People are getting married less and having fewer babies than ever before. The most common excuse is it’s too expensive to raise a family.
In most ways, this argument is bogus. Millennials are just as wealthy at this point in their lives as Gen Xers were, and Gen X women managed to average about 2.1 babies each. Millennials have about 1.6 each nowadays.
But in one very big way, it’s true that raising a family is more expensive now — it’s called a house. We don’t have enough housing, and this is made evident by one consequence of the law of supply and demand: The rent is too damn high.
“Nationwide, the share of renters who are considered ‘burdened’ — spending more than 30 percent of their income on rent and utilities — has climbed to 47 percent.” That’s from an excellent Annie Lowrey piece in the Atlantic, with the daunting and startling but true headline “The U.S. Needs More Housing Than Almost Anyone Can Imagine.”
TOM BRADY CHOSE FOOTBALL OVER FAMILY AND LOST
Expert estimates hold that the housing shortage ranges from 3.8 million to 7 million units.
If the demand is so large, why wouldn’t a free market provide the supply to meet the demand? There are a million answers. One is that states and counties often artificially limit the ability of builders to build houses and apartments. Zoning laws, staircase regulations, parking requirements, and a million other governmental rules get in the way. So do environmental and labor laws, which make building homes much more expensive, which in turn makes building affordable homes uneconomical.
When it comes to starting a family, a big hole in the housing market is the “starter home.”
My wife and I lived in two such homes consecutively. First came our 800-square-foot row house in D.C. The second was a 950-square-foot detached brick colonial in Sprawlsville, Maryland. But these starter homes weren’t cheap, given the markets. As Emily Badger at the New York Times pointed out in a recent piece, they used to be cheap and plentiful.
“Nationwide,” Badger writes, “the small detached house has all but vanished from new construction. Only about 8% of new single-family homes today are 1,400 square feet or less. In the 1940s, according to CoreLogic, nearly 70% of new houses were that small.”
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These days, despite smaller families, homes are bigger. So the barrier to entry into housed family life is higher.
We have a lot of problems in our politics and culture today. The most addressable one might be the housing shortage. Governments should remove as many obstacles as possible to building as much new housing as possible.
