Abstract
Stacy Torres on an overlooked variable in birth rates: housing shortages.
Like many native New Yorkers, I never learned to drive. This helps explain why I’m endlessly entertained by my little sister driving me around whenever I visit her in West Hollywood.
As we zip across Sunset, Hollywood, and Santa Monica boulevards, zigzag through Laurel Canyon, and pop over to the Valley, she points out the places she’s lived and worked since arriving in Los Angeles six years ago, fresh off a Greyhound bus with $500 and only the foggiest idea of how she’d eke out a living.
She began in a hostel on Crenshaw Boulevard, moved into a share at Franklin and Bronson, and finally landed one block from the Sunset strip. She took driving lessons from a patient man named Edgars. Now, as she navigates the city, she reels off the landmarks that dot her work landscape, enlivened by her sketches of bosses, co-workers, and friends. As the youngest of four, she excels in her role as entertainer and is an astute observer of foibles, including her own. Among her stories, the crazy people she’s worked for (my words, not hers) are my favorite, with their tantrums, whims, excessive spending, and permissive parenting. She has cleaned rich people’s houses, laundered a pop singer’s gowns, staged mansions for rental, tour-managed an Australian DJ, nannied, and now out-earns me as a full-time personal assistant to the owners of a small restaurant and furniture store empire. I never tire hearing of how she keeps everyone happy, provides wise counsel, and cleans up messes.
Without a long-term plan to address California’s shortage of affordable housing, it’s unlikely the state’s decreasing fertility can rebound. There’s serious potential for a much-grayer state in the near future.
I’m proud of the life she’s built. I worried when she dropped out of high school, then college, and as she cobbled together fifteen years’ worth of precarious jobs. And now, with a summer wedding and baby fever, I worry for her future. Can she “have it all” in Cali?
According to the California Department of Finance, the state’s 2016 birth rate was its lowest ever, 12.4 births per 1,000 Californians. The department’s demographers cited the Great Recession, fewer teen pregnancies, and increasing time to complete education as likely suspects for decreased fertility, and one, Walter Schwarm, said reassuringly, “This is just kind of a mere pause.” The not-to-worry report went on to predict an uptick in birth rates when people my sister’s age, born in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, start having children.
The state failed to identify high housing costs as a potential culprit in the birth drought, but its citizens—like those in other expensive areas like San Francisco and New York City—know it’s a factor. A Bay area acquaintance told me that a friend was fond of saying, “The price of housing is great birth control.” Indeed, tooling around town with my sister, whirring past the dangling arms of cranes hovering above luxury construction, and crashing on the couch in her cozy rent-controlled apartment, the hurdle presented by a shortage of affordable housing is plain.
My sister and her fiancé lucked out with their one-bedroom apartment, which has room for a crib in the corner of the bedroom, and its $1,450 rent (which has only risen $50 over four years). New tenants pay at least $1,800; more often, it’s over $2,000. Without a long-term plan to address California’s shortage of affordable housing, I do not believe decreasing fertility can rebound. As in Japan and parts of Europe, there’s serious potential for a much-grayer state.
Still, if anyone can make it work, it’s my sister. She’s always had more expensive taste than me, the frugal, over-cautious eldest sister, and now she’s gunning for the ultimate luxury item: starting a family in the Golden State.