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Comment by mc32 | Hacker News Reader

I sympathize but it's not people born in the Bay Area who are driving up demand. If there had not been an influx of people from other areas (including other areas of Calif) there would not be such housing crunch --and likely there would have been a pop. reduction without an influx. What's the fertility rate per woman in the Bay Area, I'm pretty sure it's below the 2.1 figure to sustain a pop.

The local native population without an influx would not be in such dire housing situation.

Yes, the area is very attractive and is a magnet but without that influx the population would have plateaued.

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Fortunately, we don't have internal passports in the United States

Sure, but it does not mean it's the local pop driving the growth, it's the newcomers who are driving growth and causing pain for the locals.

Ignoring the argument around whether showing up before the population density is high confers some special “native-ness” and ownership (which I think would need to be fleshed out significantly to be really compelling), the math doesn’t really make sense.

Typically people’s lifetimes overlap their kids’ significantly. I mean most people meet their grandparents, so if you have a fertility rate of 1, and an area becomes attractive to early-career people who are just settling down and starting families, and the existing housing become taken up by that group, then I guess the area will have to house the original population, plus their kids, plus their grandkids, so we’ll need housing for 175% of the original population, total.

Of course the area is, by not accepting new immigrants to get back to replacement rate, setting itself up for long-term unpleasantness as the tax base ages into retirement. But hey I guess that’s their right…

This is not really true. Many Bay Area cities have severely underbuilt even their own demographic processes. Berkeley, for example, needed to add 40% more homes just to accommodate its own longevity increases and birth rate since 1970. Casual observers severely underestimate the housing implications of longer old age, and birth rates were well above replacement until quite recently.

You are wrong. San Francisco does not even build enough homes to match natural population growth. Neither do most cities on the Peninsula.

As I posted below, here are the natural growth rates:

Look at the figures: https://www.newgeography.com/content/007550-total-fertility-....

Imgur: https://imgur.com/a/FQ7tVqs

SF: 1.49

SJ: 1.59

That's not growth, it's decline.

Which is flat out insane given the economy

Your link 404s, and fertility rates are not measures of net new natural population growth. If everyone lives longer, you can still have more births than deaths with sub replacement fertility.

In any case, the California Department of Finance gives counts of births and deaths by county, and you are wrong: https://dof.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/Forecasting/Demographi...

There's almost no natural population growth in the US. It's all coming from immigrants.

There was not a single year in 2010-2019 where California had more deaths than births.

From [1]:

> A rate of 2.1 children per woman is necessary to maintain a population at its current level (immigration and migration aside). California and the nation had fertility rates near population replacement levels in 2008, but every state falls below those levels today. California has fallen faster than most, dropping from 2.15 to 1.52

Well below replacement rates on births. I imagine a very large portion of the births are immigrant births as well, which would push the rate even lower.

1: https://www.ppic.org/blog/californias-plunging-birth-rates/

Why is everyone trying to infer net new births from fertility rates? We have the exact data: https://dof.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/Forecasting/Demographi...

People can live longer, and natural population increase can persist long after fertility drops below replacement.

Why does that matter? Unless you're proposing unconstitutional restrictions on internal migration, people are going to want to move to places with jobs, culture, friendly politics, etc. and housing demand will reflect that for locals and new arrivals alike.

I was replying to poster saying he or she wanted to live (afford a house) where they grew up. I'm saying, it wasn't natural pop growth that caused the situation but rather influx that was not met with commensurate housing development/construction.

TBH, "I have a right to live where my parents did" is flat untrue, and while not a uniquely American pathology, something I observe my fellow countrymen believing without evidence.

I grew up in a town with an economic implosion. Very few people born here during the '70s stayed, and there was not, is not, and should not be a mechanism to bend the economics of the entire country to enable them to do so (if for no other reason than their industry collapsed for a compelling counter-concern: it was killing us. Pollution controls went in and the best companies in town could no longer compete while maintaining air quality standards and shuttered operations. So now people were out of work but the work was also not shortening their lives by a decade).

I think there's a big difference between "I want to be paid to live in an economically collapsed community because I was born here" and "I want to be able to afford to live in an economically thriving community because my friends and family are here". Especially when considering government policy.

What is the big difference?

1) Generally speaking, family and friend communities offer support structures that increase individual success and decrease antisocial behavior. Keeping those communities together is worthwhile both from a social welfare perspective and an economic efficiency one.

2) Reducing obstacles to building is free (in the long term, it's revenue-positive). Propping up a dying town is expensive.

Since your data is wrong, I can only imagine you’re going to change your mind right?

Just completely made up. There is no way a region with great weather year round was ever going to see population reduction. Even if you were to assume SF would, Oakland and the rest of the more diverse bay is filled with the demographics that are driving US population growth as a whole.

Look at the figures: https://www.newgeography.com/content/007550-total-fertility-....

SF: 1.49

SJ: 1.59

A measurement of fertility rate with high earning women in tech included in two of the most popular-in-tech cities in the Bay Area is not an argument in favor of the native population being unwilling to have children.

The population would only reduce if the parents die immediately after the kid is born. Until the parents die, the population would still grow.

Thank about what the Fertility rate means.

>the TFR is based on the age-specific fertility rates of women in their "child-bearing years", which in conventional international statistical usage is ages 15–44.

>The TFR is, therefore, a measure of the fertility of an imaginary woman who passes through her reproductive life subject to all the age-specific fertility rates for ages 15–49 that were recorded for a given population in a given year. The TFR represents the average number of children a woman would potentially have, were she to fast-forward through all her childbearing years in a single year, under all the age-specific fertility rates for that year. In other words, this rate is the number of children a woman would have if she was subject to prevailing fertility rates at all ages from a single given year and survives throughout all her childbearing years.

Is the assumption that there are no existing 60, 70, 80 and 90-year olds...?

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