It's Not a Values Crisis, It's a Housing Crisis.

J.D. Vance and the rising pro-natalist right have an explanation for collapsing American birth rates: a values crisis. People are too selfish, too secular, too career-focused, too disconnected from the meaning of family. The solution, they argue, is cultural — restore the right values and the babies follow.

The data tells a different story. And it’s an uncomfortable one for them, because the answer is not a mass “come to Jesus”–it’s policy.

In 1981, the median first-time American homebuyer was 29 years old. The total fertility rate was 1.81. By 2024, the first-time homebuyer was 38 — and TFR had fallen to 1.62.

The age at which Americans can afford a first home has marched right past the age at which a woman can biologically start a family without intervention. Female fertility declines steeply after 35. The line crossed in roughly 2022 and fertility rate fell in lockstep.

We have causal evidence that this is not coincidence. A natural experiment in Brazil that randomly assigned housing access through public lotteries found that adults aged 20–25 who won homes had children at a 32% higher rate than those who didn’t. When you hand young adults a house, they have kids. When you don’t, they don’t.

This is the part of the discourse that J.D Vance will refuse to publicly acknowledge: housing unaffordability is not distributed evenly across the population. It is concentrated with brutal precision on the cohort in their 20s and early 30s — the same cohort whose biological window for forming families is closing.

The median U.S. household headed by someone aged 65–74 now holds eleven times the net worth of the median household under 35 — $410,000 versus $39,000. Older Americans who already own homes have seen their net worth balloon. Younger Americans hoping to form households face a price level set by the asset accumulation of the generation above them.

In California, Proposition 13 is the engine of this concentration. Two identical homes can sit side by side on the same San Mateo street. One purchased in 1978 might pay $3,000 a year in property taxes. Next to it is another purchased in 2024 paying roughly $20,000/year. Same size/quality of house, same services, same street — the difference is who got there first. Multiply that across millions of parcels and you have the structural reason that long-tenured homeowners get richer while new entrants get priced out. You also have a homeowner political class with direct, multi-decade financial incentive to vote against new supply.

The pro-natalist framing avoids this entirely. It has to. Once you concede that the proximate cause of low fertility is housing affordability for fertility-age adults, you are no longer fighting a culture war — you are arguing for housing supply, for property tax reform, for the political defeat of a homeowner coalition that has spent 50 years pulling up the ladder behind itself.

That is a much harder fight than complaining about Hollywood, and it has a different set of villains.

Prop 13 didn’t just suppress supply. It picked a generation to win and a generation to lose, and the losing generation isn’t having kids.