Families and Transportation

On his second day in office, Transportation Secretary Sean Bean directed federal transportation agencies to “give preference to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average,” to which my friend Bob Poole responded with a profound “huh?” Matthew Yglesias, meanwhile, fretted that this policy could backfire, erroneously claiming that directing funding to low-density communities with higher birth rates would make housing in such communities even more expensive, which would reduce birthrates.

Darker colors show higher fertility rates measured in births per thousand women. Source: CDC. Click image for a larger view.

As I noted in an article published by the Institute for Family Studies, it may seem strange for the Department of Transportation to get involved in family policy, but in fact it already has been involved in such policy for many years through the Federal Transit Administration. That agency’s transit capital grant program (which was specifically cited in Duffy’s memo) favors grants to communities that provide “transit-supportive land use,” meaning zoning and subsidies favoring high-density housing.

Recent economic research has found that the Baby Boom was due, in large part, to federal policies that promoted homeownership. The report didn’t say so, but 94.3 percent of owner-occupied homes in the United States are single-family homes (including mobile homes), while only 5.5 percent are multifamily, so increasing ownership of single-family homes appears to be a good way of increasing fertility.

FTA’s housing policies were based on the explicit assumption that high-density housing in transit corridors would lead to more transit ridership and the implicit assumption that more transit ridership would save energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Neither of these assumptions are true.

Research by the Cascade Policy Institute showed that people living in transit-oriented developments in the Portland area were not significantly more likely to ride transit than those living elsewhere. This is confirmed by the fact that, despite building hundreds of transit-oriented developments, Portland-area transit ridership was declining in the five years before the pandemic.

Data in the National Transit Database also shows that transit is hardly green. Outside of New York and one or two other urban areas, transit uses more energy and emits more greenhouse gases (including emissions from the power plants that supply electricity for electric-powered transit) than the average car or light truck.

Transit-oriented housing is also sometimes claimed to be more affordable housing, but that is a complete lie. As I’ve noted here many times before, the elevators, steel, concrete, and interior non-living areas such as lobbies and hallways all increase the costs of multi-story housing, so the four- to six-story buildings going into most transit-oriented developments cost about twice as much, per square foot, as single-family homes.

Yglesias’ claim that emphasizing low-density housing (which isn’t explicitly mentioned in Duffy’s directive) will only make housing more expensive is valid in regions that have created artificial land shortages using urban-growth boundaries, greenbelts, concurrency requirements, and other growth-management policies. But in other areas, including all of Texas and most parts of other fast-growing states in the Sunbelt, there is plenty of room for all the low-density housing that people want. There is also room for high-density housing if anyone wants to live there and if there are enough such people builders will provide it for them.

Countries colored in browns have 2022 fertility rates (measured in number of children born over an average woman’s lifetime) higher than replacement while those colored blue are not replacing their populations with domestic fertility (but may be doing so through immigration). Source: Wikipedia chart by Korakys. Click image for a larger view.

Fertility rates in other countries, including China, Italy, Russia, South Korea, and other countries have fallen so far that they posse a serious demographic crisis for those economies. Fertility rates are known to drop when agrarian societies become urbanized, but not necessarily below replacement levels.

Fertility rates have fallen to such low levels that the populations of a href=”https://www.bbc.com/news/health-53409521″>23 countries are expected to fall by at least 50 percent by 2100. While some reduction in population may have environmental benefits, such dramatic reductions will pose huge economic problems resulting from too few people working and too many in retirement. Many of the countries with ultra-low fertility rates have emphasized mid-rise and high-rise housing and tried to discourage single-family housing.

I don’t think that government policies and government grants should be based on a single parameter, whether it is greenhouse gas emissions or fertility rates. The fertility requirement is only one of several points in Duffy’s directive, others saying that funded projects should be “supported by rigorous cost-benefit requirements and data-driven decisions” and be based on “user-pay models.”

At the same time, low fertility rates are a symptom of government policies gone wrong. As I have endlessly repeated here, regardless of whether they are of child-bearing age, most Americans want to live in single-family homes. In fact, more than 80 percent of the residents of a dozen states that haven’t passed state-wide growth-management laws do live in single-family homes. FTA’s land-use policies were effectively supporting those who want to overturn that preference and get more people into multifamily homes.

The one change I would make to Secretary Duffy’s policy is that it should be based not on recent fertility rates but on projected rates. If a region such as Portland or San Francisco abolishes its urban-growth boundary, that is likely to increase fertility and this should be taken into consideration when handing out federal dollars.