Housing's Effect on Fertility

After a story on Zillow analysis saying birth rates dropped most in the wealthiest counties went viral, professor and urbanist Richard Florida took a closer look.

Citing two specific studies from 2012 and 2013 and the "significant body" of demographic literature overall, Florida points out that higher education and income levels tend to call fertility rates to fall, not higher cost burdens, and as such the Zillow analysis "fits into that pattern—not the other way around," referencing author Bill Bishop's concept of "the big sort," of ideological social sorting. The CityLab co-founder writes that previous study has shown that an average increase of $10,000 per home would lead to about a 1 percent increase in fertility.

The late, great Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary Becker is the person who introduced the basic set of ideas about the “cost of children” in a classic paper written back in 1960, called “An Economic Analysis of Fertility.” His basic model said children could be viewed similarly to other sorts of goods in that they convey ... value to their parents. As people and societies get richer, they do not just want more and more stuff; they want better stuff ... Crassly put, when it comes to having kids in affluent societies, people trade quantity for quality.

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