New home, new baby?
In the "things that make you go hmmm" category: The New York Times mused this week on rising fertility rates in the U.S., wondering if the "wide-open mortgage climate early this decade" that pushed homeownership numbers to record levels encouraged more people to have kids:
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. ...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.”
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