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>With so few people having children in the Netherlands Has the Netherlands tried to address its housing crisis first? In most of Europe, lack of affordability

• nashashmi 4y ago
  Then people should be humble enough to live on the very little. Not ask for some other entity to provide its people with so much more (like full housing).
  • thriftwy 4y ago
    People living humble are reluctant to have more children. But the ability to start your adult life humbly is definitely very important. I am talking about access to cheap rent small apartments to move off your parents' and then perhaps acquire one instead of renting.
    • nashashmi 4y ago
      I think in response to needs like these, we might want to take a look at how lower income class people live in Asian and Latin American countries. It is similar to how little Tim lives with his family in “Willy wonka and the chocolate factory”. Joint family systems are the norm.
      • thriftwy 4y ago
        People don't owe you children in exchange for your desire to treat them like exploited illegal immigrants. With that attitide, go and have all these children yourself.
      • effingwewt 4y ago
        You did not just use the destitution Charlie lived in as a example of how poor people should live. Poor people already live in squalor and are packed in like sardines, especially since housing costs keep rising. How about the rich pay their fair share, or stop stealing money from the poor via wage theft, or stop conspiring to keep wages lower than ever, or how about stop people deciding about housing stopping NIMBYism, or how about putting a ceiling on CEO comp and stock buybacks, or how about dealing with the ever-widening wage gap. Also, you've obviously never been to at least latin america, as their poverty is so bad they literally risk their lives getting anywhere else. The mental gymnastics to blame the poor in your comments on this thread are Olympic level.
        • nashashmi 4y ago
          And did you just demean the lifestyle of poor people? I have known modest looking habitats that the rich western world would frown upon. I have seen this kind of lean living. And thought it was quite sufficient. What is also shown in the case of Charlie’s home is a family that cannot feed themselves and have poor health and have the fewest breadwinners. This is not an example of lean living. This is being needy.
          • _x2o9 4y ago
            Breadwinning is quickly becoming a foreign concept in the Western world, as the new strategy is simply breadtaking. Why work hard to win, when you can simply take? What you need to understand is they are simply shameless, like they feel no shame to be dependent on others to provide for them. Historically people actually had shame, they would feel it hurts their dignity to accept even charity (voluntary donation of money)! But now, people in the West are even happy to take money even forcefully through the tax system. No more dignity, no more shame. And this behavior is incentivized by our political system and tax system. More details on this perspective, in my response to him, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35761106 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35761106
            • nashashmi 4y ago
              While I agree with your complaints, I don’t agree with your sense of complaints. It seems much of your opinions are a result of western capitalist indoctrinations. (I have recently stumbled across my own indoctrinations and am trying to undo them.) I would love to discuss this in IRL. We would have much to talk about.
  • anonymouskimmer 4y ago
    > Then people should be humble enough to live on the very little. Not ask for some other entity to provide its people with so much more (like full housing). This applies to all people, not just those at the bottom. Yet those at the top keep charging high rates, or NIMBY against building more housing because of the effect of that housing on their quality of life and net worth. When you NIMBY, or charge high rates, you are asking other entities (those at the bottom) to provide you with so much more.
    • beebeepka 4y ago
      Maybe I am too quick to judge but this strikes me as a completely uncalled for US-centric know it all take.
      • anonymouskimmer 4y ago
        This is a standard critique of capitalism, mercantilism, feudalism, state communism, and whatever your -ism of choice is. It's been done the world over for millennia. Every time someone in power or privilege has said "we must all sacrifice for the greater good" - the sacrifice is disproportionate, and those disproportionately affected have grumbled about it. Every time someone has said "we must preserve this particular thing", the preservation has been at the disproportionate expense of others, and those so affected have grumbled about it.
        • ChuckNorris89 4y ago
          Of course, "sacrifice for thee, not for mee". See the Bank of England chief telling everyone they need to accept we're now all poorer otherwise inflation will never stop. Of course, by "us all being poorer" he most likely didn't include the wealthy elites and asset owning class that have made bank these past years and are in no way poorer than before, quite the contrary. It was the same during covid. "We all need to scarifice to ...." meant something else entirely.
          • anonymouskimmer 4y ago
• thriftwy 4y ago
  Just give a blanket license to PIK or LSR and watch the market flooded with line after line of 25-storey cheap studio apartments until you beg for forgiveness.
• meeuwer 4y ago
  Bingo. Housing in the Netherlands has become a cult demanding increasingly more human sacrifice. Sometimes I wonder if “demographic transition” in the developed world is nothing more than a side effect of the neoliberal housing policies.
  • toomuchtodo 4y ago
    A friend emigrated to the rural US Midwest because making a life and supporting a family in the Netherlands was financially untenable. As always, n=1.
• Gareth321 4y ago
  > In most of Europe, lack of affordability and quality family friendly housing, is the number one reason for couples not having kids. This is not correct. The poorest households are having the most kids. It has clearly little to do with income or housing affordability, even if you found a survey which indicated this. I say this as someone who delayed having a family until I could afford a home, so I have a dog in this fight.
  • ChuckNorris89 4y ago
    The poorest do because they have little education in terms of contraception and safe sex, they have low standards for QoL for their kids and just hump away like mammals without thinking about the future and the conditions their kids will have to live in, and sometimes hold conservative religious views which usually shun contraception and abortions and promote endless breeding, but the educated middle class, or what's left of it anyway, practice safe sex and want good living conditions and a bright future for their kids, both of which are vanishing.
    • mensetmanusman 4y ago
      At some point we probably won’t label a dying/negative-growth subset of the population that can’t figure out how to procreate or even create the pertinent conditions to procreate ‘educated’
      • dragonwriter 4y ago
        > At some point we probably won’t label a dying/negative-growth subset of the population that can’t figure out how to procreate or even create the pertinent conditions to procreate ‘educated’ Yeah, society probably will, because those are the people putting energy into preserving and propagating their ideas.
      • ChuckNorris89 4y ago
        Society doesn't care about helping to procreate the educated. For society, you're just a number in an balance sheet, you're just a consumer and a tax payer, cannon fodder for the economy basically. Your country needs more and more numbers in that balance sheet, to funnel into the economic meat grinder, and whether those extra numbers come from your offspring or from someone else's, it's irelevant to them.
• kypro 4y ago
  Time and families are also a problem today. People have less relatives to help raise children and grandparents tend to be older. Both parents are also more likely to want and need to work full-time jobs. I don't know why but here in the UK there seems to be a kind of culture war on parenthood too. Young women who want kids and don't want to work tend to be shamed for this decision, while women who remain single and focus on their careers are celebrated. If people want careers over children, that's fine, but that shouldn't be seen and pushed as the only respectable path by society.
  • ChuckNorris89 4y ago
    >Young women who want kids and don't want to work tend to be shamed for this decision, while women who remain single and focus on their careers are celebrated. That's only toxic feminism pushing for this narrative but pretty sure it's just a loud minority in certain echo chambers and not a national narrative. Toxic feminism promotes this idea that having kids and being a caring mother means being a slave of the patriarchy and that freedom and salvation comes at spending their lives trying to compete and beat men at their traditional role as the breadwinner. The problem is, nature and evolution hasn't built females and males to compete against each other, but to complement each other, for procreation of the species. Once you push the sex responsible for birth to do a lot of the breadwinning, procreation of the species starts to fall apart.
    • anonymouskimmer 4y ago
      Anyone opining on pre-historic nature and evolution is spinning a just-so story, unless they're literally data-mining paleontologic or genomic evidence, and if they're doing the later they're talking about the results and conclusions in a much different manner. > Once you push the sex responsible for birth to do a lot of the breadwinning, procreation of the species starts to fall apart. There's no reason to assume that single-mothers weren't common in the past, absent direct paleontological evidence. There's no reason to assume that a supported mother isn't being supported by her blood relatives, while the father of her child(ren) is off doing his own thing (there are actually societies which function this way). And absent very short period of time in the few months immediately around actual childbirth, hunter-gatherer women were probably quite capable of supporting themselves.
• dragonwriter 4y ago
  > In most of Europe, lack of affordability and quality family friendly housing, is the number one reason for couples not having kids. Its the number one reason people cite, but if you look at the stats, fertility (and this is also true in the US) drops pretty consistently with income. So, its not really driven by affordability in the simple, direct sense. So, are people lying? Maybe not: stress and precarious conditions often explain within-species shifts further toward r-strategy (produce more offsprinf with lower investment in each) vs. K-strategy (fewer offspring with higher investment). We may just be witnessing that in humans.
  • bradlys 4y ago
    When you have a high income - you have more to lose by having children. When you have a low to no income - you don’t lose as much. It’s why poor people always seem to have more kids. There are other factors but it’s one of the large ones.
  • ChuckNorris89 4y ago
    High income doesn't mean rich parents with McMansions. In Europe high income is basically middle class where half you money goes in taxes, and half of what's left goes on rent, then good luck buying a house. Poor people have nothing to loose from having kids, they already live or are used to poor and difficult conditions, but the middle class has the most to loose from bringing up kids as it means a QoL sacrifice and/or more stress of finding a career that enables them to keep the QoL with kids. For rich people that's not a problem.