiting from 34-year-olds born in 2006. They’ll be in the labor force just in time.”
Funny how that reproduction thing works.
Guess what we’ve been doing!
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