A twofer from The Anti-Planner. First up the headline article, December 21, 2022:
Yesterday, Tyler Cowan mentioned in the Marginal Revolution blog that he wished books on urban areas “would spend more time discussing whether dense urban areas are simply a fertility trap.” I’m not going to write a book about it, but it may be one more reason why planners’ mania for density is a bad idea.
A fertility trap, sometimes called a low fertility trap, is a situation where a nation’s birth rate has declined below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman. Within a generation, this leads to a reduction in the number of young people working, which means — in a country that has a social security system, as most developed countries do — the number of older people that each young person must support increases.
This has become a serious demographic problem for nations around the world. As various lists of fertility rates reveal, the only nations producing more than replacement numbers tend to be poor, developing countries, while nations in Europe, North America, and many parts of Asia are well below replacement rates.
Lower birthrates are commonly ascribed to better educational systems for women. This puts them into the work force and reduces the number of years that they might be willing to bear and care for children. But this doesn’t necessarily reduce birthrates to 1.1, which is the rate found in Korea. France, Australia, Sweden, and the United States are all around 1.8, which is still below replacement but well above South Korea.
China, of course, long had a one-child-per-family policy, at least in urban areas, yet it has an overall birthrate of 1.7, which is nearly as high as in the U.S. and well above Singapore, South Korea, and other countries that haven’t overtly tried to discourage child bearing.
The first time I heard low birth rates associated with density was a video about Russian demographics by Peter Zeihan. “Krushchev forced everybody into condos which reduced the birth rate,” he observed.
In 1965, Russian urban planners published a book titled The Ideal Communist City that argued that everyone should live in tiny apartments in mid-rise or high-rises. This would allow everyone to travel by mass transit and avoid the need for automobiles, traffic congestion, and urban sprawl. (The book is downloadable and my review of it and its relationship to American urban planning is here.)
The planners hypothesized that the ideal family size was four and that adults needed no more than 225 square feet of living area plus 50 to 75 square feet per child. Based on this, they proposed apartments of 600 square feet per family, which was what was built throughout the Soviet Union and numerous eastern European countries.
And not just in communist countries. We tend to think of North Korea as “the bad guys” and South Korea as “the good guys,” but until about 1988 South Korea was almost as much of a dictatorship as North. One of the dictates was that nearly all new housing should be in concrete high rises, just like the Ideal Communist City.
The problem is that planners were completely wrong about 225 square feet being sufficient living area per adult and 600 square feet per family. People being stuck in these tiny apartments made more space available by having smaller families....
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And from February 29, 2024:
Density and Fertility
Nearly three months ago, I suggested that trying to get people to live in high-density housing projects was a good way to “kill a country” by reducing fertility rates. Not everyone was persuaded; one comment stated that there is “Not a shred of evidence other than his bald assertion that people in Korea have no room for kids.”
South Korea has the lowest fertility rate in the world at a mere 0.7 births per woman. But 🇰🇷 is not alone. Several regions have fertility well below 1.
— More Births (@MoreBirths) February 25, 2024
A look at places with ultra-low birthrates, how they got there, and some lessons for all of us.
Important 🧵, please share! pic.twitter.com/p7oZhOGR0HA Twitter user calling itself “More Births” has reached the same conclusion as the Antiplanner. After noting that South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Thailand all have very low fertility rates, More Births asked what these regions have in common. The number 1 factor listed: ultra-dense housing policies....
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The article he is referring back to is from December 6, 2023: "More on High Rises and Fertility Rates"