> nice house in a nice suburb!

There's your problem. Everyone wants to live in the same set of well established well resourced neighbourhoods. But there's too many of us. Go out in the 'burbs and accept that owning a house implies a commute you will dislike (among a host of other compromises).

It's everyone's problem if the end result is that there aren't enough children to replenish the population.

The grandchildren of today's Amish children will herd their sheep through the abandoned urban cores.

Are you joking right now?

I’d have to move a thousand kilometres to some shit hole country town to afford a house on a salary I earn by working as a principal consultant in the central business district!

Now imagine the same scenario but with a school teacher, nanny, gardener, or inset job title here that is tied to a specific location.

When “existence here with the rest of us who have pulled the ladder up after us” becomes untenable for entire generations then you don’t get to complain when nobody is around to clean your gutters or wiper your arse when you’re too old to it for yourself.

Our children our are our future and they’re being told to jump through flaming hoops… that aren’t even in the same city as their parents!

I am with you sans shit hole country town. Talk about a large brush.

> I’d have to move a thousand kilometres to some shit hole country town to afford a house on a salary I earn by working as a principal consultant in the central business district!

I didn't suggest anyone should quit their job. What I said was consider making tradeoffs. Space and affordability in exchange for a longer commute and other distance-related headaches.

>Our children our are our future and they’re being told to jump through flaming hoops… that aren’t even in the same city as their parents!

Nobody is owed the same opportunity as their parents. If the children of the well off have the right to live where they grew up then entire suburbs become enclaves of generational rights-holders.

Many of these problems would go away if cities de-centralised; from one central hub business district to many business districts. The problem, as I see it anyway, is unwillingness to invest in resources and infrastructure, to make satellite developments attractive for business and residents.

Why should it have to? Other countries build vertically in the urban cores. Many places in Europe even build small towns this way. One of the only good things about Europe is that I get to live really close to where I work, and not even have a commute.

Where in Europe should that be? I live in Germany and for example Stuttgart has a shortage of nurses because they can't afford living in a 1 hour commuting range (one way).

in the USA you wouldn't not be able to afford it - it just wouldn't exist. There would be no homes inside a 1 hour commuting range.

Meanwhile, I grew up in an 800 sq ft apartment that housed my parents, my father's parents, me, and my sibling.

Objectively, you don't need a house with a lawn and a back yard to have children, and have them grow up healthy and successful.

A different perspective from Poland: house affordability is equally as bad, so the argument could have been "young people don't have babies because they can't afford three bedroom apartments". But the country had a major baby boom in the 80s, during a (relatively mild) civil war and in the middle of a major economic crisis, when getting anything other than vinegar was a huge problem. And I clearly remember ppl living with 3 kids in studio apartments, playing with a lot of kids while waiting in mile long-lines for totally mundane rationed foodstuffs, school classes starting at 2 pm and ending at 8pm (too many kids), and my parents reaching out via their network to a director of orthopedic shoe factory because even money couldn't get you that kind of stuff. And in the 40 years since we had sustained growth rates comparable only to China or South Korea, and similar problems with childbirths. I don't buy any economic arguments.

I suspect that getting contraceptives was also complicated during the Jaruzelski Junta days.

That baby boom was an echo of the first post-war baby boom and fueled by a record 274k newly built apartments in 1979 - a culmination of a decade of ramping up construction when Edward Gierek took over and started borrowing money on a massive scale[0].

As a father of two I can tell you right now why demographics in Poland are in the gutter: most families need two incomes to survive, but:

-Companies insist every employee works full time.

-Women often have nothing to come back to after maternity leave.

-Daycares, kindergartens etc. are open for 9h at most, so pray your commute isn't too long if you have two or more kids.

-Commutes to these institutions have become longer as on one hand more people live in the suburbs while on the other urban planners kinda sorta forgot you need to carve out some land for a school/kindergarten when you're planning a new residential area, so if you live in a recent-ish building forget about leaving the car at home.

Most people seeing all these obstacles just settle on one child, whom they can leave and pick up in shifts.

My family copes by living on a single income, which is still possible today if you're a software engineer, but most likely won't be long term.

[0] In hindsight it wasn't a terrible plan - there was enormaous demographic potential