All those people for whom home ownership is just about in reach will delay starting a family. Those living in unsecure shared accomodation won't even consider it. It's pretty clear that fertility rates have fallen significantly in all western countries over the past decade.

OTOH, that apartment complex was designed and built ~1965 or so, when having kids was far more the American social norm. And their business model seemed carefully tuned to attracting longer-term renters.

The amusing part of it is that small children are the most amenable to moving, it's not until they're a bit older and getting into school that moving becomes a real problem for them.

Fertility rates are low enough that it can't be entirely ascribed to housing.

Children are expensive. If you can't currently afford to buy a house and decide to have a child, the chances of you gaining enough wealth to afford one in the 4 to 6 years before your child reaches school age is practically nonexistent.

This means having a child while renting basically pushes your home ownership plans back by probably about a decade.

I never would have had kids if I waited that long.

I get that it’s perverse how we place so much of the cost of raising children in parents. At the same time, waiting until you’re “already established” is too much.

You may have had great reasons for doing this. But if this becomes a widely accepted expectation we are going to relying heavily on immigration.

it should be alleviated by making rental accommodation more stable - such as a longer term contract. What if you had a 30 year contract rental (with built-in, but known ahead of time increases).

so as long as you pay your rent and don't do anything illegal or damaging, you can't be evicted. the worst that can happen is a rise of the rent, but even that is often limited to not go beyond the average market rate for the area.

No they're not illegal. In Austria you see time limited rental contracts all the time, usually 3 years. It's rare to find unlimited rental nowadays as landlords want to make money.

germany doesn't allow time limited contracts. there are only two exceptions. a time limited contract is allowed if the landlord can claim to need to use the property themselves after the end of the contract (which they can only do if they don't have multiple properties to rent), or if they have plans to tear down or renovate the building.

It's nearly impossible as everyone is locked into their rental units and will never move.

You basically have to wait for someone to die.

In Germany, the scarcity is so high that realtors can afford to ghost you left and right despite you having money and then when you finally get to view an apartment there's like 80+ people viewing it and only the one with the best portfolio (full of your private info that they normally shouldn't be allowed to have) gets it. This madness is nowhere near what it's like in the US.

Seems a high risk, desperate maneuver. What's the end-game for the landlord? A building full of drug dealers, in perpetuity? Keeping maintenance up to city code could be a burden, and the insurance company might start to get wise.

Sometimes it’s just to have tenant churn to allow them to get higher rents. Rent control for long periods of time can cause very large disparities between current market rents and what a tenant is paying (thousands/mo). The dangerous folks aren’t usually obvious when first checking out a unit.

At least in NYC, there is a lot of reputed Mafia involvement in real estate.

Owning a home presents a long-term hedge against financial instability. Due to zoning and other factors, it's often not possible to live in areas which are "good" for children without owning a home. My particular neighborhood in a major city has low cost/quality rentals for college aged folks, reasonable subsidized housing options, and condos. If one were to rent without subsidy for a family, they would likely be pushed into a luxury unit and pay an unreasonable and highly inflationary sum.

Of course, plenty of people start families without solid economic footing. But it's a bit harder to invent space out of thin air than it is to take on debt.

Houses are something like more than double the size they were just 40 years ago, and families are smaller.

It does depend on what families are willing to put up with, though. I'm not sure many of my millenial peers want to raise 7 kids in a 1500 square foot house. It's important not to ask what's physically possible, but instead what's probable given societal expectations.

Fortunately it looks like a 10% correction is all we need, and, fingers crossed, it looks to be coming.

Sure, some people do that, but there are race and economic class biases to it, and both the races and economic classes biased to it are shrinking as a share of the population.

The VAST majority of non-single parent families in the US still alive today owned a home.

Maybe current trends are different since home ownership rates are low in young people. But family formation rates are also lower than normal.

While at any given time homeowners may be more likely than their age-peer contemporaries to start families, aggregate homeownership rates don't show any sign of being a positive contributor to family formation.