Ayanna Gay was in her 30s and had been married for three years before she and her husband, Nakhaz, began seriously thinking about having a baby. A slew of considerations kept them on the fence, including not just the astronomical cost of childcare and fears about bringing a kid into a world in political and economic turmoil, but also a prohibitive mortgage.
Finally, they decided to take the leap. Gay is due to have her first child in mid-August. “We got to a point where we were like, we can afford this more than we could have afforded it before,” Gay tells me. “But it was never, like ‘Oh, yeah, we’re going to be smooth sailing.'”
The Gays are far from alone. While there are myriad reasons the birth rate in America has been falling since 2008, surveys have found the rising cost of having a kid is at the top of the list. Childcare often costs more than a typical mortgage, nearly three-quarters of private sector workers still don’t get paid parental leave, and the inflated price of everything from eggs to minivans is putting extra pressure on family budgets.
Rising housing costs are a major part of those concerns. A record number of Americans are struggling to afford their rent or mortgage. Restrictive building and land-use regulations and developer norms have made starter homes and family-sized apartments scarce. Birth rates have fallen the most in parts of the country where housing costs have risen fastest. And families now make up the fastest-growing group of Americans falling into homelessness.
The homeownership boom starting in the 1930s helped create the baby boom.
This isn’t a new problem. There has long been a close relationship between housing costs and birth rates in America. While parts of the US with the cheapest housing tend to have higher birthrates (a 2018 Zillow report found that fertility has risen in some places with the least cost inflation), areas with stricter land-use laws that prevent denser, cheaper housing from being built are closely correlated with lower fertility rates. A 10% increase in home prices led to a 1% decrease in births among non-homeowners in the 1990s and early 2000s, the economists Lisa Dettling and Melissa Schettini Kearney found in a 2012 paper published in the National Bureau of Economic Research. In a 2025 paper, Dettling and Kearney also found that the advent of the modern, low-down-payment mortgage in the 1930s made homeownership far more accessible to younger people and was responsible for more than three million additional births — meaning the homeownership boom helped create the baby boom.
These days, rents are unaffordable for half of US tenants, and homeownership is out of reach for a growing share of 20- and 30-somethings. The typical first-time homebuyer in 2024 was 38 years old, a record high. Sixty percent of Gen Z worry they might never own a home, one recent survey found. And that lack of affordable, stable housing — as the prospective parents, new parents, and housing experts I talked to for this story repeatedly told me — is deepening the financial concerns many younger people have about having kids.
While Gay and her husband bought their home in Orlando, Florida, in 2022, their housing costs are straining their budget, especially with the added expenses of a kid. And with both working from home, she thinks they'll need a bigger house if they ever want to have a second kid. Without cheaper housing options, they won't grow their family.
"If there's a world where only one is sustainable, then we will only have one," she says.
The country's declining birth rate isn't all bad news. Fewer teens are becoming parents. American women are getting more education, making more money, and delaying or not having kids of their own accord.
But it's also a symptom of darker trends. American women aren't having as many kids as they say they want. Young people are having less sex and fewer of them, especially those with lower incomes, are getting married or living with romantic partners. As men struggle economically, fewer women are as interested in marrying or having kids with them. A third of US adults over 50 say they're childless because they never found the right partner.
The conversations Americans are having about starting a family or having another kid are "very layered," Paige Connell, a mother of four and parenting influencer, tells me. She hears from mothers who feel burned out working and caring for their kids, and worry that having another would overwhelm them or hurt their careers. She also hears from childless people who don't know how they could afford childcare or a bigger home. Affordability is the biggest concern she hears from parents and people considering having kids.
Housing costs are the single biggest factor preventing Americans from having as many kids as they want, according to a recent report published by the Institute for Family Studies, a conservative think tank. In IFS's recent survey of more than 8,000 Americans 18 to 54 years old, a quarter of respondents listed housing costs as a concern, while 30% cited the cost of childcare, and 26% said they wanted more leisure time. But of those factors, housing costs had the largest total effect on family size.
"Housing is the biggest affordability hurdle facing families," Lyman Stone, a co-author of the report and the director of IFS's Pronatalism Initiative, tells me. "It's the thing that everybody thinks about first, as soon as they're thinking about fertility."
It really is the case that if you give people more bedrooms in their apartments, they're more interested in having children.Lyman Stone
In Connell's case, being able to afford her three-bedroom home has allowed her to have the number of kids she wanted, she says. She's among the lucky millennial homeowners who landed a 3% mortgage interest rate on her suburban Boston house back in 2020. If housing costs had been as high then as they are now, she doesn't think she and her husband would have had a fourth.
"There's a growing conversation about not having children unless you, quote unquote, have enough space for them," she says. "Like, if you can't afford to give them their own bedroom, then you should have shouldn't have that child."
Stone's research has found that the problem isn't just the cost of housing, it's the scarcity of the types of homes most appealing to families: those with two or more bedrooms in communities that are safe, walkable, and have decent schools. People who have kids or want families tend to prefer single-family homes over apartments. Above all, they just want room to grow. "It really is the case that if you give people more bedrooms in their apartments, they're more interested in having children," Stone tells me.
The fundamental driver of soaring rent and mortgage prices is a steep housing shortage. Family-sized housing is particularly scarce.
When rents rise, single adults can live with housemates to split costs, says Emily Hamilton, a housing researcher at the libertarian-leaning Mercatus Center at George Mason University. People with kids aren't likely to do the same, meaning they can't as easily defray rising housing costs. A group of roommates "can generally pay more for housing than one or two working parents with kids could," Hamilton says.
Developers also aren't incentivized to build affordable family-sized housing, especially in expensive cities. They tend to build two more profitable types of homes: detached single-family houses with lots of lawn and square footage on the outskirts of cities, and large apartment buildings with cramped one-bedroom and studio units in the urban core. Neither make for affordable homes for families.
That's in large part because land-use regulations, building codes, and financing models have made it very difficult or impossible to build anything in between, Michael Eliason, a Seattle-based architect and founder of Larch Lab, tells me. Affordable housing designed for families is increasingly relegated to far-flung exurbs and rural areas. "We've hit the limits of sprawl," Eliason says. At the same time, we "aren't good at building urban, multi-family housing that is of a quality similar to living in a detached house or a townhouse."
Bobby Fijan, a real estate developer who's been pushing for more family-centric dense housing, tells me there's a lot developers could do under the current constraints to make their buildings more family-friendly. That could include designing two-bedroom apartments for a couple and a child, rather than two roommates, by featuring just one bathroom and reallocating square footage to an additional bedroom. Or apartment buildings could include a children's playroom in their common space instead of a dog washing station.
President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance talk openly about their concerns with the falling birth rate. Vance has famously blamed society's ills on "childless cat ladies," while Trump has promised to usher in a baby boom. Their pro-natalist policies are focused on expanding federal cash benefits for parents, including Trump's proposal for a $5,000 baby bonus. But they've also talked about opening up federal land for housing construction. Some Democrats have gotten behind the idea as well.
Brad Wilcox, cofounder of IFS, previously told BI that the group has had conversations with the Trump administration's Domestic Policy Council about pronatalist policies. He pointed to the administration's efforts to sell federal land for housing construction as a promising path forward.
As part of their "big beautiful bill," Republican lawmakers expanded the child tax credit from $2,000 per kid to $2,200. The proposal excludes the neediest families who don't make enough money to be eligible for the full benefit. The reconciliation package also includes a baby bonus in the form of investment accounts with $1,000 of seed funds for every American baby born from 2025 through 2028.
While some researchers, including Stone, have found that an expanded child tax credit would increase birth rates, it wouldn't be enough for many Americans.
Catherine, a 43-year-old physician in the San Francisco Bay Area, and her husband, a neuroscientist, make about $500,000 a year combined. But the couple and their two young daughters live in one of the most expensive housing markets in the country and bought their three-bedroom house in Carmel for nearly $1.7 million in 2023.
While their 1,700-square-foot home has enough space for a third baby, Catherine worries that expanding their family would deplete their financial safety net and make their fixed costs — mostly their mortgage — unaffordable. If either she or her husband takes a step back at work to help take care of a third baby, they'd likely struggle with their sky-high mortgage payments. She asked that her last name be excluded from the story because she fears her employer would discriminate against her if they knew she was considering having a third kid.
"For us, it's not so much maternity and paternity leave guarantees that would lead us to have a third child, it's really about reducing that fixed cost long term," Catherine says. "We're doing OK now, but if we add this third element and something else happens, how are we going to pay our bills?"
Moving doesn't make sense for them. A cheaper three-bedroom home is nearly impossible to come by in their school district. And Catherine's job, which requires her to be in the office five days a week, means they can't decamp to a cheaper state. If she or her husband were to lose their jobs or want to find other work, the opportunities in their niche fields are much more abundant in the Bay Area than they are elsewhere.
Not to mention, they love living in Carmel. There are robotics and surfing camps, a plethora of museums, and access to the outdoors — all great for raising kids.
"We're paying for the neighborhood, for the school options, for the safety, for our jobs," Catherine says. "The Bay Area is just really, really, really expensive."
Eliza Relman is a policy correspondent focused on housing, transportation, and infrastructure on Insider's economy team.