Side Effects: Soaring Rents and 'Plummeting' Fertility Rates in Big Cities

A team of economists have found that the zoning, and restrictive land-use regulations that make cities such as San Francisco and New York so expensive are driving down fertility rates.

Reduced fertility and birth rates are trends mostly concentrated in major cities, but wage growth plateauing elsewhere in the nation is another obstacle for new parents. Fewer children being born today, particularly in the wealthiest cities, means there will be fewer people engaging in the economy in the future, and fewer people to support today's aging population. Fast Company concludes that the U.S. essentially created a system that makes reproduction such a burden on people that the system will soon no longer be able to reproduce itself.

Russell and Shoag determined that the relative restrictiveness of a city’s land-use policies by the number of cases brought to court around housing issues; they crossed that data with listings like the Wharton Residential Land Use Index ... When overlayed with fertility data from the CDC, they found that the cities and towns that actively stifle or restrict development are seeing fertility rates, especially among young women, plummet.

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