The Antiplanner was first alerted to a tweet about South Korea’s low birth rate from Marginal Revolution, a blog from George Mason economists Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok. Being from George Mason, they lean libertarian, but haven’t learned enough about housing economics to realize that YIMBYism isn’t about housing affordability or property rights but about forcing more Americans to live in multi-family housing.
The ideal American city under YIMBYism. Photo of Seoul by Gerhard Huber.
So I appreciated it when Cowen mentioned my post on birth rates and high-rise housing in Marginal Revolution. They get a lot more readers than this blog, so it led to lots of comments.
“Having children in an apartment isn’t THAT big of a deal,” said the first comment. “Lots of people do that.” But in the United States, apartments are regarded as temporary housing, something to live in until you can afford a single-family home. People who live in small high-rise apartments in Seoul probably don’t imagine they will ever earn enough money to move into a single-family home. Plus, as I noted in my post, high-rises are expensive, so in the U.S. the only people who have children in high-rise homes are either very wealthy or very poor and living in public housing. (The same commenter also claimed that I said that high rises were the only factor causing low fertility rates, which is not true as I cited other factors in my post.)
Another comment claimed that “YIMBY reforms will make even suburbs cheaper by reducing demand on SFH homes,” which displays the complete ignorance of housing markets typical of naive YIMBY supporters (as distinguished from YIMBY supporters who have hidden agendas). Quite simply, building expensive apartments that people don’t want to live in is not going to make a fixed supply of single-family homes that people do want more affordable.
Those who think that more apartments will make suburbs more affordable don’t seem to realize that an apartment is not equal to a single-family home, any more than a Scion is equal to a Ford F-150. If we had a shortage of pickup trucks, building more subcompact cars like Scions is not going to relieve that shortage. That would especially be true if the Scions ended up costing more than the F-150s.
A third comment pointed out that most Israelis live in apartments yet the country has a high birth rate, well above the 2.1 replacement number. That is true, but a large share of Israeli apartments are low-rise buildings that cost less to build, so four-bedroom apartments are common. Such apartments are rare in South Korea. Most Israelis still want single-family homes, but the nation’s birthrates are boosted by high levels of immigration of young families, a factor I mentioned in my post.
There are other comments, including ones supporting the Antiplanner. The real disappointment is that so many people are so committed to YIMBYism that they reject any argument against it. They just don’t realize that the United States is a big country with enough room that everyone who wants to can live in a single-family home, which is actually the most affordable kind of housing (except maybe for low-rise apartments). There is no good economic case for converting single-family neighborhoods to higher densities since most people don’t want to live in higher-density housing, the people in the neighborhood don’t want such housing in their midst, and the main supporters of density are people who also want to reduce American mobility and economic prosperity.
Good point by mentioning that the spillover effect between the single-family homeownership market and apartment living is negligible.
Another area that would nice to see data on is the relationship between housing cost and fertility rates.
This post is valid. too many people who want to increase density neglect the good old low and mid rise, mixed use apartment building. But going from one extreme to another isnt going to help much either, cause car-centric suburbs just dont make taxes back when paired with their maintenance costs, and most american cities right now can hardly afford good transit in their inner city let alone their suburbs
@ PlanningAspirant. It’s interesting how you contort this analysis to insulate that “too many people who want to increase density” and that somehow more density including unrealistic public transit systems and mid-rises will address this issue. Also, I doubt there is as much of an issue with tax revenue from suburban and exurban development as you assert. Needless to say, it’s typical “planner logic” which is little more than you continuing to promote unrealistic schemes with little justification.