> Where I live (the United States), it’s become very difficult for young people to be able to afford renting or buying a home in a safe neighborhood. By compar

> Where I live (the United States), it’s become very difficult for young people to be able to afford renting or buying a home in a safe neighborhood. By comparison to times when birthrates were significantly higher, every neighborhood is a safe neighborhood. And while the share devoted to housing specifically has gone up, overall cost of living compared to wages has dropped (real wages have increased) significantly. Pretty much all the financial reasons people point to as armchair explanations are inconsistent with the data. There's possibly a factor that, outside of the lowest income sector, expectations of material situation necessary as a prerequisite for raising children have grown faster than improvements in actual material conditions (driven, possibly, by saturated media coverage of both fictional lifestyles and the actual lifestyles of people far richer than average), and there's probably other social changes that economic statistics don't capture (like maybe anticipation of social, including familial, support in child raising has dropped, increasing reliance on services obtained in the market).