Rent is the bigger issue than affordability per se. My wife pointed out the other day that we had our second and third kids shortly after we stopped living in apartments and bought a house. We didn't plan to have a significant age gap between our first (who we had in law school) and our other kids, and we earned a lot of money the whole time, it just happened that way. She's convinced that having the extra space subconsciously encouraged us to have more kids.
I've been encouraging my cousin who desperately wants children to have them in her two bedroom apartment but she feels that she needs to have a house first and she and her husband can't afford one. They're in their late 30s. My partner and I are mid-30s planning to have young children in our 2 bedroom apartment, we'd prefer a 3 bedroom but they DO NOT EXIST in our Los Angeles neighborhood. More space means untenable commutes which brings more complicated childcare logistics (can't get to daycare before it closes, less time with kids etc).
> we'd prefer a 3 bedroom but they DO NOT EXIST
This seems to be an absolute epidemic across the state. Same with condos. It's like they assume that apartments of any kind are only for single people and maybe a couple with one child. In other words, people who are dragging the fertility rate down toward 50%.
When I pull up Zillow and look at rentals across a huge swath of the East Bay, there are 8,309 apartments listed (I filtered out houses and townhomes). I add one filter: 3+ bedrooms. The number drops to 784. Fewer than 10% (!) of apartments listed have 3+ bedrooms. (Also, a quick spot check of these seems to show a nontrivial amount that are actually just houses with faulty metadata.)
This puts a tremendous burden on low-income people, to have to foot the higher cost of maintaining a home and/or of an absurd commute, just in order to have enough space[1] to have more than one kid. That, or overpay to compete for one of the few bigger apartments, many of which are "luxury" oriented.
Meanwhile, the high-income can afford a house or a luxury 3br apartment, but they are mostly high-income because they've deprioritized family, putting in 10+ years of being DINKs. In my circle of upper middle class tech types, many of them are 35-38 before having their first kid. 1 kid is much more likely than 3 for people starting in their late 30s, so this drags down fertility rates even among the "high income" subgroup!
[1] I know opinions vary on whether it's good and healthy to have kids sharing rooms, though imho I don't want a son and daughter forced to bunk together as they get older, and calls to 'just share rooms' is giving "Own nothing and be happy."
For what it's worth, we had our first child when we lived in a studio in our late 20s. One kid is really easy space-wise. The only reason we even got a 2BR before buying our house is that we got an au pair.
This did not stop people in the past. You read of three-room New York tenements holding families of ten, or families with half a dozen children living in a single-room frontier cabin, and this was considered commonplace.
My parents raised eleven children in a typical four-bedroom suburban tract house.
I wonder why modern people would be different?
Because we have an expectation for more space. Pretty simple, no one wants to go backwards to when we lived in single room tenements with a wife pumping out babies for a decade in a row. Also, no one can afford a four bedroom home with twelve occupants on a single income like in the 50s.
You couldn't in the 50s either. You just made do.
That’s the real key to all this - if you want it, you make do, and learn to grab what you can.
Much worse than housing is the vehicle when you cross the 5 or 6 kid boundary, your available vehicles begin to rapidly plummet.
They didn't have birth control then so it was much less of a choice.
Well, then we should say that it is something related to availability of birth control which has caused the change, not some novel preference for living space.
Raised 3 kids in a 2 bedroom apartment in NYC. It’s fine. When they go to college, they marvel at the space they have in a dorm room.
Some families make it work and survive but very few middle class Americans would consider this "fine". For better or worse, most people prefer to have more space and privacy. The notion of raising a family in a cramped apartment seems like torture to me, and the birth rates in urban areas indicate that others agree.
Hmmm... What if a wide variety of economic actors have somehow managed to slurp up all the surplus that previously went to "paying it forward" in terms of raising children?
Rent is a common complaint, but consider the costs of childcare, needing two incomes to stay afloat, etc.
The high cost of childcare also largely comes back to high rents. The management needs to pay for the space, and pay workers enough to afford to live within commuting distance. There are of course other costs to running a day care center (utilities, insurance, supplies) but rent is a major factor here.