Do you have a sense of how you see it playing out?
Japan is very illustrative in this regard. Young people are forced into unaffordable cities, where they often live in cramped shoebox-sized apartments. While beautiful spacious traditional homes are decaying just 2 hours away by car.
What can help? Promote smaller cities, by focusing on making smaller cities more attractive for employers. This is already happening with the remote work, and it helps: https://eig.org/families-exodus/
How to make smaller cities more attractive? Put a stop to densification of larger cities, and tax (or cap-and-trade) the office space in dense areas.
This might be true, but could be for many reasons. There's not enough info in that to promote a specific response.
The thing is, there is not much you can change in peoples' behavior. So your only option is to stimulate the behaviors that you want.
The unaffordable housing cost is entirely an artifact of urbanism gone wrong.
If you go outside of big cities, land price is not an issue. At all.
Barrie is still in the general Toronto area, so it's expensive. Sudbury further north that is definitely not a part of Toronto anymore, has very reasonable houses for ~$400k, or 5 years of average household income in Ontario. This is well within the normal "affordable" range, so a 20-years mortgage will be around 30% of income.
The problem is, people _can't_ live in Sudbury because there are no jobs there!
Or people in big cities have plenty of opportunities and interests than just to have children.
People often want to live in big cities due to social reasons, not just due to employment opportunities.
But the current drop below the replacement rate is all due to increased density. If you look at the stats, the urbanization percent stayed flat. However, more and more people are moving into a smaller and smaller set of large cities.
Correlation is not causation. People happily raised children in dense cities for centuries. It was only when the postwar regime of making new housing illegal took hold, and housing prices inevitably spiralled out of control, that they stopped.
> Young people are forced into unaffordable cities, where they often live in cramped shoebox-sized apartments. While beautiful spacious traditional homes are decaying just 2 hours away by car.
Those old houses look great in instagram photos but they're not very fun to actually live in. Young people are rightly prioritising places that are good to live instead of the boomer square feet fetish.
> Put a stop to densification of larger cities, and tax (or cap-and-trade) the office space in dense areas.
Killing the most economically productive parts of the country is not going to magically make other parts more productive, it's just going to destroy the whole country's economy.
The causes of the population decline are a) women marrying later, or not marrying at all, because they have the option of a career and prefer that b) families that want to give their children a good future having few children, mainly because of the cost of education. Those are the things you need to address if you want to change it.
London is an example of such a city. Its population in 1750 was 750000 people. It was not a "large city" at all by current standards.
> Those old houses look great in instagram photos but they're not very fun to actually live in.
Oh, I agree. However, for the price of an apartment in Tokyo, you can build a _new_ home with all the modern amenities.
> Young people are rightly prioritising places that are good to live instead of the boomer square feet fetish.
Yeah, like "microapartments" where you can cook food while sitting on a toilet. Very well suited for hikikomori, great for raising 3 children!
> Killing the most economically productive parts of the country is not going to magically make other parts more productive, it's just going to destroy the whole country's economy.
It won't kill anything, it will just move jobs out of large cities. We've already had a "dry run" of this during the pandemic.
> amilies that want to give their children a good future having few children, mainly because of the cost of education.
Europe has free (or cheap) education. Yet birth rates are even lower than in the US.
> Those are the things you need to address if you want to change it.
Then why people moving out of cities have a greater fertility rate?
And its population in the 1930s, with a healthy fertility rate, was 11 million.
> for the price of an apartment in Tokyo, you can build a _new_ home with all the modern amenities.
Maybe - bear in mind that building costs are much higher out in the country. But assuming you build a big house, what would you do with it? I guess all the cleaning will help make life less boring.
> It won't kill anything, it will just move jobs out of large cities. We've already had a "dry run" of this during the pandemic.
The pandemic did a lot of economic damage, and many jobs stayed in the cities or are rushing to return there now.
> Europe has free (or cheap) education.
But much stronger womens' rights and correspondingly low marriage rates.
> Then why people moving out of cities have a greater fertility rate?
In Japan? Maybe because of all the cash subsidies for moving out with children.
How practical is raising kids in a 20m2 studio? Especially if you've got multiple. I'd bet not nearly as practical as in a house. Plus the recent trend of building lots of smaller apartments instead of a bit bigger and way more practical ones.
The other way around is more difficult to quantify, and a lot of demographic studies look at immigrants from poor countries.
They don’t speak English and I’m not sure if they will assimilate well. I already see street vendors, trash everywhere, and other 3rd world behavior in some parts of SF.
I’m an immigrant from 3rd world. It’s pretty sad to see here.
I don't see how even that helps. What you need to fund basic welfare is a large supply of basic goods (shelter, food, medical care). The basic problem with retirement of a lager generation than subsequent generations is a lack of labor/productivity. Those basic goods don't really respond well to just throwing money from tech companies/rich people at the problem, you need people to work to provide those goods and services.
The only way taxes help is if they discourage "unproductive" economic activity (SWEs and financial planners) so much that those people start working as nurses and construction workers instead.