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Notes -
Italy’s birth rate is decreasing further to 1,2:
https://archive.is/T6thJ
The article notes that Meloni is herself a single child, but fails to mention that she also only has a single daughter. Still the low birth rate is a core issue for her and her right-wing coalition, but as in leftwing governments elsewhere they can’t find policies to reverse course.
My state offers heavily subsidized childcare and healthcare for pregnancy and young children to middle income families and below, which is not that hard to actually use. I looked up the fertility rate, and it isn't great.
But also, I like this visual tracker of US births by state 2005 - 2021, where is shows births per 1,000 women (15 - 44) going down noticeably every single year: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/fertility_rate/fertility_rates.htm
It looks like more than just "we can't go out when we want." Arizona went from 80 to 55.5 in 15 years. Utah went from 93 to 64. 15 years ago, women went to college and worked, people also moved away from their parents to work, liked going on trips together, missed going on date nights when they had young children, used contraception, and had access to abortion. The trend remained pretty steady through Covid and the years after.
I'm not sure why it's so stark, but even very expensive taxpayer funded childcare, food, tax breaks, and healthcare programs don't appear to be doing anything about it. Certainly not trivial things like cheap (or even free!) diapers and formula.
There is no amount of social welfare that can convince a person to have kids. There are more important things that are aren't in place.
You need
All govt. assistance ends up being fed to landlords downstream. Italy tops the list of western-european countries where 25-35 year olds still live with parents. Don't try anything another solution unless you fix housing first. Everything else is downstream.
I know a ton of people in their late-30s who're struggling to have kids / 2nd children becasue they're too old. The urge to be parents exists. Things just take a LOT longer to stabilize.
I'm confused about your list of needed things. I don't know anyone who grew up with all of them. Looking at just my family tree I have:
One set of grandparents had their first son on a US Base in West Germany. Moved back to the US to a part of the country far away from other family, bought a house in the suburbs, and had five kids all told. (Missing: house at first baby, labor support)
Other pair of grandparents had moved from Ireland, didn't have any relatives to help. Had 12 kids on a single policeman's salary. (I'm not sure when they bought their first house, but they were missing labor support.)
-My parents had me and my brother in a one bedroom condo, about a five hour drive from my father's parents. My parents both worked at the time and I was in daycare. After my brother's birth they moved to a lower cost of living state and bought a house. My father had a job lined up, my mother did not. She transitioned into a Stay at Home role, which ended up being mostly permanent. Three kids total, but my mom was 33 when she married so she did her best. (Missing: house at first baby, family support.)
-My husband and I rented a two bedroom in a quadplex when we had our first. We couldn't afford daycare in the region, nor could we afford for one of us to stay home. We worked split shifts that first year so we could watch our daughter. He started working at 5 AM, I worked from 1:30 PM to 10. We were far away from either of our families. Eventually we saved up, had promotions, rented a house, had three more kids with an au pair to watch them, and bought a house in a lower cost of living state.
Getting married is a common thread, but having a house or a nearby family caretaker is not as essential as you stated. My experience has taught me it's mostly a matter of wanting a child. I don't know anyone my age who wants a single child half as much as my husband and I wanted a big family.
It is about making it lucrative to those who are on the fence. The people with strong opinions on kids are not changing their opinions.
But for every person like me, there's someone living at their parent's house (parental support), that their parents own (home ownership), with a long term girlfriend. There isn't a material difference between them and the requirements you list. The things keeping them from having kids are attitude and perception.
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It's interesting and also sad that Japan's birth rate isn't doing well, since their housing market is famously functional compared to ours (by reputation in libertarian circles at least, I don't really know).
East Asia is different because childhoods are just uniquely sucky there. I’ve got a regular rant about it, but basically people love raising happy kids and don’t like shoving them through a miserable rat race, and the latter is how East Asian childhoods work. So in oriental countries people are making a rational choice not to take on two decades of enforced suck.
Notably japan’s birthrate is the highest in east Asia(if you rationally consider North Korean statistics unreliable), and my impression is that Japanese childhoods are unpleasant Rat races compared to the west, but compared to South Korea or the sinosphere are rather idyllic.
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Japan, South Korea and Taiwan have ZERO work life balance. I don't think the average American can even fathom what 'zero' work life balance looks like. Americans think they work hard when compared to Europe. But East Asia is a whole another beast.
I don't agree with this. I'm stereotyping here, and focusing mostly on Japan, but here's how I see it:
The stereotypical salaryman focuses on his work-life. He goes to work, works very hard, then socializes after work with his coworkers. They eat dinner together, drink together, maybe do some other stuff (maybe go to sex workers...). But it's a combination of work and friends. They put in "long hours" but they're not really working the whole time.
Meanwhile, the housewife takes care of everything else. She raises the kids, she manages the family budget, she cooks all the meals, she deals with family. EVERYTHING.
A lot of the "long hours" that asian workers work are just getting paid for stuff that Americans would do for free, to prove that we're a good feminist who balances the household work with our female partners.
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I'd argue that the housing issue is actually downstream of the cultural issues. There are a bunch of large houses around me that could easily accommodate six or even eight people living them, but currently there are only two. People can and do raise children in their parents' house if it's respectable in their culture. One of the interesting things about current trends, is that it doesn't really seem to make much difference; countries with all different housing situations and acceptable arrangements are falling together.
Also, there are large areas of the US where it isn't all that hard to buy a house. I live next to a city of under a million people, and didn't bother saving any money in my 20s. I had a baby in a one room duplex, and we realized why families have houses, so we asked a local agency that helps people buy their first time home if we could buy one or not. They said, yes, up to $x. Then a year later we had bought a house, and it was all basically straightforward aside from a regionally specific appraisal issue on the first house we tried to buy. We aren't making a lot of money. It doesn't make any difference, birth rates are going down just the same.
You are techincally correct. The last couple of generations grew up in the suburbs and hated it. Now they don't want to go back.
With the demise of organic in-person culture, suburbs and small cities can feel isolating. Other than a few places like NYC, you'll quickly find yourself isolated because you never meet anyone. NYC forces you to collide with people like almost nowhere else in the US. The other big cities also achieve this to a small degree. But past that, every other place in the US makes a newcomer feel like they're trapped in their own head. Now newcomers suffering didn't used to matter as much, but pretty much every young professional is being forced to move into some other city as a transplant. They all get shuffled around, each getting more and more isolated.
So yeah, people want housing and they want it in a place where they won't be miserable.
I lived in SF for a decade. It had strong sense of neighborhood but without neighbors. We’d make friends for a short time, but everyone moved on, literally - to Oakland, Portland, Austin, or even just the Outer Sunset. I live in suburbia now which is exactly the opposite. Some neighbors have been here for 50 years!
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Ah, I see the problem. You don't just want inexpensive houses, you want inexpensive houses in Manhattan. Yeah, even Don Draper didn't live in Manhattan (or NYC at all).
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I loved growing up in the suburbs. I knew everyone on my culdesac. We were a ten minute drive from various friends of my mother who had children around my age. We went to church activities every week, sports, library events, etc. We weren't bored or bereft of social interaction.
In NYC I feel like being friendly puts a target on your back. But it might just be that I was socialized for one type of friendly, and don't recognize other forms.
I recently moved to a suberb outside a small city in a flyover state. I was quickly invited to attend a Welcome New People catered dinner at my new church, where we were paired with another family who checks up on us all the time. I am constantly invited to more parish activities, including a program that just pairs families with similar aged kids to meet up at least once a month to do whatever they want.
The nearest coffee shop has a consignment store with crafts made by local patrons. There's a festival every week in the downtown. I know most people on my street.
To some extent this is just what being settled in a place looks like, though. My parents have lived in Greenwich Village since the early 1980s (late ‘70s in my dad’s case) and sure enough they know all their neighbors, get greeted at their coffee place, brunch place, deli, cheesecake place etc by name, are part of many local organizations, can’t walk down the street on a busy warm weekend afternoon without meeting multiple people they know walking around.
But that’s a completely different experience to the one I have, let alone the one someone would have moving there from somewhere else with no friends.
Highly sociable people can make friends anywhere. If you were the kind of person in college who signed up to 20 clubs in the first week to see what they were about and to make friends then you’re never going to be friendless. But I think for the default person, who isn’t a recluse and enjoys company but who also isn’t highly motivated to make friends, living in a more atomized suburb exposes you to far fewer people in the natural course of daily life.
You talk a lot about your parish/church, but of course ever fewer people are involved in a local religious organization. I think generally you encounter more people in a city, and for people who are weirder there are also more likely to be others like you around relative to a small town where out of necessity social organizations are largely going to cater to the modal kind of person. Cities involve more incidental encounters with other people, for better or worse.
My parents moved into the state when I was 4. Six years later, they moved into a new-build neighborhood. My mom talked up the opportunity with friends and a couple of her friends also moved into the same neighborhood. I. Those six years in between, she had made friends with dozens of families, just by exchanging phone numbers with other moms at the playground, meeting their friends, arranging play dates, going out to coffee, etc.
My experience with cities, apartments, and dorms is the physical proximity creates emotional distance. People don't even look each other in the eye, let alone learn each other's names. It's too intimate by default, so people take steps to create boundaries.
This is greatly put, and matches my experience perfectly. Have people talking about how suburbs are isolating ever lived in a mid rise apartment building? Nobody ever talks to anyone else, people move every 1-2 years, your neighbors are entirely unknown.
On the other hand, when you live in a SFH neighborhood, just looking at people’s houses and yards and cars makes you wonder about the kind of people who live there. When you go out on a walk, you meet people who are your neighbors, and not random passersby, like you do in dense, busy areas. Because of lower density, you see the same people over and over, which facilitates remembering. When you ask them where they leave, they tell you something like “a green house with an American flag”, instead of “uhh in 1201”, which you’ll immediately forget.
There is nothing more alienating than living in a dense, vibrant city.
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Gen Z has become homeowners at a rate higher than not only the Millennials, but also Gen X. In the US, homeownership complaints are a big thing among redditors who don't actually want to be tied down but it's not really the issue they claim.
I straight up don’t believe that 30% of 19-26 year olds own homes. That’s a ridiculously improbable number. I bought a house at 22 and my real estate agent- who was probably a top 10%, and definitely in the top 20%, by volume of sales- said I was his youngest ever successful sale, and that he doesn’t get many clients within a few years of me either. If he’s representative- and DFW is one of the larger housing markets in the country so he should be reasonably so- then just based on ages, that’s not happening.
Instead what I suspect happened with this- I can’t find the specific survey methodology- is that this was a survey of heads of household, which actually tells us that gen z is likely to live with parents/as roommates if they can’t afford to buy. This tracks very well with everyone’s lived experience that I’ve heard and is also much more plausible than lots of early-20s homebuying.
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The oldest gen-Z is 26 years old. Their home acquisition numbers are reflective of inheritance and a minority with social media success. Addtionally, home ownership is a useless metric if you don't know their monthly premium. Home ownership is only 'liberating' if is is somewhat affordable.
Ah, if you don't like the numbers, just wave them away.
Median salary for a gen-Zer is about $38,000: https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/average-salary-by-age/
Assuming they have $40k for a down payment lying around, and ZERO debt, they can afford a $200,000 house. Townhomes in my semi-rural town in Utah are $250,000+. The numbers just straight up just don't pass the smell test.
Edit: Just checked Zillow, the cheapest listing I can find in my town (that isn't a trailer in a trailer park) is $265k, that's for a townhome.
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Archive.is doesn't work for many people now (including me) so I can't comment.
But if they say 30% of people age 19-26 own homes then either they're wrong or family wealth is the reason. No way these people are buying homes with their wages.
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