When YIMBY Met Pronatalism
This alliance might help build family-friendly apartments
I can’t believe it: today is the five-year anniversary of the publication of my book, Brave New Home.
In case you don’t know about Brave New Home, its central thesis is that there’s a mismatch between people’s preferences and demographic realities and the housing we’re building. Lots of people want to live in something other than single-family homes, but we’re not giving them the option to live in, say, courtyard apartments or multigenerational homes or co-living because we’re not building that kind of housing. (The book then explains why we haven’t built many of these housing options at scale and what it would be like if we did.)
So it’s perfect timing to discuss a new report that explores the lack of family-friendly apartments. The report comes to us from Bobby Fijan – a real estate professional who co-founded the company, Building Housing for America’s Families, and has made a career out of nudging developers toward better floorplans for families – and Lyman Stone – director of research of the consulting firm Demographic Intelligence, the director of the Pronatalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies, and a PhD candidate at McGill University. (Humble brag: I was at the housing conference where the two met and saw in real time how their interests aligned around creating housing that suited families better.)
Their report finds that people who live in small apartments are less likely to have children — but at the same time, developers are building more apartments that are smaller and with fewer bedrooms.
The result is a mismatch — there are relatively few family-sized apartments in a sea of studio and one-bedroom apartments. Coveted three-bedroom apartments make up just 5 percent of recent apartment stock, and yet Millennials — many of whom have or want to have children — are the largest demographic group.
Here are a few helpful charts from the report to illustrate these trends:
But what’s more, Stone and Fijan’s research demonstrates that Americans are willing to pay more per square foot for an apartment with more bedrooms, and these units with more bedrooms are strongly associated with more openness to having children. The report in turn suggests that access to larger apartments with more bedrooms could mean more couples would have children.
Unlike a lot of housing reports that might be aimed at policymakers, this report seems like it has a different audience in mind: the developers, real estate investors, and YIMBY stakeholders who are thinking a lot about apartments these days.