I would say it’s not just the cost of housing, but cost of (good) childcare in general. Children are massively financially costly… daycare, clothing, food, medi

I would say it’s not just the cost of housing, but cost of (good) childcare in general. Children are massively financially costly… daycare, clothing, food, medical care, education, etc. They’re expensive in terms of time too, and parents are practically always short on time due to needing dual incomes to be able to pay the bills without constantly sitting on the edge. So realistically, I think that what all this means is that an economy can’t have its cake and eat it too; its workforce can work itself to death or it can have kids at replacement rate, not both. Polls have shown that young people are no less interested in starting families than they were in decades past. It’s simply not responsible to do so in the case of an increasing number of couples’ situations, and so they don’t. The only way to turn this trend around is to pay actual living wages and mandate a better work-life balance on a national scale.