As mentioned in this other comment [0], I find this to be one of the most interesting problems of our time.
> There is a huge factor in this which is well-documented to reduce the fertility rate:
If you have a moment, would you mind pointing me to this documentation? It sounds very correct to me, but I would love to have the receipts when I quote you in the future.
There are numerous studies showing that higher housing costs reduce the fertility rate, e.g.: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.labeco.2024.102572
Thank you. This is excellent. I am really curious how we fix this in the future.
My crank idea to fix both of the issues you mention is mandatory national service.
This would provide everyone a common ground, similar to how widespread military service in wwii did. It would promote civic virtue by exposing everyone to how they personally can make the government useful. And it could be made such that we have our national service corp just build useful things, like houses. Additionally we could provide similar benefits to folks that go through national service as the military - healthcare, payment for college, etc.
one possible answer is removing property taxes and replacing them with land value taxes. property taxes dicensentivize development while land value taxes incentive it.