Apartments in high-rises are inherently anti-family

The more of them you build, the lower fertility will be.

As we confront the low-fertility crisis that is enveloping most countries, we need to understand the very low birth rates of cities in particular. One of the first facts of demography, immediately evident in the data and true almost everywhere, is that fertility is lower in urban cores than anywhere else.

Economists like Bryan Caplan claim that fertility is so low in cities mainly because of cost. If cost is the main reason birth rates are so low among people living in urban high-rises, then we should double down and keep building more of them until apartments are affordable enough to give us the baby boom we so desperately need.

But if fertility in apartment towers is low because this type of housing is inherently negative for family formation, then building ever more high rises is a very bad idea, because over time an increasing share of people will live in an anti-natal housing type.

How can we find out which of these answers is correct? Randomized controlled trials are surely impossible for something like this.

Fortunately, a great natural experiment exists. East Asian countries have been constructing apartment towers like crazy. In an apartment-building frenzy, the number of dwellings per capita has grown by 10-17% across Asia as a chart published in 2023 by John Burn-Murdoch shows. Meanwhile the number of dwellings per capita has grown slowly in Europe and has been stagnant in the Anglosphere.

And this housing is affordable for young people. Incredibly, the homeownership rate of young people in China is twice the rate of the US. The second chart is from 2017, when the average millennial was just 28 or 29. Some 70% of young Chinese were homeowners in 2017, a number that may be even higher now after much more additional building.

With so much housing being built, Asia should be having an incredible baby boom right about now, right?

Unfortunately, exactly the opposite is happening as Asian fertility has completely collapsed. In 2023 the total fertility rate was 0.72 births per woman in South Korea, 1.02 in China, 1.20 in Japan, 0.75 in Hong Kong and 0.86 in Taiwan. By contrast the TFR was 1.62 in the United States, 1.56 in New Zealand and 1.52 in Ireland. These Anglosphere numbers are not great but still twice the fertility of those East Asian countries. (‘Replacement fertility’ is about 2.1 births per woman.)

Why isn’t all that building in Asia yielding more babies? If you have travelled in East Asian countries as I have, you know that the housing that is being built is almost entirely in the form of high-rise apartment towers.

Below is Shanghai, TFR 0.54. That is only around half of the (already very low) Chinese level. At that rate, for every 100 people there would be only around 6.25 grandchildren and 2 great-grandchildren. It isn’t hyperbole to say that such numbers suggest civilizational collapse.

The same story is true in Seoul (TFR 0.54), Beijing (TFR 0.66) and Bangkok (TFR 0.8). In every instance, birth rates in these cities where housing is mostly high-rise apartments is far lower than for each nation as a whole.

It is not about small apartment size

A popular theory is that the cause of low fertility is that apartments in Asia are small and if you built larger, family-sized apartments, things would be just fine.

Wondering about that, I searched and found this: “Using transactions data, Colliers estimates that the average gross private apartment size is between 88 and 98 square meters across Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen.” That is 947-1054 square feet, substantially bigger than the average apartment size in the United States (882 square feet).

One of my Shanghai readers responded to a recent post by noting, “I actually live in Shanghai, and most new developments here start at 1800sf/3br.” Another replied, “Most apartments built post 2000 in Shanghai are 3+ beds.”

I don’t have the data on the exact mix being built, but it is clear that plenty of the apartments in Shanghai are sized for families, and yet its fertility is mind-bogglingly low even by Chinese standards.

Fertility is far lower in apartment towers for a whole host of reasons beyond size and cost

Economists are fixated on things like price and price per square foot. But there are whole lot of other factors that make high rise towers particularly bad for families.

• Noise and privacy issues. Apartment living means you share walls and common areas with many neighbors. Kids, meanwhile, are noisy, messy, and often embarrassing. Even one screaming kid will be an imposition on your neighbors when walls are shared. Imagine three or four!

• Lack of a yard for kids to play in. A typical single-family home has far more usable space than a comparably sized apartment because of the yard. (Our family residence for instance has 15,000 square feet of yard, a third of an acre, which greatly reduces the sense of crowding we would otherwise feel as a family of eight.)

• General crowding and density. Demographer Lyman Stone, in a June 2024 paper entitled More Crowding, Fewer Babies: The Effects of Housing Density on Fertility found that density (more people in a geographic area) and crowding (more people in one’s immediate space) both contribute to low fertility and when you have both, as you typically do in apartment blocks, you get exceptionally low fertility. Humans seem to be a lot like mice in this regard. (His paper, titled Death Squared: The Explosive Growth and Demise of a Mouse Population, is riveting must-read because of how many of the neuroses of his mice seem to match what we see today, especially among people living in cities!)

None of these things would be made better by building more residential high-rises, and in many ways, conditions for families would be made worse!

Freeing up single family homes for young people? Hardly!

A few days ago, economist Scott Sumner tried to rebut arguments I raised on his blog TheMoneyIllusion:

“Some people argue that single family homes are better than high-rises for solving the fertility crisis. But even if that were true, it would help to build more high rises for single people and childless couples in places like LA, in order to free up more single-family homes for families with kids.”

Matthew Yglesias has made a similar argument responding to my showing how anti-natal apartments tend to be.

Yet few older empty nesters giving are up their suburban houses to live in apartment towers. Instead, these apartment blocks draw mostly young people. My leafy DC suburb has many four- and five-bedroom houses occupied by only an older couple or even just a single widow. These houses would be perfect for a young family, but their older residents are mostly staying put.

It is possible that a few single-family homes may be freed up on the margins when you build high-rises, but mostly vast numbers of young people are enticed to live in apartments that are fundamentally anti-natal in character.

On a ten-day Japan trip with my family in September 2023 I saw a remarkable phenomenon where the building of apartment towers is leading to the loss of millions of single-family homes. Even though Japan is rapidly depopulating due to low birthrates, Tokyo is growing in population as it builds many high-rises and pulls young people in from across the country. Meanwhile millions of single-family homes across Japan, which would be perfect for families, are left vacant to decay. (Tokyo has the lowest fertility rate in all of Japan and constant building of residential high-rises in Tokyo drives what I have termed the Japanese Depopulation Conveyor belt of young people into the city!)

Building high-rise towers increases the share of people living in apartments, driving down fertility

If you plot the share of people living in apartments in a place against fertility, you find a robust negative relationship. The larger the share of people in a city that live in an apartment, the lower fertility will be. If you alter the mix of housing in the direction of more apartments, fertility will drop. This negative relationship is among the strongest evidence that apartments themselves are relatively anti-natal.

This relationship also holds on a national level. The greater the share of a country’s households that live in apartments, the lower its fertility rate will be. Spain, where around 70% of households live in apartments, has far lower fertility (1.13) than Australia (between 1.5 and 1.6), where only 15% live in apartments.

Since housing will be around generations to come, altering a country’s housing mix in the direction of apartments will have a particularly disastrous effect on birth rates in the long term. That seems like a very bad idea when demographic collapse is the risk we face.

Building housing is important, but that should mean quality single-family homes, not apartments in towers

House affordability matters a great deal for birth rates, as my own work shows. State-by-state, fertility is much higher when housing is more affordable in relation to local incomes. The economists are not wrong about this.

But housing type matters greatly for fertility, and most economists skip that part. Bryan Caplan’s 2024 graphic novel Build Baby Build is filled with pictures that look just like the above image of Shanghai. I know Caplan - he and his wife did not raise their family in environs like that. They raised their family in a single-family home in the tree-lined DC suburbs, as did other economists now advocating that we throw out limitations on height. Most of them have little appreciation for what that means.

(I met Caplan and discussed this topic one-on-one with him for more than an hour in a Zoom -- though he has refused so far to debate me publicly. He was friendly but said he would be convinced only if I could come up with the perfect analysis that matches every other variable – especially price per square foot for houses and apartments in the same place, good luck to me! I think the evidence that apartments in towers are anti-natal is already overwhelming.)

We can’t ignore the lessons of places like South Korea. After the Korean war, Korea saw a housing shortage and so began building big apartment buildings. Korea never stopped building them, and now around three in four Koreans lives in an apartment in a high rise - perhaps the highest rate of any country. This has contributed to the lowest fertility of any nation in the world, just 0.72. Korea will have a very difficult time raising birth rates, since all that anti-natal housing will be with them for generations to come. If trends continue, the demise of South Korea is in sight, and the wrong type of housing will be a big part of that story.

Everyone else should avoid making the same mistakes as East Asia has, by building in a way that helps and not hurts birth rates.