It’s nice to see an actually study confirming what I have been saying for years now.

The only surprise for me is that this is happening in places like Germany which have higher salaries rather than only places like my native Portugal which for Europe has shit salaries.

I have a Finance Industry background and lived in Britain for a decade before I came back to my home country, and Britain was about 5 - 10 years ahead in their realestate bubble, so it was painfully obvious to me when I arrive in Portugal that high house prices (in a country with shit salaries in European terms) was causing the country to have one of the most aged populations in the World:

• Houses are too expensive so young people in their early career can’t afford them, hence continue living with their parents much longer (the average age to leave one’s parents’ home in Portugal is 34!!!) thus delaying starting a family.
• Even after they start a family, to actually have a child, then need a bigger place to have a bedroom for the child, and for a second child they often need to get an even bigger place (if it’s a boy and a girl they need 3 bedrooms, or somebody is going to be sleeping in the living room) were again high realestate prices are an impediment.
• Then there’s the problem that housing costs are so out of line with salaries that even the middle class needs TWO working adults to pay for the rent or mortgage of a one bedroom in any large city (which is usually were the best paying jobs are). Childbirth means one person being out of the workplace for at best 6 months, which isn’t too bad in Europe for people with good jobs as they get paid time off (though it affects people’s career progression), except that work legislation has in the last 3 decades been “liberalized” so that most young people don’t have an actual job - they have totally insecure gigs or at best 3 or 6 months contracts - so childbirth means losing one income from work for 6 months, leaving only ONE adult earning to pay for rent or mortgage to which now add the costs of having a child.
• Then on top of this come the costs of raising a child.
• Meawhile there are the risks for would be mothers and their would be babies as they get closer to their menopause as it becomes more risky for women to have children, something which certainly at least the more well educated couples consider.

So because of high housing costs relative to incomes and insecure employment (for certain early in one’s career, for some for a lot longer), people massivelly delay just starting a family until they can earn enough to actually be able to afford their own home, then delay the having their first child until they can actually afford the time off work for one member of a couple or having climbed enough the career path that they have an actual secure job were they get paid time off AND until they can afford the costs of raising a child AND can afford to move to a house with a room for the child (or at least have a prospect of being able to do so in a few years before the child reachers their teenage years).

So all this so that in their mid to late 30s they can have just 1 child.

Then for the second child it’s yet more “climb the career until you can afford to raise more children” AND “earn enough to upsize your home to have one more room” and at this point people start worring about the risks for the mother and the baby of “having a child in your 40s”, plus people are getting a bit fed up with the decades of nothing but fighting (extra nasty in Portugal which has a “working long hours” culture) just to be able to get another kid

So most people give up on having a 2nd child - the overwhelming majority of couples I know here only have 1 child.

Remember, 2 children per person is still below the 2.4 average need to merely maintain population size.

(Oh, and on the “funny” side, all this shit then leads to government choosing to import immigrants “because working-age population is falling” which then leads to other problems due to the higher rate of cultural misunderstanding and collisions when people with different cultures arrive in large numbers without enough time to integrate, all of which boosts the anti-immigration Far-Right)

The solution, IMHO is two fold:

• Build lots and lots of public housing which is sold or rented at cost. This was actually what happened in the 80s and it worked. Its what works in places like Singapore (which is a fucking Authocracy and yet doesn’t have this problem of Western “Democracies”). This attacks the problem of low supply and excessive margins on the Supply side of the Supply-Demand inballance in realestate.
• Forbid ownership of realestate in Portugal for non-resident people or companies and locally registered companies where the controlling interest is directly or indirectly in the hands of non-residents. This is absolutelly compatible with EU regulations (and, I believe, Denmark already does it) since it does not discriminate on nationality, only residency (which means that Portuguese nationals who are non-residents get the same treatment). Also realestate tax should increase exponentially with the number of residential properties somebody owns. This attacks the problem on the Demand side of the Supply-Demand inballance in realestate.