The argument that America’s falling birth rate will eventually relieve housing pressure collapses under even minimal scrutiny. It fails to explain why the country is already deep in a housing crisis and ignores the economic, migratory, and climate forces that will shape demand far more powerfully than fertility trends in the decades ahead.
Declining birth rates, this particular argument goes, will eventually ease demand, allowing communities to avoid difficult choices about growth, land use, and supply.
It is an argument that sounds empirical, forward-looking, and even responsible, but it is deeply flawed.
The phrase “demographics are not destiny,” often invoked in political analysis, applies just as forcefully to housing.
Population trends matter, but they do not mechanically dictate housing demand, and treating today’s fertility rates as a justification for limiting new housing misunderstands both how demographics work and ignores the fact that we need housing now in various forms.
That reality is underscored by figures repeatedly cited by Senator Bernie Sanders, who has noted that the United States has roughly 800,000 people experiencing homelessness and a shortage of about 4 million affordable homes.
Those numbers make clear that the housing crisis is not a hypothetical future problem tied to population growth, but a present shortfall baked into the existing housing stock.
Even if birth rates were to continue declining for a generation, the country would still face millions of households with nowhere affordable to live, because the gap already exists.
There are two basic problems with the argument that falling birth rates make new housing unnecessary.
Start with the most obvious point: housing is a now problem.
Rents are unaffordable today. Homeownership is out of reach today. Workers are commuting long distances today. School enrollment is declining today in many communities because families cannot afford to live there.
Appeals to what might happen decades from now do nothing to address shortages that are the cumulative result of underbuilding for the better part of forty years.
Housing markets do not wait for long-term demographic equilibrium, and people struggling to find affordable homes cannot wait decades for the problem to supposedly fix itself.
When supply lags behind demand for years at a time, scarcity hardens into high prices, displacement, and exclusion.
Telling a generation that relief may arrive sometime after they age out of childbearing years is not reasonable, nor is it viable.
The second problem is that the fertility numbers being invoked—often a total fertility rate of around 1.6 births per woman—are snapshots, not destinies.
They describe a moment in time shaped by economic conditions, housing costs, student debt, childcare availability, and immigration patterns—not immutable laws of nature.
Fertility rates fluctuate—falling during recessions, stalling when young adults cannot form households, and responding to affordability, stability, and confidence in the future—so treating a single number as a fixed trajectory confuses a point estimate with a structural trend.
More importantly, this arguments gets causality backward.
There is mounting evidence that high housing costs are themselves a contributing factor to lower birth rates, particularly in the wake of the Great Recession.
After 2008, employment slowly recovered while housing affordability did not, with rents rising faster than wages, first-time homeownership becoming harder to access, and household formation delayed as young adults doubled up or moved back with parents—outcomes driven not by lifestyle choices but by concrete economic constraints.
When people cannot afford a second bedroom and stability feels unattainable, family formation becomes a luxury and decisions about marriage and children are postponed or abandoned.
In that context, using low birth rates as an argument against building housing is circular as scarcity itself helps produce the very demographic patterns then cited to justify inaction.
Even setting that aside, national birth rates tell us very little about local housing demand.
Housing pressure is not evenly distributed across geography.
Migration routinely overwhelms fertility effects, especially in places with universities, jobs, amenities, and relative climate resilience.
Communities like Davis are not closed systems; they are shaped by who can move in, not just by who is born there.
This is where the claim that demographics alone will solve housing shortages unravels, because it assumes a stable world of slow, predictable population trends—and we do not live in that world.
Climate change introduces a destabilizing force that demographic determinism cannot absorb.
Large-scale climate disruption is already displacing people through drought, heat, wildfire, flooding, and food insecurity.
Serious projections anticipate tens to hundreds of millions of displaced people globally over the coming decades.
According to the World Bank’s Groundswell: Acting on Internal Climate Migration report, “climate change, an increasingly potent driver of migration, could force 216 million people across six world regions to move within their countries by 2050,” with hotspots of internal migration beginning to emerge as early as 2030.
Displacement on that scale will not distribute evenly across the globe, and the United States—by virtue of its relative affluence, institutional capacity, and geographic position—is likely to be a major destination.
Historically, large-scale environmental and economic disruptions have pushed people toward countries with stronger labor markets, infrastructure, and political stability, not away from them.
As climate stress intensifies across parts of the Global South, Central America, and coastal regions worldwide, the assumption that U.S. housing demand can be planned around slow, domestic demographic contraction ignores the powerful pull factors that make this country a refuge in an increasingly unstable world.
Even if the displacement is less than feared—debatable at this point—the notion of climate displacement makes the idea of planning housing policy around declining birth rates foolhardy.
Systems designed for razor-thin equilibrium are brittle.
When shocks arrive—fires, floods, heat waves—scarcity becomes humanitarian failure.
Housing capacity is not merely an economic buffer; it is an adaptive one.
Low birth rates and climate-driven migration can—and likely will—coexist. In fact, they reinforce each other.
Climate stress suppresses fertility in origin regions while increasing housing demand in destination regions.
Averaged demographic data obscure this reality, offering false reassurance precisely when resilience should be prioritized.
At this point, one might reasonably ask how national politics fits into this picture.
The Trump administration policies pull in two opposing directions at once.
On the one hand, the administration’s retreat from climate mitigation and international cooperation accelerates the very disruptions that drive displacement.
Rolling back emissions rules could very well make the future disruptions worse by amplifying drought, heat stress, and instability, particularly in regions already on the edge.
On the other hand, the same political movement has wrought systemic disruption and chaos through its policies of mass deportation, border enforcement, and the fantasy that migration is a discretionary policy choice rather than a structural response to survival threats.
History leaves little ambiguity—walls can reroute migration and raids can increase suffering, but neither has ever stopped large-scale human movement driven by environmental collapse, and an effort to attempt this in the future will likely exacerbate global pressures.
This is the contradiction that rarely gets stated plainly: the people being expelled or excluded today are the same populations who will be forced to move tomorrow by climate disruption.
And when those pressures intensify, the question will not be whether migration occurs, but whether receiving communities are prepared—or catastrophically unprepared.
Housing scarcity will not function as a deterrent but will function as a crisis multiplier.
Seen in this light, the argument that declining birth rates will quietly solve housing shortages collapses under the weight of reality.
It asks communities to ignore present harm, misunderstand causality, discount migration, and assume planetary stability at the very moment instability is accelerating.
Demographics matter, but they are not destiny.
Housing outcomes are shaped by choices about zoning, permitting, and investment—not by declining fertility, which does not build housing, nor by climate disruption, which does not respect local growth caps—so a politics that denies both mitigation and preparation all but guarantees pressure at the door, whether anyone wants to acknowledge it or not.
The real choice facing communities is not whether growth can be avoided, but whether scarcity will be managed humanely or allowed to metastasize into exclusion, displacement, and crisis. Waiting for demographics to rescue us is not realism but abdication.
If the future is uncertain—and it is—planning for resilience means building capacity rather than betting on shrinkage, because in housing, as in democracy, the real danger lies not in adapting to change but in pretending it will not arrive.
Responsible planning means meeting today’s housing needs, taking climate mitigation seriously, and ensuring we have the capacity to adapt to a future whose challenges will arrive whether we are ready for them or not.
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I guess that’s my “cue”?
There is no housing shortage (no shortage of actual buildings). What we’re seeing is a case of differing income/asset levels. A well-documented, increasing disparity between those at the top, vs. those at the bottom.
https://news.ku.edu/news/article/study-finds-us-does-not-have-housing-shortage-but-shortage-of-affordable-housing
And universities know this as well. Think about it for a minute in regard to the article below. Is anyone claiming that housing is “too expensive” or in “short supply” in Kansas? What exactly is causing this projected enrollment decline, since it obviously would have nothing to do with housing?
https://www.kansan.com/news/enrollment-cliff-could-test-ku-s-housing-and-recruitment-plans/article_656b9cec-de0b-4cf0-af91-a65169c1b749.html
All of the wealth/assets of the baby boomers will belong to their descendants over the next 30 years. It’s happening now, each and every year.
Might want to read the article next time.
Oh, I read it – there’s just too much disparate nonsense to comment on all of it.
If you’d like me to comment on a specific part of it though – I’d be glad to do so. Pretty sure I’ve previously addressed every single aspect of it repeatedly, over the years, but can do so again if there’s something specific you might want me to address again.
How about reading the (second) very brief article I posted – and sharing your thoughts on that?
In other words, why is enrollment declining at all universities – including one in Kansas where housing is presumably quite inexpensive? Note how the university is apparently gearing up to reduce/reconfigure the number of students in dormitories.
https://www.kansan.com/news/enrollment-cliff-could-test-ku-s-housing-and-recruitment-plans/article_656b9cec-de0b-4cf0-af91-a65169c1b749.html
That would take us off topic
Obviously, if there’s fewer students in the pipeline, it’s ALREADY impacting demand for housing as noted in that article.
How is a reduction in demand “off topic”? And why isn’t that something that you’d be happy to learn about, given your stated concerns?
Seems to me that you and I would normally be on the same page, in viewing this as “good news”. Would you care to explain why you view it differently than I do?
Isn’t a claimed “shortage” of housing ultimately related to, and directly corresponding to demand? (There’s a basic economic model that most people are familiar with regarding this, which you often cite yourself. But you generally only focus on “one side” of that model.)
But even if you want to ignore that question, I’m willing to answer any specific questions you have for me.
Because the article is about the disruptions likely to occur due to climate change
That is one of the issues mentioned in your article.
So your theory is that mass numbers of immigrants (from other countries?) will be allowed to enter the country illegally once Trump is out of office? And will settle in high risk fire zones in California, for example?
Or in Florida, where hurricanes are an increasing factor – already devastating entire communities?
Or in the Las Vegas area (some nearby community), where they’re already actually denying housing permits due to lack of water?
In any case, where, specifically are these hordes of immigrants that you’re predicting coming from? Which countries, and why?
And for that matter, won’t Trump have Greenland and possibly Canada by then? (Nice and cool, there, and not that crowded.)
:-)
If not, Detroit has some cheap housing and isn’t that hot in the winter. Places like Buffalo, as well.
Cheap housing to boot!
But seriously, it seems to me that climate change is one reason that Trump is interested in Greenland and Canada, even if he doesn’t want to openly disclose that reason.
Perhaps the entire U.S. will need to move to Canada (and Alaska), right?
Actually I’m making a much simpler argument here – exogenous shock as a reason not to rely on projections or current demographic trends.
Seems pretty far-fetched, and not a reason to base local housing policy upon it.
Would have to know more about where these people would supposedly be coming from, why (specifically), whether or not it would be “allowed”, where they’d seek to settle, etc.
I was only partly joking regarding Canada, Alaska, and Greenland. (Including for people escaping from California.)
Apparently, Canada has already allowed quite a bit of immigration.
Right now, this country is continuing to allow development in areas where it shouldn’t in regard to climate change, depletion of water, etc. Those are the people who might relocate “within” the country.
But so far, they’re not moving to Kansas I assume.
And again, curious as to your thoughts regarding the demand for housing and university education in regard to a lack of births.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/feb/05/flawed-economic-models-mean-climate-crisis-could-crash-global-economy-experts-warn
Might be good if we have an economic “reset”.
I’m getting tired of the system we have, myself. And that includes viewing housing as an asset, rather than a place to live.
I’m not sure that the system we have is healthy for humanity. Basically, capitalism is the harnessing of greed.
But you have to play the game, to some degree.
I have met people who aren’t so uptight regarding the game, and never seem to envy anyone else. (Those are the people I’d at least like to emulate, as I get older.)
But I’m not particularly worried (on a personal level) that climate change is going to destroy me.
“But I’m not particularly worried (on a personal level) that climate change is going to destroy me.”
I see a pattern here. You seem to only worry about things that will harm you personally. Part of that might be the lack of offspring disconnects you from the future.
That’s not where I was going with all of this, but an interesting side note. My point in general in this piece is the misplaced use of data and projections leads to poor policy.
You are mistaken, regarding my personal interest.
For example, the reason I fight sprawling housing developments has no relationship to my personal interests. (That would be a tough and highly ineffective way to “make money”, for example. There’s easier ways than that.)
But no – I don’t see any real personal threat to me, you, or anyone reading this in regard to climate change. Perhaps to those rebuilding in Florida, building new homes in places without adequate water, building/rebuilding in high risk fire zones or places that are increasingly subject to flood or sea level rise – all related to climate change.
I doubt that includes anyone reading this (other than perhaps those seeking to live in those areas someday.
Ok, I’ve noticed a pattern that you often mention your personal stake including your last line above that I quoted. But I am still curious about why you fixated so hard on the point of “sprawl” (which I believe you define too broadly). And why you would worry more about sprawl than climate change which is much more likely to have a serious long term impact on the humanity.
You seem to be purposefully ignoring my subsequent comment, regarding how climate change doesn’t really impact any of your readers (or you, for that matter).
Now, whether or not you believe I’m telling you the truth regarding my motivation isn’t something I can control.
Regarding climate change, there’s a reason I don’t focus on this as much as some others do. The primary reason is that those who claim to be concerned about it are often advocating for the exact things which cause it (e.g., sprawl, endless population growth, etc.). Climate change is only one symptom of the impact of modern society on the environment. There’s loss of species, habitat, increasing competition for resources, etc.
I suspect that our educational system focuses on climate change, without actually dealing with the reasons it is occurring.
Has nothing to do with whether or not we’re all driving electric cars, unless population and growth are addressed. One might as well drive a Hummer, if the underlying cause isn’t addressed.
Or as I sometimes say (during “manufactured droughts”) – flush twice; help prevent more sprawl.
Seriously – other than the “punishment” that government can dish out, what’s anyone’s motivation to go along with this program of actually ENCOURAGING results which contribute to climate change?
There are underlying financial interests in pushing this – it’s not out of concerns regarding equity, climate change, or any other “noble” cause. We’re dealing with a corrupt system, one that is actually controlled by capitalism.
There is no actual “scarcity”. There’s a system which taps into human nature (self-interest) in a harmful manner.
“You seem to be purposefully ignoring my subsequent comment, regarding how climate change doesn’t really impact any of your readers (or you, for that matter). ”
Frankly I think that’s nonsense, but I have other issues to deal with now.
I really don’t understand how you can say climate change doesn’t impact me or my readers.
For example, five of the twenty worst fires in California history UP TO THAT POINT hit the state in the fall of 2017.
Then in January 2025, were the LA fires that destroyed tens of thousands of structures and did significant damage in LA.
Based on just those two examples, how can you say climate change isn’t personally affecting us?
You may not see the connection I’m referring to, but I see the hype and money surrounding the Super Bowl as an example of what’s (mostly) “wrong” in our system.
Same thing regarding the medal count for the U.S. at the Olympics. Why would anyone care about that?
The “glory” surrounding all of that is also related to Lindsey Vonn’s “comeback” (and we know how that ended). What a surprise.
I also find it disingenuous when the media won’t show video of her crash, but would certainly show the result if she prevailed. How is it that “privacy” is suddenly demanded, when things don’t go well? Especially when either result is part of the pursuit, itself – promoted and on public display.
Why do I now know who Bad Bunny is, without even knowing anything about his music? (Still don’t – I didn’t see the Super Bowl.)
Ron O
This whole back and forth with David shows how out of touch you are with the situation and the future. Yes wealth distribution is driving the housing crisis (and for some reason you say there’s no crisis but then point to this as the source of the crisis.) But you’re ignoring the fact the wealth distribution and inability to get stable housing is driving down the birth rate. You can’t keep a consistent line of argument because everytime you’re path is rebutted you come up with a different often contradictory line. You refuse to get pinned down because you can’t bring yourself to concede.
Of course the population decline statistic is irrelevant. Iti might be true that we have a number of houses that are vacant in detroit. But that does absolutley nothing to influence the housing demand HERE.
The only questions worth asking are:
1) Do we have a local housing imbalance with respect to our own city economy
2) Is it in our best interest to solve that imbalance.
Those are the real questions. They are the correct questions, and they are the reason why just producing “houses” isnt the solution.
We only need to build the housing that is relevant to the inbound workforce that is currently priced out. It is NOT in our interest to provide more regional housing for richer people who commute outbound to sac. That kind of housing increases traffic / VMT’s and costs us money in the long term.
1) “Do we have a local housing imbalance with respect to our own city economy.”
No. The city itself barely even has an economy.
“It is NOT in our interest to provide more regional housing for richer people who commute outbound to sac. That kind of housing increases traffic / VMT’s and costs us money in the long term.”
Agreed – and that’s pretty much who would be living at Village Farms and Shriner’s.
Though I don’t really know what you mean by “our” interest, to be honest. “Our” interest and the interest of every city in state (according to the state) is to keep growing. At which point, one has to go back to the birth rate to ask where these people are supposedly coming from – and “why” that’s a goal. Seems like no one dares question that, in regard to the state’s new fake “mandates”.
At least David puts forth a fake answer regarding those questions (apparently – the people escaping the fire and tornado in the image, though they appear to be casually crossing the water in the wrong direction).
Ron O
Davis has 33,000 jobs locally, of course we have an economy. And 17,000 workers commute into Davis. These facts are indisputable. We’re not talking about accommodating an increasing population.
We aren’t talking about growth–we’re talking about accommodating the people who are already coming here. If the birth rate settles 2.1 which is replacement we’re just fine with that. We will need people to take care of us in our old age.
Richard’s point is statistically accurate. And it clearly and indisputably supports the need for workforce housing in Davis. The question is how much workforce housing. I believe the need falls into three distinct cohorts, (1) the group Don Shor frequently points out … those whose incomes are not sufficient for the purchase of a home … those whose incomes will be in the market for a rental. (2a and 2b) the group of people who have sufficient income, as well as an interest in purchasing a home for their respective family unit. The reason there are (a) and (b) portions of that group is because many of them will choose to purchase their home where they can get more square feet of both house and yard as better support for their personal life style than they can get for the same price in Davis. The entirety of group (2) represents “conceptual demand” or “intellectually theoretical demand”. Group (2a) is the portion of (2) that are likely to choose a home in Davis, while group (2b) is the portion of (2) that are likely to choose a home elsewhere other than Davis.
Groups (1), (2a), and (2b) together add up to the 17,000 Richard references. What the size of each of those three components is is anyone’s guess.