The baby bust is mostly cultural, but partly economic. The economic drag on family formation is mostly about housing: In the past six years, it has become much more expensive to own or rent a home.
The most obvious way to bring down prices is to increase supply. If you’ve been following debates over housing and urbanism for the past decade or so, you know about the YIMBYs — instead of the “Not In My Back Yard” NIMBYism, the YIMBYs say “Yes In My Back Yard.”
The YIMBYs are mostly right, but sometimes they seem to have a fetish for high-rises and apartment buildings as opposed to single-family homes.
This is understandable for those who simply want to maximize housing density and supply. But if you see the housing crisis through the lens of the family-formation crisis, you will be a bit ambivalent about high-rises and even on six-story walkups.
Yes, increasing supply in general drives down the cost of homes, but it doesn’t always make it easier for people to start and grow their families. Dense urbanization does not seem to be pro-natal (Look at Tokyo).
For many Americans, the dream is a single-family detached home with a big, fenced-in yard. That’s great. We should have more of them. But massive yards also mean lower density. In a given area, lower density means lower supply, which means higher prices.
So if either the YIMBYs or the suburban-dreamers get their ideal, it’s sub-optimal for helping families.
Between these extremes, there lies an optimal density for families. I believe the optimum density for promoting families is dense suburbia. I’m not against raising children in the city (I lived in New York City growing up), but I like suburbia because it’s important for children to be able to safely just step out the door and run around outside. This points to an important consideration: Density is one factor when we’re trying to be family-friendly, but the design of the homes and the surrounding spaces probably matter just as much.
This is where townhouses — attached single-family homes — enter the conversation. Liberal blogger Matt Yglesias has a long essay on them today, again, saying that the design here matters. First, they shouldn’t be ugly and cheaply made. I agree with Yglesias on that. He also talks about walkability to coffee shops, which is nice and all.
But what’s more important to me is how child-friendly the immediate environment is: Each family should have its own private outdoor area, and that ideally should open up to a common play area. Imagine a small, 300-square-foot backyard, enough for the toddlers to run around or to have another family over for a picnic. But then there’s a gate in that small backyard (with a latch too high for a 4-year-old to reach), which opens onto a large, enclosed common green area with a playground. In this setting, the elementary-school-aged children can just let themselves out to play with the neighborhood kids on a Saturday morning without needing their parents to take them anywhere or supervise them.
This may not be your ideal family housing situation, but life is full of trade-offs. What I’ve described above is a potentially affordable way to get the most important stuff a family needs. One recent survey showed that families would be willing to give up a large private yard for other goods.
Pro-family developer Bobby Fijan of the Great American Housing Corporation adds another detail: Soundproofing.
TIM CARNEY: BABIES AND FAMILIES SHOULD NOT BE EXOTIC
A big reason parents want a single-family home is so that they don’t have to worry about their children crying (sometimes you need to let a baby cry itself to sleep), or about a neighbor waking up the sleeping baby, or about a neighbor hearing the children fight. Soundproofed townhouses are clutch here.
This is all to say that for getting more families, density is good, single-family homes are good, right-outside-the-door play areas are good, and close-by communal play areas are good. These things all blend nicely in well-designed rowhouses or townhouses.