[anal_reactor]

I have a theory that the housing crisis is caused by the dating crisis. Statisticians estimate that in the Netherlands we're missing 400 000 houses, while we have 1,2 million people aged 30 to 60 living alone. If two-thirds of those people married each other, the entire housing crisis would be solved overnight. And it's worth pointing out that people used to marry each other at much higher rate than they do now, so it's not an unrealistic solution.

And it's not smartphones that broke our mating rituals, because the change was already happening long before. I'd argue that economic development exposed the dirty truth that people just don't like each other and given the choice between marriage or watching TV undisturbed, they'll choose the latter.

Something that doesn't intuitively click for me is, if the lack of housing is the issue, then why do we have historically low average number of people living in a single house.

[littlexsparkee]

Do you have a source against the smartphone claim? There was a recent NBER paper in favor of this hypothesis

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48444543

The GFC housing bust happened at the same time but note that the drop in fertility was most severe for teens so the phone effect predates the shortfall in units built

[anal_reactor]

The smartphone claim is based on "people have started to prefer living alone long before smartphones became a thing", but TBH that's the weakest claim in my comment.

[soco]

> the drop in fertility was most severe for teens

You mean, there are less teen parents nowadays? That would count as improvement in my books...

[littlexsparkee]

Yes. It is in mine too, I just mentioned the effect on teens since they would be oblivious to housing prices as a motivator for the fertility drop, which was OP's thesis.