A lack of family-friendly housing is a key reason people are having fewer children. It’s also a problem governments can help fix
https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/this-one-factor-is-a-key-reason-people-are-having-fewer-children-its-also-a/article_02aeec30-6eaf-40be-b999-948b941681f9.html
7 Comments
People having fewer children isn’t something the government needs to fix, it’s a universal phenomenon in every rich society in human history (or really, the ones where women gain greater autonomy). If Canada needs new people they are still wildly available on this planet without having to downgrade that autonomy or inculcate racial partiality in our disinterested populace.
Our existing and fully born working age population facing severe housing shortages is a problem functional governments have solved many times in human history, but that is not the same problem.
The government can easily fix it by actually making it legal to build. Do you think the free market is voluntarily leaving low rise housing in Toronto’s little Italy, or cabbage town, etc? If you could build Paris or Tokyo style housing those areas would all look like Paris or Tokyo.
All these measures have proven useless. The only sure way to raise population is….immigration. Generous immigration.
Errr no.
A key reason why people are having less children is because now it’s a CHOICE. Women are not confined to the house anymore and they can decide to pursue a career instead of being forced to stay home to take care of a big family.
The most educated people are and the smaller the families. It doesn’t mean that educated people do not have kids, but simply that they decide how many they wants.
But as always they won’t. Largely because it’ll upset the nimby boomers, and also because the government itself is so invested in housing they’re never going to do anything to devalue their own accounts. It doesn’t matter who the government is at this point, all the parties have gone corrupt in favour of personal and corporate profits for their friends and lobbyists. Then tax-funded bribery for whatever voterbase keeps them in power (looking at you OAS..)
Just to head off the inevitable conversation about birth rates and whether a country can even properly incentivize it, even “generous” programs still represent an extremely small percentage of the actual cost of having, let alone raising, a child. Therefore, I’d suggest maybe we should be a bit less confident assuming we’ve actually tried incentivizing it in a meaningful way.
This comment on [South Korea](https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueReddit/comments/1md1mg5/why_donald_trump_elon_musk_and_jd_vance_want_to/n605pyv/) seems compelling to me, and speaks directly to the impact of housing. Whether that level of support is realistic or efficient is another conversation, but there’s this persistent and seemingly inaccurate narrative that somehow countries have tried throwing money at the problem and it hasn’t worked. Show me an amount that’s even 10% of the cost of a kid and we can talk…You get these dramatic headlines like this one: [You Can’t Even Pay People to Have More Kids] (https://populationconnection.org/article/you-cant-even-pay-people-to-have-more-kids/) but read the article and it’s a laundry list of comically cheap incentives. Wow 6 months of parental leave paid out at 60, no wait 80%, that definitely offsets the financial and career costs.
People care about birth rates for a lot of reasons, some more savory than others, but I think we should see it at least in part as a quality of life metric. Of course I do think there are factors that naturally lead people to no longer want to have children regardless of the economics, but it’s undeniable that there are increasingly those who would love to have children but make the mature and coldly rational decision not to, or to have less, directly because of costs.
I resent the gaslighting, that this is a choice we’re actively making and not at least in part a rational response to worsening conditions. Like yes, we’re choosing to have less children because the choice is harder now…at least when you’re being responsible about it.
I don’t have studies to back up my thoughts but I do have kids, and I think not wanting kids is personal freedom, money and not seeing that great of a future, not in any particular order.
I think the access to information has everyone hyper sensitive and more aware of everything wrong in this world.
I am thankful I grew up with 5 channels, landlines and the ability to make ends meet with an average job.