During his first week in office, Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy signed a memo instructing his subordinates to “give preference to communities with marriage and birthrates higher than the national average” and otherwise use its resources to help families with children, insofar as the law allows. The decision appears in line with Vice-President J.D. Vance’s recent statement that he wants “more babies in the United States of America.” Yet it is not entirely clear what the federal government can do to raise declining fertility rates. Timothy Carney considers the problem and makes a few concrete suggestions, among them:
Home prices are the single greatest economic contributor to the baby bust and the retreat from marriage, and so anyone who wants to reverse these trends needs to figure out how to make homes more affordable.
The obvious answer, when you consider that prices are set by supply and demand, is to help create more houses. (Twenty years ago, you may remember, the U.S. government, through Fannie Mae, was dead set on subsidizing demand. That led to the financial crisis of 2008–2009.) . . . There are plenty of ways to do this: repeal laws requiring massive parking lots for new housing, repeal zoning laws that prohibit duplexes and apartment buildings, and repeal minimum-lot-size laws.
If [newly built] buildings don’t include a mix of studios, one-bedroom, two-bedroom, and three-bedroom apartments, they could trap young adults in permanent singlehood or childlessness.
What’s missing the most in the current housing market is the “starter home.” Think of a townhouse, a small 1,000-square-foot Cape Cod, or a suburban duplex. These exist, but they are aging, and the supply is shrinking because they are almost never built anymore. One root problem here is overregulation.
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