This stage of the demographic transition is a huge problem, IMO. The more I think about it, the more it seems like a ratchet (as in, it only moves in one direction):

Basically, two incomes are useful, so both people in a relationship pursue careers. Now they have more money to compete on the housing market. This seems like a good move, so others follow suit. At first this is largely a win for people who pursue this route. But, as more people do this, it becomes necessary in order to compete for real estate in good neighborhoods.

Now there is an advantage to be had by putting off having a family even longer, or having even less children. So people do this. But as more and more people follow suit, the advantage evaporates. And so on and so forth until you have demographic implosion.

For the life of me, I can’t see a way out of this in the short term. Maybe a wholesale transition to remote work?

Immigration will offset the demographic implosion, at least if current trends continue. But speaking as someone who studied climate science, a temporary population reduction can only be a good thing for long-term human survival. We're above the carrying capacity of Earth for humans, and though we've done a lot of tricks to expand capacity, we're currently putting a large swath of the biosphere in danger.

If there are less people, then pressure for good neighborhoods goes down, and we'll reach an equilibrium. I think it only seems like a ratchet because we're in the middle of a downturn after a 5000 year run of exponential growth.

Doesn't mean it doesn't suck to live in this time in terms of housing -- but in other terms, life is pretty outstanding. The two income thing is mostly new, but then compare the amount of time that medieval women spent on childcare and providing clothing. It's so much better now that they're not expected to spend every spare moment at the spinning wheel.

> We're above the carrying capacity of Earth for humans, and though we've done a lot of tricks to expand capacity, we're currently putting a large swath of the biosphere in danger.

Given the vast differences in climate impact between different populations and consumption habits, this doesn't seem to be the case.

Perhaps a better way of phrasing it would be "We're above the carrying capacity of Earth for Rich Americans".

The issue is that the U.S. isn't overpopulated. India, China are tho.

Worth remembering that the average person in the US emits far more than the average person in India or China.

I don't think most people have a problem with having a smaller population in general, they have a problem with the shift in the age distribution. Having less people is fine, having few young people who have to care for a general aging population is not.

What is the carrying capacity of earth for Humans? I recall in the 70s there was hype about the “Population Bomb” but those fears were never borne out.

As well, what makes you think we will reach an equilibrium for good neighborhoods? Some housing will be abandoned, causing blight; blight causes good neighborhoods to become less desirable, and they spiral down from there.

Detroit is a great example of what happens when neighborhoods lose people.

It's really hard to say what the carrying capacity is, because unlike other species, humans keep modifying their environment. Without clothing, the answer is probably a few million. Without agriculture, the number is south of half a billion. With mechanized agriculture, large-scale land use changes, and artificial fertilizer, we can probably still double our current population. But at the cost of stressing the rest of the environment. I'd guess the "safe" level is somewhere in the low billions, i.e. 1-5 billion.

I was mainly talking about the SF case, where lower global population should make it more affordable rather than causing things to be abandoned. This is what is playing out in Tokyo, which is still growing while the countryside is abandoned. As for the small towns, it sucks, but dying small towns has been a thing for quite a while now as agriculture has become more mechanized. Detroit's kind of the odd man out being a depopulating metropolis, so I'd actually argue that it's a terrible example, at least for the next 100 years.

On a global scale, SF is tiny. Fewer than 1m people in a state of 44m, a country of 350m, and a world of 7,000m.

The impact of global population on SF is and will be negligible.

I'm not getting your point. The thing about global trends is that they are global, which means that they'll apply to all of the large cities. Some large cities might have other trends that might hide the signal, like falling into the ocean, but the point is the global mass migration.

Yes, we seem to have gone from women not having the choice to work to women not having the choice to not work.

This is false.

There are 500$/mo rents everywhere and food costs are the lowest in history.

If you dont care to keep up with the Joneses and have minimum wage people cook you food, you can easily live off 1 low-income salary.

...if you leave the big city? There are not $500/mo rents in many popular places. But sure, Des Moines, Pocatello, you can live like that. And why not - at that salary, you sure aren't going to the Bolshoi Ballet any time soon.

I can't find a $500/month 2-bedroom apartment for rent in Des Moines (https://www.padmapper.com/apartments/des-moines-ia/2-beds/pr...).

The cheapest I see is $625, which is 25% more than $500/month.

Yup. It widens the income gap significantly. The problem with anything that raises average income, is that people without average income are worse of.

If families have at most 1 earner, then the worse case scenario is to have 0 earners, being one down. If most families have 2 though, when you fall to 0, you're much, much worse off compared to the norm.

People with kids vs people without. People with college degrees in high demand profession vs people without. Basically, every time we push people in drove toward a more efficient "lifestyle", the worse off people who don't are.

There's a book somewhat related to this idea called The Two Income Trap. I haven't read it yet, but recently read a good book review of it[0] that discusses the extra competition created by two-income households and tries to vet the book's evidence. It also discusses the related problem that comes from treating "good school districts" as a positional good, causing a negative externality of over-competition and consumption beyond the intrinsic economic benefit of that good.

[0] http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/28/book-review-the-two-inc...

It’s a great book, written by (now Senator) Elizabeth Warren (from the great state of Massachusetts).

Solution: create a surplus of homes. That will detach price from income. Nothing else will work. (Note: we did this with food and it successfully kept prices low)

Not necessarily. The least affordable housing markets tend to be bigger cities. Growing the cities further will not necessarily make housing in those cities more affordable. There's a positive feedback loop between cities being bigger being more desirable.

Cheap public transit is all.

In case of food, it comes to your nearest super market. So its not just overproduction of food, its also supply chain optimization.

You're spot on about the basic underlying mechanic. A mechanic like that can be found directly causing or partially contributing to almost all the problems we face today.

Obligatory link going deep into this: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/.

Sane zoning laws would be much easier and do a lot more to ease the burden on people (I currently live in an “OMG no high rises! Won’t someone think of the neighborhood character!?” city and the rent is ridiculous). We just have to have the political will to change them, which unfortunately means angering very powerful monied interests, including Betty and Edgar who really love their now-valued-at-$500,000 house next to downtown.

This is bang on. Looking at the graph look where Harris County (Houston) and Dallas are.

If the graphs were plotted with increase in population against the change in fertility then those places would be outliers.

Texas zoning and tax on houses work.

The funny thing about housing prices is that a state in the US has handled house prices so well with an economy that is doing well but Texas is often ignored in these discussions.

Texas has pretty restrictive laws about parking minimums. It would be illegal to build a pleasant neighborhood (for my definition of pleasant) in Texas.

Also, negative externalities of Texas' built environment (lung disease, cancer, potentially more autism near motorways(still early stages of research) dead people on roads, inability to travel or perform basic tasks for those who can't or prefer not to drive, being impoverished by your automobile, and the potential collapse of global civilization due to climate change) are not priced in, so often the neighbors or the rest of the world are paying for those houses.

Thousands of acres with mcmansions in gated HOAs and no walkability sounds terrible.

> Texas zoning and tax on houses work.

Texas zoning also paved over all the marsh land that would've kept the city from flooding.

I'm living in California and I have this idea for a zoning law: if a residential plot of land sells for more than $X million per acre, it is automatically up zoned to higher density. That way if the market says a location is really valuable more people get to live there.

I've theory-crafted other potential policies like "require any increase in office build density to be matched by increased residential density". That seems more potentially game-able than simply increasing density of properties the market had determined are valuable.

There is a Brazilian show on Netflix, 3%, that explores (caution: spoiler for Season 1) a sterile elite ruling over a dystopia.