The movement desperately trying to get people to have more babies

Originally published in Vox on July 30, 2024
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Abortion was always slated to be a top issue in the 2024 presidential election. But virtually no one predicted that politicians would be openly blasting those ambivalent about having children.

“We are effectively run in this country … by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they wanna make the rest of the country miserable, too,” J.D. Vance, the Republican vice presidential nominee, said in a now-famous statement in 2021. “It’s just a basic fact. You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez), the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children.”

That wasn’t all on the subject from Vance. He also argued in 2021 that parents should get additional votes on their children’s behalf. People without kids “should face the consequences and the reality,” he said.

Other conservative voices have joined in. Speaking in Vance’s defense last week, Blake Masters, the former Arizona Senate candidate, said bluntly that people without children shouldn’t lead in politics: “If you aren’t running or can’t run a household of your own, how can you relate to a constituency of families, or govern wisely with respect to future generations?” he asked.

Elon Musk, the billionaire Tesla CEO, weighed in to call Harris an “extinctionist” because she noted some young people cite climate anxiety as a reason not to have kids. “The natural extension of her philosophy would be a de facto holocaust for all of humanity!” Musk concluded.

One starting place to understand where all this is coming from is pronatalism: a broad ideological movement driven by concern that the world is not producing enough children and that society should work to change that.

Not all pronatalists are politically conservative, and not all conservatives are particularly pronatalist. People with different backgrounds and ideologies are concerned about what a shrinking population will mean for future generations, though the movement does include anti-abortion advocates like Vance and Masters who have been more vocal. Still other card-carrying pronatalists staunchly oppose coercing women into having children they don’t want.

Those worried about declining birth rates paint a scary picture of the future. As the number of babies dwindles, the number of workers will shrink, too. There will be fewer people paying taxes to support welfare systems, which will still be supporting large elderly populations. The result, they warn, will be economic stagnation and political strife: higher unemployment, more acute labor shortages, diminished investment, fewer innovations, and greater poverty.

There is some reason to be wary of these grim predictions. Past population panics have fueled some of the world’s most horrific chapters. Back when leaders thought the world was producing too many humans, governments around the globe pushed mass sterilization campaigns, forced abortions, and gruesome eugenic regimes.

Others see the increased focus on birth rates as a way to scapegoat individuals — primarily women — for societal issues that politicians could otherwise address, such as improving care for the elderly or taxing the rich more aggressively.

That there’s a “proximate economic problem … doesn’t necessarily mean increasing birth rates is the solution,” said Nancy Folbre, an economist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

The concerns about fertility aren’t taking place in a political vacuum, in the US or anywhere else.

Around the world, far-right leaders have campaigned on platforms to roll back abortion rights, restrict immigration, and boost the number of native-born children. In China, government officials recently scrapped gender equality as a priority and advised women “to establish a correct outlook on marriage and love, childbirth, and family.” In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has promoted a policy of “procreation not immigration.”

Even talking about population decline as an issue can feel risky. Though not all pronatalists are against reproductive rights, a louder conversation that frames falling birth rates as a major problem inevitably boosts the issue’s salience, creating space for potentially more reactionary ideas.

Still, those who want to voluntarily increase the number of children say we must have a real conversation, no matter how uneasy it makes us. Some are hopeful about emerging technologies — like artificial wombs and lab-grown eggs — to one day bring more humans to life. Others warn that sexist, racist, and ethnonationalist forces will fill the void if liberal leaders fail to solve the problem themselves.

“If we wait, the less inclusive, less compassionate, less calm elements within our society and many societies worldwide may someday call depopulation a crisis and exploit it to suit their agendas — of inequality, nationalism, exclusion or control,” warned Dean Spears, the director of the Population Wellbeing Initiative at UT Austin. “Paying attention now would create an opportunity to lay out a path that would preserve freedom, share burdens, advance gender equity, value care work and avoid the disasters that happen when governments try to impose their will on reproduction.”

Spears may be right, but it’s a gamble. Nobody really knows whether you can sustainably boost birth rates without coercing women into having kids or restricting the opportunities they might otherwise pursue. Efforts to substantially reverse declining fertility in other countries have so far failed, and right now, at least in the US, most adults without children say they just don’t want them.

Why people are talking about birth rates more now

All over the world, fewer children are being born, including in some of the most populous nations like China, India, the US, Brazil, and Mexico. Earlier this month, the UN announced it is likely the number of people on earth will peak in the next 75 years — a big change from even a decade ago, when demographers thought that moment was still well over a century away.

Concern about declining birth rates is not new, but until recently, it didn’t seem to have much domestic relevance for the United States.

By the turn of the 21st century, many countries were already grappling with plummeting fertility. In 2004, journalist Phil Longman published The Empty Cradle, outlining the political and economic risks of depopulation; he traveled all over the world encouraging leaders to take it more seriously.

At the time, there was a major exception: the United States. Even as the US provided virtually no support for working parents, American birth rates stayed elevated. Experts attributed this primarily to higher birth rates among Latino immigrants, higher teen births, and potentially America’s religious culture.

“At that time it was possible to look at all these numbers and say the United States is immune to this,” Longman told me. “Our birth rates were still barely above replacement level, so people could be like, ‘Oh well that’s the European disease, that’s the South Korean culture, American exceptionalism will save us.”

Holding the US as an exception, the overarching consensus became that countries that were more successful at boosting birth rates were those that provided more support for women to balance their domestic life with jobs and other pursuits. Sweden’s egalitarian welfare policies were designed by intellectuals in the 1930s who specifically wanted to boost Swedish birth rates, and by the end of the century, Nordic countries with more expansive welfare systems seemed to be doing better on the birthrate front than more socially conservative countries like Italy and Japan.

“Feminism is the new natalism,” a Tory member of Parliament in the United Kingdom said in a 2003 report on the threat of low fertility in Europe. Over the last 10 years, though, even the Nordic countries have seen hastening drops in fertility. Declining birth rates finally hit the US starting in 2007 and have continued to fall ever since.

Why? There are several leading explanations advanced by different people:

  • Women are postponing marriage and childbearing later into their reproductive years and using more effective birth control methods more consistently.
  • People are having less sex overall, with some arguing that smartphones and the internet have dominated attention that previously went toward dating and love.
  • Some say people have recognized that smaller families are easier to manage if women want to balance child-rearing with careers and other personal pursuits.
  • Others argue the mental health crisis has brought more despair about the future and a corresponding unwillingness to bring unconsenting children into an overheating world.
  • Others look to broader “doomer” narratives about parenting and lament the overly negative messages some media outlets send about raising kids.
  • Still others say birth rates are falling primarily because of high costs and point to surveys suggesting people would have more kids if they felt it was easier to afford.

The decline in birth rates since 2007 has been driven primarily by women in their 20s. Maybe people will have the same number of kids ultimately, but just later in life? Experts say that no longer seems very likely.

This may be because the decline is less about fewer large families with four or five kids and more about significantly fewer families having even one or two children compared to a generation ago. “The decline in the rate from zero kids to one kid is mostly driven by singleness,” said Lyman Stone, a demographer who identifies as a pronatalist.

Can policy really make people more willing to give birth?

The burning question in the pronatalism conversation is whether governments can do anything to restore a country to “replacement rate” (an average of 2.1 births per woman) without restricting women’s rights.

Some social conservatives have blamed falling birth rates in Western countries primarily on women’s career aspirations and the overall decline in marriage. But Spears, of UT Austin, says that can hardly explain why we’re seeing similar drops in nations like India, where marriage rates remain high and where most women don’t work in the formal labor market.

Can governments do anything to reverse this? Last year, my colleague Anna North reviewed examples of countries that were trying to reverse fertility declines. Germany increased investments in child care. Russia began offering lump-sum payments of about $7,000 to families with more than two kids. Hungary started offering newlyweds loans of $30,000, which Orbán said would be forgiven if the couple had three children. None of these interventions have been enough to fully reverse the population decline, and Spears tells me there isn’t anything he’s seen “with strong evidence of an effect.”

But some experts and advocates believe that it’s possible — if the incentives are large enough.

“A lot of the pronatalist policies have been worse than half-hearted,” Folbre, the economist, told me, pointing to examples like $4,000 in subsidies from governments in Italy and Singapore, which really amounts to just a couple months of child care aid.

“What’s actually being spent [by governments] is a very small percentage of the cost of raising children, and leaders should take as many steps as possible to socialize those costs and reduce costs of parents,” she said.

Stone, the demographer, is optimistic about the potential of policy to voluntarily boost birth rates, and he recently established a think tank — the Pronatalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies — dedicated to researching these questions.

He pointed to some recent empirical reviews on the topic, like this one from 2021 that assessed family policies in Europe, the United States, Canada, and Australia since the 1970s, and found social reforms can increase fertility. Another review from 2022 looked specifically at maternity leave policies and concluded they “do in fact increase fertility when benefit increases are generous.”

Stone is motivated by surveys that suggest women are having fewer children than they really want, but he recognizes that most women don’t want very large families, either.

Boosting fertility, in Stone’s view, may ultimately come down to more muscular spending while reducing other costs, such as housing and student loans. While incentives with sticker prices upward of $200,000 per baby may seem initially eye-popping, Stone argues that it looks more reasonable when compared to annual Medicaid spending and other health interventions.

The darker corners of the pronatalism movement

Not everyone concerned about falling birth rates is interested in gender equity or voluntary solutions.

Last December, a relatively fringe group gathered in Austin for the first-ever Natal Conference to discuss boosting babies, with some guest speakers decrying the liberal cultural forces they see as responsible for the world’s decline.

Peachy Keenan, a pseudonym for one conservative speaker, argued her fellow pronatalists need to make motherhood and large families a more hotly desired status symbol, but to avoid “market[ing] natalism” to progressive feminists.

Other speakers included right-wing blogger Charles Haywood, who lamented that “the actual meaning of masculinity has been destroyed by vampire feminists,” and Malcolm and Simone Collins, who were subjects of a viral Guardian profile earlier this year that revealed they smack their children.

This corner of “pronatalism” is composed mostly of tech enthusiasts and hyper-rationalist types, religious fundamentalists and some far-right activists worried about immigration and demographic change.

One of the most prominent members of this coalition is billionaire Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who claimed the falling fertility rate is “the biggest danger civilization faces, by far.” Musk recently led the push to get Vance nominated as Donald Trump’s vice president.

Some mainstream conservatives like Washington Examiner columnist Tim Carney argue that focusing on more extreme voices within the pronatalist movement amounts to “nut-picking”: As he correctly notes, it’s not just far-right conservatives who worry about falling birth rates.

But extreme pronatalists also increasingly hold positions of power. Pronatalist intellectuals with influence in the Trump world have endorsed policies like limiting contraception and banning no-fault divorce. Trump has said he wants to see “a new baby boom.”

Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson has blamed Roe v. Wade for killing potential American workers, resulting in strained welfare systems today. “If we had all those able-bodied workers in the economy, we wouldn’t be going upside down and toppling over like this,” he said during a 2022 congressional hearing.

The presence of such perspectives in the movement is not something most women can afford to ignore.

“The Handmaid’s Tale is a very real risk,” Folbre said, referring to Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel in which a government weaponizes women’s fertility. “A lot of the energy behind Donald Trump is related to a panic about the consequences of women having more reproductive choice.”

Stone, the demographer, is against abortion, and I asked him how people concerned about rollbacks of reproductive rights should feel about him directing this new pronatalism think tank. He agreed he “would like to see all the babies born” but said “the key thing to understand” is that evidence showing abortion restrictions lead to higher birth rates is minimal, since in societies with good contraceptive access, people mostly just switch to that.

The data isn’t great, but Stone estimates that one prevented abortion “likely gets you .05 to .15 extra 18-year-olds 18 years later.”

Another study co-authored by Spears at UT Austin similarly found “no evidence of a significant association between abortion legality and birth rates” and that abortion bans can even lower total birth rates overall. (It’s worth noting too since Roe v. Wade was overturned, US abortion incidence has increased.)

Still, efforts to restrict abortion are getting more aggressive, and there’s no certainty that abortion incidence will stay elevated as leaders seek new ways to cut off access. Plus, it’s a less comforting fact about contraception when there are anti-abortion activists in the US working now to conflate abortion with birth control.

Stone argues that liberals will ultimately have to consider compromise with anti-abortion groups on policies where there’s common ground — like child care and affordable housing — even if they support the measures for different reasons.

“At the end of the day, every single political vote involves holding your nose to some extent,” he said. “And if your view is that you can’t support reducing child poverty by 40 percent through a child allowance because pro-life people are also supporting it, then maybe you hate kids.”

Reproductive desires, reproductive justice

One of the top arguments pronatalists make to support their case is that research surveys tend to suggest women have not had as many children as they hoped.

As the United Nations wrote in its 2023 State of the World Population report, current evidence suggests that across Europe and the US, as well as throughout East Asia, women nearing or at the end of their reproductive years say they would have had more children than they actually did. “These data do ultimately point to an appreciable gap between desired and realized fertility across the globe,” the UN concluded.

Leslie Root, a demographer at the University of Colorado Boulder, focused her graduate studies on these types of “child-bearing intention” surveys but eventually stopped because she grew concerned with how the data was being interpreted.

She explained that some surveys lacked nuance, failed to consider how desires can change over time, and didn’t account for the context in which a survey is administered, including the presence of family members or partners.

“It’s not always clear what the surveys are asking, especially these retrospective surveys of women over 45,” Root told me. “They ask looking back at your life if you could have had more kids would you have done so but there is obviously a social stigma to saying you wish you had fewer.” (Stone, who also spent his graduate studies focused on the surveys, argues they still provide credible data.)

Root ultimately doesn’t think birth rates are that low, but even if they were, she thinks leaders should treat the problem as an economic one, not a demographic one.

The view that birth rates are “neutral” is shared by Emily Klancher Merchant, a historian and author of Building the Population Bomb, which traces the rise of overpopulation fears in the 20th century.

“If women say they haven’t had as many children as they want, then that’s the primary issue to focus on, not birth rates,” she told me. “And if the problem is with the economy or how to support the elderly, there are many more direct ways to deal with that than through population measures.”

Root and Merchant both say the conversation would be better focused on reproductive justice — a feminist movement focused on supporting one’s right to have children, to not have children, and to parent children in safe, healthy communities — than pronatalism.

Many policies supported by reproductive justice advocates are also supported by pronatalists, but feminists say building support for family-friendly measures like universal child care as a way to boost fertility risks gutting them later on if leaders conclude they’ve been insufficient to reverse population trends.

Spears, who believes in reproductive freedom but also thinks falling birth rates are a serious problem, compares this moment to decades ago when leaders realized they needed to address climate change.

In Spears’s view, there’s still time for leaders to reverse declines in population since we’re still years away from when the number of people on earth is set to peak. “Six decades ago there weren’t university majors in sustainability science, there wasn’t a journal called Nature Climate Change,” he told me. His point is that we have never really brought our best resources to bear to tackle these questions, and if we seriously invest in doing so, we could potentially build more economically stable societies that better align with families’ reproductive desires.

“I think that if we truly change society’s commitment to taking care of one another, and to taking care of the people who take care of one another,” he said, “then we could invent new ways to live.”

We deserve a more nuanced conversation about working moms

Originally published in Vox on July 9, 2024.

This spring, a European study came out with the provocative conclusion that having children contributes “little to nothing” to the persistent gap in earnings between men and women.

The study caught my attention because I know the threat of earning less as a parent has had a chilling effect on people in my generation considering starting families. Last year, while I was reporting on motherhood dread in the US, young women told me they feared having kids would mean they’d be penalized in the workplace, affecting their financial security and opportunities. Meanwhile, the media does little to allay that concern: “One of the worst career moves a woman can make is to have children,” the New York Times once declared.

But while these economists found that Danish women who used in vitro fertilization experienced a large earnings penalty right after the birth of their first child, over the course of their careers, this penalty faded out. Eventually, the mothers even benefitted from a child premium compared to women who were not initially successful with IVF.

In other words, the so-called “motherhood penalty” that says women pay a price in the workplace for becoming moms might be less severe than previously thought.

“As children grow older and demand less care, we see that the mother’s earnings start to recover, with much of the immediate penalties made up 10 years after the birth of the first child,” the researchers wrote.

What makes this new European research so notable is that it relies on the same high-quality data that has informed previous studies on the motherhood penalty (including one Vox covered in 2018) but used an even broader sample and an approach the authors argue is better suited for long-term conclusions.

This wasn’t the first time I’d seen research that complicates our understanding of the motherhood penalty. After the essay on motherhood dread was published, I heard from Sharon Sassler, a Cornell University sociologist who studies relationships and gender.

She had recently published a paper on gender wage gaps in the computer science field and found that mothers in computer science actually earned more than childless women (though this “wage premium” was significantly less than what fathers earned).

“It was difficult for me to find a home for the attached article because reviewers cannot fathom that mothers might out-earn single women, though there is a growing body of evidence that [they] do,” she wrote in her email to me. “It might be selection [bias] … but given that folks have found this across disciplines suggests that the motherhood penalty really needs to be reassessed.”

I was curious about Sassler’s suggestion that moms might actually earn more and that we don’t often hear that because gatekeepers “seem to like the narrative that women are always screwed by family.”

I decided to dig into the literature, reviewing studies and talking with researchers to get a better sense of what we know. Some aspects of the motherhood penalty debate remain fuzzy and unsettled, including whether moms face a long-term disadvantage in the workplace at all.

There’s also some disagreement over what the problem is, exactly: Is it that mothers earn less than childless women? Is it that they’re earning less than fathers, or men who started their careers at a similar level? What is the social problem to address?

Amid our growing national conversation around declining birth rates and reproductive freedom, a clearer sense of the research on motherhood penalties could help policymakers answer these questions. It could also foster conditions that help more women feel secure making the choice to become parents if they want.

What we know about the motherhood penalty

Putting these unresolved questions aside for a moment, the research we have paints a different picture from the one that suggests having children is inherently a career-killer.

Though it doesn’t always make it into the media discussion, scholars know that the motherhood penalty — which past research has found averages 5 to 10 percent per child for women in their 20s and 30s — can vary significantly based on occupation, the age at which women have their first child, their marital status, their cultural background, and whether they live in an urban or rural environment.

Averages can mask a lot, too. White women tend to experience higher motherhood penalties than Black and Hispanic women, but the magnitude of the penalty has gone down significantly for all women over the last 50 years, thanks to factors such as increased educational attainment and mothers returning more quickly to work after having kids. In some fields, there’s no penalty at all.

“We shouldn’t think of child penalties as something that’s immutable or a constant,” said Henrik Kleven, a Princeton economist who has studied these dynamics closely. “It’s something that has changed over time.”

Moreover, though there’s real evidence that some women experience penalties after having kids, we don’t have very strong evidence that it’s a lasting hit. Other research suggests people may time their pregnancies to when their earnings were already flattening out.

One 2014 study found that for most women who had fewer than three children, the motherhood penalty essentially disappears, both in terms of wages and job status, once they reach their 40s and 50s. As the more recent study on Danish IVF users also showed, the context around the motherhood penalty changes when we take a longer view.

Those considering children deserve to make parenting decisions with the best information possible, including factors that could minimize or even eliminate labor market disadvantages. Finishing school before having kids, for example, is linked to lower or nonexistent motherhood penalties.

Many women would prefer to have kids while they’re younger even if that means they can’t maximize their lifetime earnings. Still, the growing body of research can help make the case for policies that mitigate the negative tradeoffs of having kids and create more family-friendly cultures in the process.

Ultimately, though, should the goal be to try and eliminate all penalties that mothers face?

Kleven, the Princeton economist, thinks it’s unrealistic and undesirable to expect no wage penalty after having kids. “It’s very natural, and I think right, that someone bears a child penalty. I don’t think we necessarily want to move to a world where we outsource all child care,” he told me. Rather, the goal, he said, should be to have “similar-sized motherhood and fatherhood penalties” — for the cost of parenting not to be so gendered.

That’s reasonable, but it’s also not the only potential aim. Women worrying about the cost of motherhood instead might care more about closing labor-market gaps through better employer support, or offsetting income penalties women face in the labor market through new tax and transfer programs, like federal paid leave and child allowances.

Theories on the motherhood penalty, explained

There are a few main explanations for the motherhood penalty.

The first theory is based on the idea that women might reduce their working hours, switch to part-time jobs, or simply reduce their effort at work once they become parents. This is the “human capital” explanation. The less you work, the less you could earn.

A second theory is that mothers might earn less because they were drawn to more flexible but lower-paying jobs. In other words, moms self-select into occupations that are less lucrative but have other advantages, such as requiring fewer hours or offering remote flexibility.

A third theory is that employers discriminate against mothers, viewing them as less dedicated and reliable. This discrimination could affect whether a woman gets hired at all, what her starting salary will be, whether she’ll be promoted, or if she’s considered for any leadership role.

The study out of Denmark has added a new wrinkle. Economists found that the Danish women successful with their first attempt at IVF earned much less than their unsuccessful counterparts the first year after giving birth, but started to recover income losses by year two, and 10 years out were earning the same amount.

Twenty-five years out, the successfully treated women were earning more on average than their unsuccessful counterparts. The researchers predict their total lifetime earnings to be 2 to 3 percent higher compared to those who were not successful. While the economists don’t have firm explanations for why, they hypothesize that it could be because mothers developed certain efficiency skills while raising young kids, or perhaps that they just weren’t out of the labor force long enough to lose critical skills and relationships.

In many other motherhood wage studies, researchers compare the wages and career trajectories before and after women become moms, in what’s known as an “event-study” approach in economics.

Kleven, whose motherhood penalty research has mostly fallen into the “event-study” category, defended his past work as a strong way to show at least short-term penalties but acknowledged that it may not be as clear for measuring long-term ones.

“We have this very simple method where we are just following men and women over time and we see these very sharp patterns in the data around childbirth and our interpretation is that we’re capturing here a causal effect of children on labor market outcomes,” he told me.

Some economists have raised concerns with the Denmark study, pointing out that women with less IVF success — those who are trying to become mothers but have not — may experience their own career setbacks due to disappointment associated with infertility. This could muddy the comparison between childless women and mothers in the labor market, since these childless women were not voluntarily childless. Indeed, past research has shown that infertility can cause “a long-run deterioration of mental health and couple stability.”

Petter Lundborg, the lead author of the Denmark study, agreed infertility anxiety could theoretically skew their results, but he told me that the data suggests mental health wasn’t a major factor and neither was divorce.

“We have this previous paper where we follow these women for 10 years and look at their mental health through the use of antidepressants and we see there’s actually very little of that going on, whereas there’s actually a slight uptick among antidepressant use for people who have kids,” he said. “But these are all small levels that could not possibly explain any of the effects we see, and the same goes for divorce.” He acknowledged the evidence on all this is “mixed.”

What the Denmark study can tell us

How useful are the Danish findings, really, for people living in other countries?

Denmark is a very progressive nation, after all, offering women one year of paid parental leave, affordable child care, and IVF under national health insurance. None of that applies to the US. People who seek IVF generally also tend to be older, further along in their careers, and typically done with their educational training. They’re people less likely to experience large penalties; their pregnancies are inherently planned ones.

All of this threatens how useful the findings might be for a wider audience. The study’s co-author, Erik Plug, said they’d like to transport their research design to other countries to compare, though few have as detailed, accessible data to mine through. (This is why so many fertility studies, even those by American scholars, use Nordic information.)

Still, the Denmark research builds on other studies that indicate that the motherhood penalty is much smaller in magnitude when women are older and have already finished their schooling.

A high-quality Nordic study that looked at women whose IUDs inadvertently failed found the labor market effects of these unplanned pregnancies were much larger for younger women and for women still enrolled in school.

“We can see unplanned pregnancies at different stages of life, and some are more costly,” Yana Gallen, the study’s lead author, told me.

Younger mothers experience this firsthand.

“The concern that having a kid too early (i.e. before hitting one’s labor market potential) will affect one’s career and lifetime earnings is based in reality,” said Matt Bruenig, the founder of the left-wing People’s Policy Project think tank.

Unless something changes in the way our society values money or distributes money, he added, more women will continue to plan to have their first child later in their reproductive years. Even if that’s not always what they really want.

Policies that could help mitigate adverse workplaces for moms

The US remains the only country in the industrialized world without federally funded paid leave, and research has long indicated that policies like universal child care and moderate-length paid leave can help mitigate motherhood penalties by helping women stay connected to the labor market. (Paid leave longer than a year, by contrast, can negatively affect women’s earnings and employment, partly due to atrophying skills and missed career opportunities, and employer bias that the mother is less committed to her job.)

Another way policymakers could address the motherhood penalty is by trying to offset whatever loss in job earnings moms may incur from taking on child-rearing.

“Maternity presents unique challenges to labor market participation and therefore earnings, but focusing solely on earnings as the relevant metric of inequality misses that societies have other ways of compensating people who face labor market disruptions,” Bruenig told me.

For low-income mothers in particular, researchers find that job turnover or having to reduce their work hours accounts for a significant amount of the motherhood penalty they experience. Low-wage jobs are typically the least likely to offer remote flexibility that makes balancing parenting with work easier, and the least likely to come with benefits like paid leave. Expanding policies like the Child Tax Credit and the Earned Income Tax Credit could help.

Continuing the cultural shift toward fathers’ contributing more domestic labor could also help reduce motherhood penalties by making it easier for women to balance their work and home duties. Federal policies that encourage both men and women to take parental leave could bolster this; Iceland and Sweden both offer 13 weeks of non-transferrable parental leave for dads, for example, and about 90 percent of new fathers there do take it.

Creating conditions for involved fatherhood in a baby’s first year of life can set egalitarian parenting patterns for a lifetime, Cecilia Machado, an economist who studies the motherhood penalty, recently told the New York Times.

Just as we all could benefit from a more nuanced conversation about motherhood penalties, so too could we gain from a more careful conversation about fatherhood penalties, where differences among subgroups also exist. In 2013, Harvard sociologist Alexandra Killewald found a positive wage boost (about 4 percent) only for fathers among those dads who were married, living with their children, and the biological parent.

Beyond public policies like child care, paid leave, and child subsidies, there could be more cultural pressure on employers and schools to help people balance their work and caregiving demands. Women recognize they could face genuine financial risks if they have children too early, but that doesn’t mean society can’t do its part to change those economic tradeoffs.

Scholars still have outstanding questions when it comes to the motherhood penalty. Gallen, the economist whose experiment looked at women with IUD failure, told me researchers have much to learn about children’s life outcomes, including life satisfaction overall. “How did the children born into all these different circumstances fare? Are they happy?” she asked. “Or do they seem like they grew up in these strained environments where everybody’s having all these difficult choices? I think that we truly don’t know the answer.”

Lundborg, the Danish study author, says he’s interested to see how their results hold up in different countries. “We do think that the evidence on long-run child penalties has been very weak, and there’s now some new evidence that challenges this notion that kids are responsible for long-run gender gaps in earnings,” he said. “If the results hold, then I think we need to find alternative explanations.”

These findings could ultimately be positive for women hoping to balance careers, financial stability, and parenthood.

“This narrative that kids are to blame for the earning gaps between males and females has been extremely strong in economics,” added Lundborg. “So yeah, let’s see what the future holds.”

Innovation in child care is coming from a surprising source: Police departments

Originally published in Vox on July 5, 2024.
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Earlier this year, a brand-new child care center opened up in San Diego, serving about 25 families.

The center charges parents 50 percent less than market rate, and child care workers are paid 15 percent above the going local average. Its hours of operation are flexible. It stays open from 5:30 am to 7 pm every day, longer than most child care centers, and can accommodate emergencies like unexpected work shifts. There’s only one catch: To send your child, you have to work for the San Diego Police Department.

San Diego’s law enforcement child care center, funded through both public and private money, is the first of its kind in the country, but plans for several others across the US are already underway. A bipartisan bill in Congress would expand the model further.

Supporters call law enforcement child care a win-win-win — a way to help diversify policing by making it more accessible to women, a recruiting tool at a time when police resignations and retirements are up, and applications are down. And, frankly, they hope that an innovative model for child care will give a PR boost to a profession that has taken severe blows to its reputation over the last decade.

But it also raises a basic question: Why just police? What about subsidizing other professions, including other first responders like firefighters and nurses?

“My response is those other professions haven’t been demonized like law enforcement has,” said Jim Mackay, a retired police detective and the founder of the National Law Enforcement Foundation, which has advocated for these child care centers and worked with police departments to build them. “My philosophy is if you have a healthy law enforcement then everything else kind of prospers out from that, and we have to treat the problems with law enforcement first.”

There’s no data yet on if this employer-centric model will pay off, but advocates argue that the child care investment is a smart bet. The estimated annual operating cost for each center is $2 million, while the average cost to recruit and train a single police officer is $200,000. In other words, if this helps keep even just ten officers in the ranks, it will have been worth it.

Tanya Meisenholder, the director of gender equity at the Policing Project at NYU School of Law, says child care is one of the job barriers she hears about most often from female cops and those considering entering the profession. Women make up only 12 percent of sworn officers and 3 percent of police leadership in the US, though there’s a national campaign underway to increase those numbers.

“Child care is the one thing that’s been brought up over and over not only as a barrier to entry but a barrier to promotion,” Meisenholder said. “Police child care would show the agencies value their employees and are listening to their concerns. It has the potential to be somewhat transformative.”

The idea is spreading quickly

Angelie Hoxie, a state police detective in Idaho, heard about the San Diego child care idea and wanted to see if she could build a similar model for Treasure Valley, which covers the greater Boise region.

Idaho police agencies have struggled with recruitment and retention, and many families are on year-long child care waitlists. The Idaho Association for the Education of Young Children said over 90 percent of child care facilities cite staffing as their top challenge.

In early 2022 Hoxie helped launch the Treasure Valley Law Enforcement Coalition and within a year they were lobbying state and federal officials and partnering with a local university and local philanthropy.

By winter 2023, Republican Gov. Brad Little was recommending funding for Idaho police child care programs in his workforce development budget, and by March, a bill to support the effort passed out of both chambers of the Idaho legislature. Republican Rep. Mike Simpson then successfully earmarked $2.65 million from the federal budget to help finance the new child care center. Construction is set to launch this summer with the program to be operational for police families by 2025.

St. Louis County in Missouri is another region set to open a law enforcement child care center next year, following the same model as San Diego: longer hours of service, subsidized rates for parents, and higher wages for workers. Their goal now is to care for up to 75 kids at a time, and by operating for 18 hours a day, upwards of 150 families could be served.

The push was prompted by a rank-and-file woman officer during the pandemic who struggled to find care for her 1-year-old while balancing her new 12-hour shifts. Twelve-hour shifts have since become the norm for the department, even after Covid-19.

“We’re absolutely hoping it helps with both recruitment and retention,” said Tracy Panus, a spokesperson for St. Louis County police.

Democratic Rep. Scott Peters, whose congressional district includes San Diego, introduced a police child care bill last year to authorize $24 million annually in funding under the federal Child Care Development Grant program. The bill would also allow Health and Human Services to provide grants of up to $3 million for new police child care centers. In December the Congressional Problem Solvers Caucus endorsed the legislation.

“There’s no question that [child care] is a priority—it has come up in every single focus group we’ve done,” said Kym Craven, the executive director of the National Association of Women Law Enforcement Executives.

Taking some cues from the US military

That police might take on leadership in child care is less surprising when one looks to the Department of Defense, which sponsors the nation’s only federally run universal child care program.

The military child care program, which serves roughly 200,000 children, is known for being affordable and high-quality, and its 23,000 child care workers are paid higher wages than their private sector counterparts. Members of Congress and former military leaders have been in discussions over the last few years about how to expand and improve upon this child care program to boost army recruitment even further.

Still, expanding public subsidies for police child care is not popular with everyone, including those who want less public money subsidizing police departments, and those who want to see public dollars prioritizing child care for low-income families.

Others have raised concerns with the idea of employer-sponsored child care more broadly. In one report published this past winter, Elliot Haspel, author of Crawling Behind: America’s Childcare Crisis and How to Fix It, argued that employer-sponsored child care “does nothing to address the fundamental challenges within the child care system, nor does it promote a pluralistic system of choice.”

He compared the model to painkillers for cancer. “They can ease the pain for a while, but the body gets sicker, and the temptation to overly rely on painkillers only grows,” he wrote.

Still, advocates for police child care say the public safety needs are too urgent, and the possible benefits to communities and agencies too great to pass up. They hope in five years they will have firmer data showing their investments have worked.

“In this new generation not too many people want to become law enforcement officers,” said Mackay. “We’re really trying to stem that tide.”

This work was supported by a grant from the Bainum Family Foundation. Vox Media had full discretion over the content of this reporting.

What a big new Supreme Court decision could mean for homeless Americans

Originally published in Vox on June 28, 2024.
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The Supreme Court has issued its long-awaited ruling in Grants Pass v. Johnson, the most significant legal challenge to the rights of homeless people in decades.

In a 6-3 decision written by Justice Neil Gorsuch, the Supreme Court ruled that cities enforcing anti-camping bans, even if homeless people have no other place to go, does not violate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. Gorsuch was joined by the rest of the court’s conservatives, including Chief Justice John Roberts.

“The Constitution’s Eighth Amendment serves many important functions, but it does not authorize federal judges to wrest those rights and responsibilities from the American people and in their place dictate this Nation’s homelessness policy,” the opinion read.

Friday’s ruling has huge implications for cities and people experiencing homelessness nationwide. It strikes a fatal blow to two Ninth Circuit decisions — the Grants Pass v. Johnson case and its 2018 predecessor Martin v. Boise — that have shaped cities’ responses to homeless encampments.

Leaders from dozens of cities and states — both liberal and conservative — have been hoping the US Supreme Court would overturn the Martin and Grants Pass decisions, which they claimed were incorrectly decided and left governments hamstrung and incapable of safely managing their communities.

Many groups representing the rights of unhoused people, in turn, argued there was no reason for the US Supreme Court to reconsider the rulings, and warned that doing so will make it both easier to criminalize people experiencing homelessness and much harder to land them permanent housing later on.

The Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge to Martin in 2019, but pressure mounted on the high court as the nation’s homelessness crisis grew worse, especially in the Western states under the Ninth Circuit’s jurisdiction.

Over 650,000 people in America experience homelessness on any given night, and roughly 40 percent of those individuals are sleeping outside on the streets, in cars, parks, train stations, and other places not designed primarily for people. Federal data published in late 2023 showed a rise in homelessness in most states.

Homelessness advocates immediately denounced the ruling, warning that it will make things worse and further marginalize vulnerable Americans.

The Grants Pass decision undoubtedly marks a significant setback to the constitutional rights of homeless people, and local governments will feel more confident passing punitive policies with the Supreme Court’s blessing.

But it will not end the political battles over tent encampments. It only concerns what cities can do, and not what they should do.

Conservatives want clearing homeless tent encampments to be non-discretionary

Those who want cities to be more aggressive in clearing homeless tent encampments are celebrating.

Theane Evangelis, the lead counsel for the city of Grants Pass, Oregon, praised the Court for “restor[ing] the ability of cities on the frontlines of this crisis to develop lasting solutions that meet the needs of the most vulnerable members of their communities, while also keeping our public spaces safe and clean.” She said she hopes that years from now this moment is recognized as “the turning point in America’s homelessness crisis.”

But even though overturning Martin and Grants Pass would make it easier for cities to clear out tent encampments, local governments still hold considerable discretion over whether they should do so.

And especially in liberal cities, where leaders may be more inclined to leave people experiencing homelessness alone (or come under more pressure from advocates to do so), some conservatives have long felt additional legislative and legal action would be needed to actually force cities to act.

“Many cities have used Martin as an excuse, you know, they throw up their hands and say, ‘Our hands are tied,’” said Ilan Wurman, a law professor at the University of Minnesota who hoped the Supreme Court would overturn the decisions. “We don’t think that was a fair reading, that you can’t enforce your camping bans, and reversing Grants Pass would take that argument away [from cities]. But it still doesn’t require them to do anything at that point.”

Instead, Wurman and others have been promoting public nuisance lawsuits as a way to force cities to disband tent encampments. These types of lawsuits can be based on things like loud noise or air pollution, but also things like unsanitary conditions or other health hazards. Importantly, private citizens have the right of action to bring public nuisance claims.

The first successful example of this strategy was in 2022 against the city of Phoenix, Arizona, when Wurman and colleagues sued for a declaration that a downtown homeless encampment on city property constituted a public nuisance. More than 1,000 people had moved to this encampment — known as “the Zone” — and the plaintiffs pointed to the crime, defecation, drug use, theft, and other safety hazards there that threatened public health. Arizona state law defines “[a]ny place, condition or building that is controlled or operated by any governmental agency and that is not maintained in a sanitary condition” as a “public nuisance … dangerous to the public health.”

A judge ruled in favor of the plaintiffs last year, declaring “the Zone” a public nuisance, and ordered Phoenix to address the situation. The encampment is now cleared, but the city is appealing the decision.

Wurman has had less success in his two other lawsuits pursuing the public nuisance strategy.

Last September, two Tucson homeowners and one Tucson business owner sued the city for failing to clear an encampment, citing things like trash, fire set by residents that burned uncontrollably, and car and residential theft.

Like in Phoenix, the plaintiffs asked the courts to declare the campsite a public nuisance and order Tucson to clear it out. The city in turn argued the plaintiffs lacked standing and that they could not be liable for “fundamental government policy,” which includes how and whether to spend its public resources.

In other words, they hope to push legislation to counteract what the Supreme Court just ruled and ensure that homeless people can’t be punished for sleeping outside on public property if there are no adequate alternatives available.

They also criticized the decision: “This decision sets a dangerous precedent that will cause undue harm to people experiencing homelessness and give free rein to local officials who prefer pointless and expensive arrests and imprisonment, rather than real solutions,” said Ann Oliva, CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness. “This ruling allows leaders to shift the burden to law enforcement. This tactic has consistently failed to reduce homelessness in the past, and it will assuredly fail to reduce homelessness in the future.”

Ultimately, liberal homelessness activists hope to use the Grants Pass attention to focus the national conversation on policy solutions they say will actually solve homelessness, including universal rental assistance, repairs to public housing, and funds for eviction prevention. Advocates plan to call for $365 billion in the next year to fund these initiatives.

Following the ruling advocates sent out an email blast inviting people to email their elected officials for more funding for housing and to join the “Housing Not Handcuffs” advocacy campaign.

“We knew from Day 1 that the Supreme Court case wouldn’t end homelessness,” said Jesse Rabinowitz, the communications director for the National Homelessness Law Center. “Now, we must use this moment in time to ensure that Congress and the White House do their job by funding the housing needed to ensure that nobody experiences homelessness in the richest country in the world.”

Yes in God’s backyard? This housing solution may be the answer to your prayers.

Originally published in Vox on June 18, 2024.
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About five years ago Harvey Vaughn, the senior pastor at Bethel AME, the oldest Black church in San Diego, heard a radio report about rising homelessness in his city. He wondered if his congregation, which owned a roughly 7,000-square-foot lot around the corner, could help. 

Today, the lot is a construction site for a new housing complex that will offer 25 one-bedroom apartments for low-income seniors and veterans. It’s the first of what advocates hope will be many such projects in San Diego, led by a group called YIGBY, which stands for Yes in God’s Backyard, a spin on the pro-housing Yes in My Backyard movement. 

In a country with a shortage of affordable homes and a surplus of religious institutions grappling with rising costs and declining memberships, developers are looking to partner with churches, temples, and synagogues to build new housing. And amid a thicket of local land-use regulations that complicate the construction, some elected officials are looking for ways to nudge these efforts along.

The YIGBY idea — working with faith-based groups to help address the housing crisis — originated from local advocates who knew homeless people eager to move from the streets into housing but unable to find any. The San Diego Association of Governments estimates San Diego County has a shortage of roughly 100,000 homes.

Local funders dedicated to solving homelessness helped bring the YIGBY concept to life, and new zoning laws approved in 2019 helped streamline the process further, removing requirements that developers first seek approval from local planning agencies or elected boards to build.

“Here in San Diego, yes, we do have concerned neighbors and anti-development people who are concerned about the ‘character’ of communities and all that stuff, but the city has really made a lot of development [easier] in the last five years,” Evan Gerber, the housing project manager for YIGBY, told Vox. 

Now this model is poised to spread across California, helping to address the state’s severe housing shortage.

Last year California’s legislature passed the Affordable Housing on Faith Lands Act that, like in San Diego, streamlines approval for new projects on land owned by churches, so housing can no longer be blocked by zoning or environmental objections. This first-of-its-kind YIGBY law took effect in January. 

The Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley estimates that, across California, there are roughly 38,800 acres of land owned by faith-based organizations that could potentially be developed into affordable housing.

State Sen. Scott Wiener, a Democrat from San Francisco who spearheaded the statewide YIGBY law, said California doesn’t yet have data on how the new law is being utilized, but he often hears from interested people who say their congregation is preparing to do it. 

“Even if just 10 percent of the plots of land identified by Terner did it, that could lead to a massive increase in housing,” Wiener told Vox. “Overall it’s very, very popular and you can really build a huge diverse political coalition around it.”

The enthusiasm for the YIGBY idea Wiener identifies is real. The model seems not only to offer communities a way to tackle their housing and homelessness crises, but also a way for faith-based institutions to practically embody their religious teachings while managing declining memberships and rising costs. 

In 2020 just 47 percent of Americans reported belonging to a house of worship, down from 50 percent in 2018 and 70 percent in 1999. Americans are becoming less religious overall, and even among those who still identify with a faith, many permanently switched during the pandemic to remote and online services. Meanwhile overhead for managing grounds and buildings on religious property has increased, with higher costs today for repairs, insurance and utilities. To boot: Donations are down. One survey found 65 percent of US churches have seen a decline in contributions since Covid-19.

Experts predict up to one-third of all these emptying houses of worship in the United States will close in the next few years, or upwards of 100,000 churches, synagogues, and mosques. In hot real estate markets, some religious institutions may sell their properties for millions of dollars in cash, but in many other locales, finding buyers isn’t so easy. A flood of large, vacant buildings could add real blight to communities, especially in smaller towns where the structures long served as central civic anchors. In Gary, Indiana, for example, there are 67,000 residents and 250 empty churches.

While San Diego coined (and trademarked) the YIGBY term, the idea has been spreading across the country, sparking interest from local, state, and federal governments.

In March, Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown introduced the Yes in God’s Backyard Act in Congress to help support these projects nationwide. The legislation would provide religious institutions and local governments with technical assistance, and would create new grants to remove barriers to housing development.

“This bill is a commonsense solution — families need more housing they can afford, and churches, synagogues, and other religious organizations want to put their faith into action by developing housing on land they already own,” Sen. Brown told Vox. “By helping these institutions cut through red tape, we can lower the cost of housing and expand options for families in Ohio and around the country.”

A ripe moment for a good idea 

Providing shelter or building housing on church property is not a brand new idea, but it’s picked up steam over the last half-decade due to a confluence of trends.

“There’s a long tradition in the United States of Roman Catholic churches and other Christian churches trying to provide for those without housing, but where you see something different in this moment is there’s a larger societal conversation in the US about housing access and the lack of housing writ large,” said Rev. Patrick Reidy, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame and co-director of the school’s Church Properties Initiative.

Carolyn Brown, a DC land use attorney, told the real estate publication Bisnow that declining church membership has really accelerated interest from faith-based leaders in housing. “It becomes more of a breaking point,” she said. 

Today more cities and states are looking to support these YIGBY housing projects. In 2019, Washington state passed a law incentivizing affordable housing development on property owned or controlled by religious groups, and local governments in Atlanta and San Antonio have started offering technical assistance to religious institutions interested in developing housing on their land. In Detroit, the city’s housing commission recently funded new affordable units on church property, and lawmakers in states like Hawaii and New York say they hope to follow in California’s footsteps with a YIGBY law. 

Some religious institutions want to build housing as a new way to welcome strangers and care for poor people in their midst, while others are thinking more about their overall institutional legacy, especially as their membership continues to shrink. 

“Obviously some faith communities continue to serve their communities and are looking at housing as a way to bolster their social justice missions, but in other cases the faith community itself may no longer be there in the way that it was 20, 30, 50 years ago and leaders want to use their legacy of presence, charity, and ministry to translate the land into a new use,” said Rev. Reidy. “I think this is where the federal government could make a difference, with HUD or a presidential commission creating resources and intel to provide faith leaders.”

Zoning creeds

Despite the enthusiasm for the idea, YIGBY still faces hurdles in realizing its full potential.

Restrictive zoning codes are barriers in most communities to unleashing the full spectrum of housing development on faith-based property. Sometimes projects can be delayed for years due to court challenges or community opposition, and earlier this year in a small town in northwestern Ohio, a pastor faced criminal charges for offering homeless people shelter in a facility that wasn’t zoned to allow people to sleep on the first floor. The projects can also be architecturally difficult, especially compared to converting old retail stores.

“Land use and building codes regulating parking, utilities, sewer, stormwater, fire safety, signage, accessibility, curb cuts, and the like, can make even a well-zoned property nearly impossible to reuse or redevelop,” said Rick Reinhard, a housing consultant.  

Some advocates of YIGBY-like development have floated more unconventional legal strategies to get around burdensome regulations.

Rev. Reidy, of the University of Notre Dame, has argued there is likely more room to push back against restrictive zoning codes through religious liberty lawsuits. “We have this federal religious land use statute, and I think it’s actually pretty clear that it offers protections to churches trying to do something like this,” he told Vox. There hasn’t been a test case of this legal theory yet, though Reidy notes many people would prefer to go the state-level preemption route instead. 

In a May report published by the right-leaning Mercatus Center, researchers found more examples of towns with convoluted zoning restrictions that could impede YIGBY development, and they noted that some local zoning risks incentivizing faith-based housing in areas that are ill-suited for healthy residential living. They recommended exempting YIGBY construction near industrial zones, military bases and airports.

Co-author of the Mercatus Center report Salim Furth doesn’t expect YIGBY development to ultimately represent a massive part of how the country will solve its housing supply crisis.

“There’s not that much land that’s developable, religious institutions are already tax-exempt, and frankly I’d like churches to stay churches,” he told Vox. “I don’t want cities to only look at the decline of religious institutions as a way to solve their affordable housing problem.”

Plus, Furth added, faith-based housing could come with certain preferences for its own members, or certain requirements that do not sit well with everyone seeking housing — an issue that has come up with some faith-based homeless shelters that require things like mandatory church attendance.

Still, for those who do pursue the option, advocates are excited about the potential to revitalize congregations and local communities, improve housing access for those who need it, and even improve relations between people of faith and secular Americans.

“I’ll say this as a Catholic priest who went to Yale Law School, there are people who are suspicious of organized religion, and it’s been really moving to hear people say, ‘I don’t know how anyone couldn’t get behind this idea,’” Rev. Reidy said. “You’ve got local governments looking for land they can’t provide themselves. You’ve got many faith communities willing to share it for affordable housing. It’s a win-win-win.” 

The federal government’s new plan to (maybe) give renters straight cash

Originally published in Vox on June 13, 2024.
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DETROIT — The federal government is laying the groundwork for a potentially major change to the nation’s largest rental assistance program, aiming to test an idea that would allow low-income tenants to pay rent directly with cash, rather than use traditional housing vouchers.

On Wednesday afternoon in Detroit, at a national guaranteed income conference, HUD Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy Development Brian McCabe announced that his agency is soon planning to solicit public comment on the prospect of testing whether distributing cash directly to tenants might work better for renters, landlords, governments and even taxpayers. 

Officials are keenly aware of some of the stark challenges faced by participants of the 50-year-old federal voucher program. To get a voucher, a household first must prove eligibility. Then a public housing agency must issue the voucher subsidy to a landlord on the household’s behalf. The landlord must then accept that voucher, the unit must pass an inspection, and the landlord must sign a contract with the public housing agency.

These are a lot of steps, and many landlords simply refuse to rent to voucher holders, citing frustrations with the often slow and complicated process. Landlords complain of bureaucratic headaches like delayed lease signings that lead to income loss and arbitrary-seeming unit inspections. 

Some renters, in turn, struggle to find anywhere to use their voucher, should they be one of the lucky few to even receive one. One federal study found that only about 60 percent of beneficiaries can find a landlord willing to rent to them.

HUD will specifically seek input on questions like whether landlords would be more willing to rent to low-income people if they could skip the government’s red tape, and whether there would be higher-quality housing available to renters using cash. More than two million families currently use the federal subsidy.

At the conference, McCabe also shared that HUD plans to soon issue guidance to housing agencies on how they could run these sorts of cash pilot programs. McCabe was referring specifically to agencies in Moving to Work, a federal program that allows certain public housing authorities to spend their dollars more flexibly than is permitted under the traditional voucher program. Moving to Work was established in 1996 and expanded by Congress in 2016.

McCabe’s announcement reflects a change in HUD’s position on cash assistance. Last year, HUD lawyers said housing agencies, including those in Moving to Work, lacked the legal authority to test cash aid in lieu of vouchers.

The shift came in part from advocacy by housing leaders over the last year, who’ve emphasized that they believe Moving to Work agencies do have congressional permission to pilot innovations like cash rental assistance. Vox reviewed one such letter sent on May 7 by four national housing groups, and another sent by public housing agency leaders, like Preston Prince, the executive director of the Santa Clara Housing Authority.

Providing cash assistance “could be really disruptive — in a good way,” Prince told Vox. “Cash could help us serve more families.” Santa Clara has some 37,000 people on its voucher waitlist, and leaders estimate that they’re currently serving just one in six eligible residents. 

Prince acknowledges that a study testing cash rental assistance could evoke more criticism of the housing voucher program or even of housing authorities more broadly. 

“I am petrified about doing this pilot project, that it might prove something I’ve been working on for 30 years is not effective,” he told me. “It could challenge the overall system. That’s the unnerving part. But it takes a little bit of courage to say in the end it’s not about me.” 

Advocates for testing cash rental assistance stress that they’re just looking to improve the housing voucher program, not replace it wholesale. If cash proved effective and even helped save governments money, officials might be able to focus on providing more support services, producing new housing, and conducting research. Housing authorities spend 13.8 hours annually on average administering individual vouchers, with tasks like certifying a renter’s income and assets to ensure they are as destitute as they say.

That voucher fraud detection work exists to protect public funds, but can also be stigmatizing and degrading. “There’s been pressure to look at our families as broken and untrustworthy, and direct rental assistance could really say to people, ‘You are trustworthy and valuable and we are here to help you be successful,’” said Prince.

The federal government has taken steps in recent years to cut down on paperwork required to access housing aid. During the pandemic individuals seeking help under the $46.5 billion Emergency Rental Assistance Program could simply affirm, under penalty of perjury, details such as their income or address, rather than submitting official records. 

More recently, HUD announced that housing agencies could allow people to self-certify their income for homeless program eligibility, a move that could expedite voucher access. In announcing the shift, HUD acknowledged that many people experiencing homelessness might not have Social Security cards or pay stubs to prove their income status.

While some renters might prefer vouchers, others may find cash easier and faster to use, especially in certain markets. “I suspect that renters being able to present themselves to landlords as paying like any other potential tenant could feel quite empowering,” Stefanie DeLuca, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins, told me in 2021. 
Several sources Vox spoke with confirmed there could be multiple cash rental assistance studies launched as early as this year.

Though housing leaders are pitching the research as a modest policy inquiry, officials involved are keenly aware of the potentially dramatic implications of this research, should the studies show that cash indeed works better. A small pilot could lead to a larger federally funded demonstration study, which could, officials say, then lead to asking Congress to make permanent changes to the big bipartisan program.

How the idea of cash rental assistance advanced

The road to McCabe’s announcements in Detroit traces its origins back to the 1970s, in a now largely forgotten nationwide study of cash rental assistance. Known as the Experimental Housing Allowance Program, 50,000 families across 12 US cities received cash subsidies for rent. Program evaluators found the subsidies were well-received and successfully administered, but policymakers shifted their attention to the new federal housing voucher program, then known as Section 8.

In 2017, Todd Richardson, a longtime HUD staffer whose team inadvertently discovered old reports of this federal experiment, proposed that those findings could inform the existing Moving to Work voucher program.

Enthusiasm mounted further following successful Covid-19 cash aid experiments ranging from rental assistance and stimulus checks to child tax credits and dozens of guaranteed income pilots. In 2022 Philadelphia also launched its own cash rental assistance pilot, studying 300 households selected to receive money on a prepaid debit card every month.

By September 2023, as Vox then reported, HUD officials began formally pitching philanthropies and basic income advocates on partnering to study this cash rental assistance idea. Part of their hope was that private charitable dollars might have fewer legal constraints than federal voucher funds, which HUD attorneys then still felt would be ineligible to use for the research. 

Since then HUD has been meeting regularly with nonprofits, funders, and housing experts to figure out how to get this cash aid idea off the ground. The federal housing agency has been hosting monthly virtual meetings and in November convened an in-person event in Washington, DC.

James Riccio, with the national policy research group MDRC, has participated in those monthly calls led by HUD analyst Paul Joice, and he told Vox his nonprofit should know “within the next month” if they can move forward with officially designing a cash rental assistance study. If they get the go-ahead, Riccio thinks their design work could be completed by late summer or early fall.

“We’ve taken up the gauntlet that HUD has thrown down and are trying to build a demonstration that would inform HUD’s efforts,” he said. 

MDRC’s goal is to conduct a two-year randomized control trial across five geographically diverse cities, studying 1,000 families. Half of those would pay for their housing with traditional vouchers, and the other half would use cash.

“We really don’t know how it’s going to turn out, if landlords would be more inclined to rent to people,” Riccio said. “It seems there’s very good reason to think it could be true, but it’s something we could learn.”

Basic income advocates see a major opportunity

The pilot program is especially exciting for advocates of guaranteed income, who believe that the government should provide individuals with unconditional cash payments to reduce poverty, promote economic stability, and ensure basic standards of living. 

During the early years of the pandemic, federal emergency aid fueled some tests of this guaranteed income idea. But that money has largely run out, and the tens of billions in annually appropriated federal voucher dollars presents advocates with a much more potentially reliable funding stream.

For now, leaders in the movement emphasize that they see cash rental assistance as a complement, rather than a replacement, to other forms of housing aid.

“We don’t want to be providing impetus to strip HUD of funding for the voucher program, which along with other rental assistance lifts 900,000 people out of poverty every year,” said Nika Soon-Shiong, the executive director of the Fund for Guaranteed Income, which is currently fundraising for a cash rental assistance pilot. “It’s not about more or less government, it’s about what kinds of interactions officials are investing in. What if every call to verify a low-income renter’s income was instead, ‘Hey, I heard you needed a ride. I can drive you.’”

The Fund for Guaranteed Income, which has administered a dozen basic income pilots across the US, is hoping to launch a rental assistance study later this year. It would be less statistically precise than the one MDRC is pursuing, but Soon-Shiong says they’d be focused more on practical design questions and specifically helping individuals move into apartments more easily. Their smaller pilot would aim to study 100 people for one year who receive direct cash, compared with 100 people who receive a voucher off the waitlist. 

“What we’re trying to pilot is the mechanisms to build that cash on-ramp, and what it looks like specifically to redesign the housing inspection form, and to make sure the contract they sign can be converted into a housing assistance payment contract,” Soon-Shiong told Vox. “Our particular intervention is focused on how we can solve one of the key problems of the program which is that people aren’t able to utilize their voucher.” 

At the Detroit conference on Wednesday, McCabe gave a shout-out to the Fund for Guaranteed Income’s work and stressed that he sees many different variations of research as helpful to building an evidence base.

“I want to emphasize there are millions of different ways that this type of program could be developed, and they would test different things and address different issues in the voucher program,” he said. “But in the end, we’re thinking about what it would mean to give families cash to pay their rent.”

A new strategy to house homeless people

Originally published in Vox on May 29, 2024.
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Sometime in the next month, the Supreme Court could grant permission for cities to more easily criminalize people experiencing homelessness. 

Some are eagerly awaiting that permission. In April, Donald Trump released a video declaring that if he were president, he’d ban outdoor camping in most places, erect sanctioned campsites for “treatment,” and send people to jail who refused to go.

Yet even among Americans opposed to a punitive approach, it’s become common to sigh regretfully, lament that affordable housing is in short supply, and point out that unhoused people often turn down shelter — so what can cities really do? If the US Supreme Court rules in favor of the homeless plaintiffs in Grants Pass v. Johnson, local governments might just invest more money into building emergency shelters, so they can prove there were adequate shelter options available before anyone resorted to fines or arrests. 

But emergency shelters don’t end homelessness, they just get people indoors for brief periods. And there are better options available. 

This message is being shouted to anyone who will listen by Mandy Chapman Semple, the architect of Houston’s nationally recognized homelessness strategy, which reduced the city’s homelessness rate by 60 percent between 2012 and 2016.  

Semple was Houston’s first special assistant to the mayor for homeless initiatives, and she’s credited with helping to design the city’s “street-to-home” encampment response, which prioritizes getting people quickly into housing, permanently closing tent encampments, and working closely with landlords so they feel comfortable renting to tenants with more serious problems. 

“I am truly concerned that we are unintentionally giving up on reducing homelessness,” Marc Eichenbaum, the current special assistant to Houston’s mayor for homeless initiatives, told Vox. “Many acknowledge that housing is the long-term solution to homelessness, only to psych themselves out from being able to respond because of a lack of affordable housing. That is when cities chase expensive, short-term options to manage the situation or resort strictly to enforcement.”

Semple has since taken her work beyond Houston, and through her company — Clutch Consulting — she’s working with cities including New Orleans, Oklahoma City, Dallas, and Hartford, Connecticut. She brings an unapologetic approach to her consulting, rejecting both the idea that homeless people belong in jail, or should be allowed to camp wherever they feel most comfortable. She insists there is a better path forward if leaders and service providers approach their work in a new way. 

Her model works like this: Public subsidies can be used to pay rent for people experiencing homelessness, but private donations, which are not subject to the same federal rules and restrictions, can help finance things that make moving unhoused people into apartments more feasible — like apartment hold fees, application fees, security deposits, and furniture. Oh, you have a unit in your building opening up in a few weeks? We’ll pay you an extra $1,000 if you offer it to us, first. Her team spends time scouting and building relationships with landlords, then tries to house everyone living in an encampment at once.

“Every market has movement, even tight markets, even expensive markets,” Semple said. “You can get into that by using flexible private dollars to incentivize landlords. We’re creating a business relationship that provides us an advantage.”

Once people have moved into housing from a tent encampment, Semple ensures that landlords have a team they can call to help with any problems that may arise. The formerly homeless individuals have case managers to help them access social services, and the landlords, too, have their own liaisons they can call. The city permanently closes down the encampment, puts up signs and sometimes fencing, and uses law enforcement to bar anyone else from returning to the area. 

“I think we really hurt ourselves as advocates when we say that at the core homelessness is an affordability problem,” said Semple. “It is, but we do not have to wait for that affordability to be solved to move people into housing.” 

Semple’s “street-to-home” encampment response has helped dispel the idea that everyone sleeping outside just doesn’t want to be inside. Clutch and its clients say that over 90 percent of people offered the option to move into an apartment say yes, even if they’ve repeatedly rejected invitations before to sleep in congregate emergency shelters.

The approach is not without criticism or challenges. Not all homeless providers are inclined to abandon their focus on getting people into shelters, and some social workers say Clutch’s methods have been abrasive and too dismissive of client concerns. 

Some advocates argue that Clutch’s encampment approach has led to more inequitable distribution of resources by focusing help on those living in areas causing leaders the most political headaches, rather than necessarily the most vulnerable in a city. Others worry the solution is not really scalable, especially as rents continue to spike. 

Angela Owczarek, a New Orleans social worker who previously worked at an organization providing street outreach services in encampments being closed by Clutch, said she felt the company used inappropriate tactics to rush people into apartments.

“We cannot participate in things that coerce people; the ends do not justify the means,” Owczarek told Vox. “Not only is that bad ethically, but it also makes it harder to do our job in the future, because then people will be like, ‘Oh yeah, you guys were part of that effort that threw out my tent and told me I had two days to agree to an apartment I didn’t want to live in or who made me feel rushed or not listened to, even if I ended up living somewhere I liked.’ How we treat people matters every moment.” 

Semple acknowledged that some outreach workers “have struggled in some cases with this shift in expectations and it takes time to help them understand why and how they need to adjust their practices.” 

But she rejected the idea that living outside in encampments is acceptable for human beings, even if they may not feel ready to move indoors. 

“Staying on the streets can be their choice, but they will need to move if they choose [that],” she said. “Living in this location under these conditions cannot continue.”

System leaders have shown more enthusiasm than frontline workers for the Clutch approach. Jamie Caves, who is implementing the Clutch strategy in Oklahoma City, said it has been “fantastic” so far, and they’ve housed 126 people since launching in September. 

“It’s new and we’re building the plane while we’re flying it so there’s certainly things we’re learning and streamlining, but it is really, really powerful,” she told Vox. “We’re really beginning to close multiple encampments in a month and really move aggressively toward our goal, which is to house 500 unsheltered people by the end of 2025.”

Sarah Pavone, the director of strategy at Journey Home in Hartford, Connecticut, echoed the excitement. 

“Up to this point we never thought about prioritizing the unsheltered for any specific resources, we never had a different approach to those living outside than those who were in [emergency] shelters even though they have very different needs,” she said. “We also didn’t engage our systems to overcome systemic barriers that delayed people from entering housing quickly.” 

The fine print of Clutch’s model 

As Houston was bringing down homelessness, the number of unhoused people in Dallas was climbing: a 45 percent increase between 2015 and 2021. Armed with tens of millions of dollars from Covid-19 relief funds and new private donations, local government and civic leaders in Dallas decided to team up and try the Clutch model, setting a goal to move 2,700 people into housing by October 2023. 

More than 10,000 people have been rehoused since the effort began in 2021, and Dallas recently reported its lowest total number of people experiencing homelessness in nearly a decade. The latest Point in Time Count — an annual nationwide survey to estimate the number of people experiencing homelessness on a single night in January — showed Dallas with a 19 percent reduction in homelessness overall since 2021 and a 24 percent reduction in unsheltered homelessness. Last year, only 27 percent of communities nationwide reported reductions in homelessness.

“To scale we had to get more and more creative about master leasing,” Semple said. “So we said how do we consider new business relationships that give us access to whole buildings, or a whole bunch of units, or future units at a new property?” 

Despite the rare progress, convincing the public to stay the course and stick with the street-to-housing model isn’t easy. Sarah Kahn, the president and CEO of Housing Forward, which leads the homelessness response in the Dallas region, told Vox there’s been political pressure to divert resources to more short-term solutions like tiny home shelters.

“Honestly the challenge is that it doesn’t matter what the result of the Grants Pass case is, it still [will] not give local governments or communities any tools to resolve these issues,” Kahn said. “There’s clear evidence that you can’t actually enforce your way out of homelessness. Really the only solution is resolving homelessness and we do that by moving people into housing.”

In Oklahoma City, leaders currently implementing the Clutch model are focused on how it could save them money in the long run. Armed with a $12.5 million investment to reduce unsheltered homelessness by 75 percent in two years (with at least $5 million coming from private donations) the city says it’ll be spending about $24,000 per person to house 500 people. According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, a chronically homeless person costs taxpayers $35,578 per year. 

“You can still do a traditional pathway and go to a shelter, but now we have new pathways for those unsheltered homeless, where we build rapport, get them document-ready, and it’s very streamlined and aggressive to get those things done in four to five weeks so we can move them directly into housing,” said Caves. “I think it’s a positive solution that makes economic sense and is also the dignified answer to those who are experiencing homelessness.” 

Clutch Consulting won’t work with communities that aren’t sufficiently bought into its theory of change. Last year leaders in St. Louis hired Semple to conduct a needs assessment to gauge a potential partnership and ultimately she concluded it would not be a good fit. 

St. Louis, which has cold winters and hot summers, has long been focused on emergency shelters as a harm-reduction approach, and Semple determined the city’s service providers were too invested in increasing the number of emergency shelter beds in the city.

Samantha Stangl, the executive director of House Everyone STL, has been trying to push back on her community’s reliance on congregate shelters. “What if the real problem were not an inadequate supply of shelters but rather a bottleneck of demand caused by a lack of exits from shelters?” she asked in a January op-ed. 

In an interview with Vox, Stangl went further. “What a lot of communities that have found success have done is come to the realization that shelter should actually be the absolute last resort because it is kind of a crisis environment,” she said. “I’m not interested in the status quo in St. Louis. We need more rapid rehousing and more permanent supportive housing to do things like that.” 

Owczarek, the social worker from New Orleans, says more skepticism should be brought to bear when interpreting Clutch’s reported results on offering housing to everyone in encampments. 

“The idea that everyone is offered housing needs an asterisk after ‘everyone,’” Owczarek said, noting that anyone who arrives at a camp after the city establishes its list of residents to house is not given the same housing opportunities. (Semple told me their approach is to house everyone eventually but designed in a way to discourage people from moving to encampments to get housing faster. “These are high-risk encampments deemed public health hazards,” she said. “We don’t want to encourage folks to come live at this site to get housed.”)

Owczarek also pointed out that “offering” someone housing does not mean there was always housing available for everyone by the time an encampment actually closed. Some residents had nowhere to go even after their encampment cleared. Semple said in those situations individuals are offered emergency shelter or in some cases motels.

Criminalization will make this housing work harder

Though Semple helps cities work with landlords to assuage their concerns, there are limits to how many people are willing to rent units to those with criminal records. Given that 1 in 3 US adults has a criminal record, this creates a significant barrier to the street-to-housing encampment response model.

Arresting, fining, and ticketing unhoused people — which local governments will be more easily able to do if Grants Pass is overturned — makes it harder for those people, who already struggle to afford shelter, to obtain permanent housing. 

Owing fines can exacerbate an unhoused person’s already poor financial situation and prolong their homelessness. One study of people experiencing homelessness in Seattle found those with outstanding legal debt spent roughly two more years without stable housing than those without such debt.

“Every time we’re pushing someone needlessly through the criminal justice system it affects their ability to get housed because every landlord is running a criminal background check,” said Semple. “These nuisance charges create the perception that they’re a criminal and not a good tenant and it’s just a tremendous waste of law enforcement capacity too.”

Rent control for child care?

Originally published in Vox on May 21, 2024.
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Brittany Kjenaas and her husband live with their 3-year-old daughter in northern Minnesota, where they pay more for child care than they do for their mortgage. Kjenaas, a health care supply manager, and her husband, a miner on the Iron Range, cite their day care bills as the primary reason they’ve abandoned plans to have any more children.

“We waited until we were in our 30s to start a family and … it’s not an exaggeration to say that the decision was based on the cost of child care,” she said. “She is our only child, and unless something changes in the cost of child care, she will remain our only child.”

Kjenaas is not alone in speaking out about how the prohibitive cost of child care is shaping the reproductive decisions of middle-class families like hers, families that are ineligible for low-income child care assistance programs.

In Minnesota, state Sen. Grant Hauschild has said that he and his wife considered having a third child but decided against it due to day care costs. It’s among the top three issues he hears about from constituents on a daily basis, as well as from prospective employers considering setting up businesses in his region.

It’s what makes a bill Hauschild introduced alongside Minnesota state Rep. Carlie Kotyza-Witthuhn this year so interesting.

Their legislation — known as the Great Start Affordability Scholarship Program — targets middle- and upper-middle-class families, those earning up to 150 percent of the state median income, or $174,000 for a family of four. Think Small, a local children’s advocacy group, estimated the scholarships would reduce child care costs for 86 percent of Minnesotans with kids under 5.

The benefits would be on a sliding scale but could be as high as $600 per month per child, with the state sending payments directly to Minnesota child care providers. The effort aims to ultimately cap family child care payments at 7 percent of a household’s annual income, an affordability threshold endorsed by the federal Department of Health and Human Services, and more recently by a bipartisan Minnesota state task force.

HHS landed on this benchmark about a decade ago after determining that, between 1997 and 2011, families consistently spent about 7 percent of their income on child care.

A 7 percent cap would represent a massive change for most Minnesota families, who pay some of the steepest child care costs in the country. Infant care in Minnesota stands at an average annual cost of $1,341 per month; preschool checks in at $1,021. The Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning national think tank, estimates the average Minnesota family with an infant and a preschooler pays roughly 37 percent of their household income for care.

State leaders like Hauschild have been getting fed up with federal inaction. Republicans rebuffed Democrats’ $400 billion child care proposal during the 2021 Build Back Better fight, and child care funding was excluded from Congress’s Inflation Reduction Act in 2022. While bipartisan compromise on child care seems possible, leaders right now only seem to be able to find common ground on helping low-income families, not the bigger group struggling with child care costs.

The Minnesota proposal failed to advance this year, but advocates believe their time lobbying on an off-cycle budget year has positioned them well for 2025, when the legislature embarks on more serious appropriations.

Still, whether state lawmakers will be able to ever fully fund the program’s cost (an estimated $2 billion or so annually) without the federal government is unclear.

If the proposal passes, Kjenaas said it would do even more than enable her family to grow.

“If we pay a few thousand less on child care, we’d be able to take our daughter to the zoo, go see a movie, and even plan a fun road trip because we’d finally be able to do so without the stress of how much money it would cost at the end,” Kjenaas testified before a Minnesota House subcommittee in November. “We’d be able to buy healthy food at the grocery store instead of pre-packaged stuff. We’d be able to have time to make healthy meals because my husband wouldn’t have to work overtime to pay catch-up on our bills … We’d have room to breathe.”

Building a bigger political base for child care

Not everyone in Minnesota agrees with the push to expand child care subsidies for wealthier families, especially since low-income families are still struggling. But it helps, advocates say, that the state legislature succeeded a year prior in securing new child care investments specifically for poor families.

Armed with a substantial budget surplus, Minnesota lawmakers in 2023 raised early childhood education workers’ pay with a half-billion-dollar investment and invested $300 million more into early learning, including new investments in Head Start and low-income scholarships.

“For a long time, the emphasis has been on the most vulnerable kids, and we made some really big strides in that area last session,” said Ericca Maas, director of policy and advocacy for Think Small. “We came together after that and said, well, glaring at us is middle-class families.”

The debates around equity continued this year as advocates lobbied for the Great Start Affordability Scholarships program, said Clare Sanford, the government relations chair for the Minnesota Child Care Association, a provider group. Some activists protested pushing to help wealthier families before those with the least resources were fully covered.

This debate was never fully resolved, but ultimately, Sanford said, leading groups decided they’d be more successful in the long term if they could expand their coalition to include more families.

“There’s a fundamental agreement that we need to help those who have the least first, and we know we haven’t finished doing that. However, part of the strategy is we need middle-class families to see themselves as part of this,” she told Vox. “We need more political will to form a greater political base.”

Megan Pulford, a single mother of two in northeastern Minnesota, is the type of parent advocates like Sanford want to bring into their coalition. As a bank loan officer, Pulford has never qualified for state child care assistance, but covering the cost of day care for her two kids comes to nearly $2,000 a month.

“Money is just so tight, our bills are just so tight,” she told Vox. “If we didn’t have to pay as much for child care, we could actually put more into our local grocers, local businesses.”

A big part of the coalition-building strategy is helping middle- and upper-middle-class parents overcome feelings of shame that they may be struggling with costs at all. Lawmakers have long treated child care assistance as a carrot to induce poor mothers to work, rather than a general investment in the healthy development of all children.

“The myth in our country is that very young children are a private responsibility, not a public one,” said Sanford. “Everyone will pay taxes to fund public K-12 schools whether or not they have kids because that’s a commitment we’ve made as a society that an educated workforce is something we all need. We do the exact opposite for ages 0-5.”

“We feel the need to help parents really understand that this is a shared experience and that it’s okay for them to share that they’re not holding up,” Maas, of Think Small, added.

The search for simple language continues

American child care advocacy is often plagued by cumbersome math and jargon, and the effort in Minnesota this year was no different.

In contrast to Canadian politicians who’ve been campaigning for child care that costs no more than $10 a day, US progressives have long stuck with more complicated language around limiting costs to thresholds of annual household income. (The specific threshold to signal affordability used to be 10 percent, though was lowered to 7 percent about 10 years ago.) The 7 percent benchmark was recently included in Senate Democrats’ Child Care for Every Community Act and was included in the Biden administration’s new rule to reduce child care costs for families already receiving subsidies.

Rep. Kotyza-Witthuhn, the Minnesota House sponsor of the Great Start Affordability Scholarships, said they felt 7 percent was a good target because Minnesota lawmakers had already pledged commitment to the goal last year and because it already exists as a federal recommendation. But advocates acknowledge it can be very confusing, particularly since many families don’t know what 7 percent of their household income is, and for some families the goal is to still have them spend less than 7 percent.

Talking about “capping” child care costs, advocates hoped, would at least provide a clear policy message they could galvanize parents around, but then child care providers started getting nervous, interpreting the cap language as a cap on their expenses or a cap on the amount of tuition they can charge.

“People freak out when you talk about a cap,” Maas told Vox. “Providers freak out about things they charge being capped, and some parents really bristle too at the idea that they couldn’t invest more in their child if they wanted to.”

To mitigate this confusion, some advocates started describing the proposed scholarship subsidy as more like a co-pay, similar to health insurance. But health insurance is among the most confusing items Americans have to budget for.

While the fight was unsuccessful this session, Democratic leaders in Minnesota say they’re keeping it as a goal for 2025.

“It is a priority for my caucus and our leadership,” said Kotyza-Witthuhn. “Everyone knows the system is broken.”

The child care cliff that wasn’t

Originally published in Vox on May 14, 2024.
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“The writing is on the wall right now, in big, bold letters: the child care crisis is only going to get worse unless we take action — and soon!” said Democratic Sen. Patty Murray in November, following the expiration of federal Covid-19 subsidies for child care. Democrats and other child care advocates were pushing for a $16 billion bill they said was essential to save the industry.

“Our nation’s child care system is on the verge of collapse,” stressed AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler. “Over 3 million kids are in danger of losing their child care slots, over 230,000 child care workers could lose their jobs,” added Senator Bernie Sanders.

Sanders was citing numbers from The Century Foundation, a liberal think tank that warned the US was headed for a disastrous “child care cliff” due to the expiring pandemic aid. Nearly every major national news organization — including the Washington Post, CNN, Bloomberg, NBC, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times — reported on this coming cliff, and its prediction that 70,000 programs “will likely close.”

The warnings echoed another set of doomsday predictions during the pandemic when advocates stressed that without significant new investment in child care and paid family leave, women would be forced to leave the labor market en masse, leading to what some described as a coming “she-cession.”

The “she-cession” failed to materialize beyond the first initial months of Covid-19, with female labor force participation ticking steadily upwards thereafter, especially among moms. So advocates updated their messaging, emphasizing that such workforce gains could crater if major new federal investments were not made soon. The Century Foundation predicted $9 billion annually in lost family earnings, and tax and business revenue loss for states at $10.6 billion per year.

But Congress did not pass big new spending in paid leave or child care. Republicans rebuffed Democrats’ $400 billion child care proposal during the Build Back Better fight, and the $16 billion child care stabilization bill Democrats rallied around last fall.

Still, labor force participation among women ages 25-54 has continued to rise, with larger shares of moms of both preschool and school-age children working now than at any time in history. Most of the labor market gains have been driven by moms with young kids under the age of 5, with roughly 70 percent of them holding down some formal job.

Jobs in the child care sector, too, have continued to expand, with more people working in the sector as of April than in any time on record.

The lesson to take from all of this is not that people should stop advocating for policies that would improve the lives of parents, kids, and those who care for children.

We know that paid leave boosts the health of mothers and babies and that many families struggle to find accessible and affordable child care. We know that child care workers are among the lowest paid, which can result in high turnover, and we also know that some parents wish they could stay home with their children, rather than work a formal job. We know that even among families that do cobble together child care arrangements, there is more we could be doing to lower household stress.

But advocates don’t need to rely on cataclysmic economic predictions to make the case for better and more humane family policy, and continually warning of a disaster that never comes undermines their case and credibility.

The fact is that not everyone agrees on what specific policies are necessary to improve child care and conditions for parents — some people would prefer direct cash support to families over funding for daycare centers, for example — but these are the real debates that the public should be having.

A strong economy does a lot

More women — including child care workers who are disproportionately female — are working today, and for the most part, that’s for positive reasons.

The US economy is strong and growing, and workers’ wages have risen faster than prices for more than a year now. Even in child care there’s been an increase in wages, with the average wage standing at $13.31 per hour in 2021, $14.22 in 2022, and $15.42 in 2023. Average preschool teacher wages also reached $19.91 per hour last year.

“As Nobel Laureate Claudia Goldin taught us, one of the most important drivers of women’s labor force participation is higher wages, so we shouldn’t be too surprised that childcare workforce participation and prime-age female labor force participation are both trending upward,” said Josh McCabe, the director of social policy at the Niskanen Center, a centrist think tank.

Tight labor markets can cure a lot of economic ills, added Patrick Brown, a child care policy analyst at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank. “The fact that low-wage workers have seen the strongest wage growth post-pandemic means that a lot of moms have seen pay increases, switched to better jobs, or work from home at higher levels — all of which make reliable child care more achievable,” he told Vox.

The expansion of remote work since the pandemic is most certainly a factor in boosting female labor force participation, especially among college-educated moms and married women. Federal labor statistics show that 23 percent of women workers teleworked last month, compared to 19 percent of men. Nearly a quarter of teleworkers had children under 18.

“The current tight labor market leads many employers to offer benefits like paid leave or flexible work hours and location,” said Adrienne Schweer, a fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a centrist think tank. “These are the kinds of benefits that women consistently rate as important factors in their employment decisions.”

More women working also leads to more demand for child care, especially as the number of children in the US continues to grow. This all helps explain growth in child care employment, said Sydney Petersen, a spokesperson with the National Women’s Law Center, a liberal advocacy group.

Still, that more women are joining or staying in the labor market with young kids isn’t necessarily something to cheer about in all circumstances. Katharine Stevens, the president of the Center on Child and Family Policy, a conservative think tank, said some women are working likely because they couldn’t make ends meet on what they were earning before recent rises in inflation.

“Unfortunately, that probably means that women who would have preferred to stay home full- or part-time to raise their own young children have been forced to spend more time working outside the home instead,” she said. “We should be making it easier, not harder for them to do so.”

Paid leave and child care subsidies could boost labor participation more

That rising wages and a strong economy have boosted employment among women doesn’t mean supportive care policy couldn’t drive those gains further. Suzanne Kahn, vice president of the Roosevelt Institute, a liberal think tank, said they’ve been focused on how to make these labor gains “sticky” even if the nation’s economic conditions decline.

Advocates for public investment say there’s already evidence that states that increased their child care spending have seen better results. A new brief from the National Women’s Law Center analyzing Census Household Pulse Survey data found that the share of respondents with children under 12 who lacked child care increased by more than 5 percentage points since the fall in states that didn’t make major new investments in their child care sectors.

By contrast, in the 11 states that did make significant new investments, the share of women respondents with children under 12 who wanted to work but reported not being able to because they were caring for a child decreased from 45.3 percent to 31.9 percent.

Schweer, of the Bipartisan Policy Center, pointed to a poll her think tank conducted last year that found that among prime-age adults not working due to issues related to caring for children, 39 percent said they would have likely continued to work in their last job if they had paid parental leave, and 45 percent would be more likely to start or return to work if a future employer offered that benefit.

“At the moment, macro policy is pushing up employment in general but that does not mean there is not still an increment of women out there who would also be employed (or at least job seeking) if there were more child care subsidies,” said Matt Bruenig, founder of People’s Policy Project, a left-wing think tank.

McCabe of the Niskanen Center said policies like subsidies for child care and paid leave are probably important to boosting women’s labor force participation to similar levels in other countries because rising wages alone “aren’t enough to get us there.”

Child care access could be much better

Just because more women are working doesn’t mean their lives aren’t being affected by child care issues, and even remote work can be a double-edged sword for moms, as my colleague Anna North has written.

“As a mom of a small child, I have to say just because it’s now possible to work from home with a kid doesn’t mean it’s not extremely challenging,” said Kahn, of the Roosevelt Institute.

“They are making it work, but paying with the cost of their own health and well-being,” argued Julie Kashen, director for women’s economic justice at The Century Foundation. “Increasing labor force participation is only good for the individuals working more if they are also being paid enough to pay their bills and save for emergencies and the future, and if providing for their families isn’t at the expense of caring for them and spending time with them.”

Diane Swonk, the chief economist at KPMG, a US audit and tax services firm, noted that child care access issues are making it harder for women who are working to stay at work.

Absences from work due to family or personal obligations hit a record high in March, she said, and stayed elevated in April. Full-time workers who cut down on hours and worked part-time due to other family or personal obligations in April was the highest month since May 2008.

We don’t need doomerism to advocate for families, workers, and kids

Despite the ubiquity of the “child care crisis” phrase, people have different and sometimes competing ideas about what policies are needed to make balancing work and family rearing easier in America.

That conversation may get hard and messy at times, but will push us closer to the truth than making sweeping-yet-thin projections about economic and societal collapse.

“Boosting employment was never the best justification for supporting working parents in the first place,” said Chris Griswold, the policy director at American Compass, a conservative think tank. “Helping families afford to raise children isn’t good because it maximizes economic activity — it’s good because families matter and economic pressures hurt kids and parents alike.”

“There are clearly steps we could take to improve the functioning of the child care market, but the idea that we need a massive federal overhaul to fix a ‘broken’ or ‘failed’ market has been largely disproven,” argued Brown, of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. “Markets are more resilient than many on the left give them credit for. The ‘sky is falling’ crowd is, yet again, overhyping the evidence to push an agenda that doesn’t fit what parents want.”

There are smart people on the left and in the center who disagree with Brown, including US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, who argues child care in America is a “textbook example of a broken market.” These are critical questions shaping the well-being of millions, and we should continue investigating them. But the child care cliff should make everyone cautious the next time there’s a political crisis advocates don’t want to waste.

Here’s what sociologists want you to know about teen suicide

Originally published in Vox on May 7, 2024.
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Between 2000 and 2015 in an affluent, predominately white community in the US, 19 young people died by suicide through what’s known as suicide clusters. These clusters refer to an unusually high rate of suicide for a community over a short period of time, often at least two deaths and one suicide attempt, or three deaths. Suicide clusters are an extreme example of youth mental health struggles — an issue that’s been getting more attention since the pandemic and one that’s at the center of an increasingly charged national conversation around social media and phones.

Anna Mueller, a sociologist at Indiana University Bloomington, and Seth Abrutyn, a sociologist at the University of British Columbia, recently published Life Under Pressure: The Social Roots of Youth Suicide and What to Do About Them, which explores why these clusters happened and how to prevent more. The researchers embedded themselves within the community (which goes by the pseudonym Poplar Grove) to understand the social conditions that preceded and followed the teenagers’ deaths.

Senior policy reporter Rachel Cohen spoke with Mueller and Abrutyn about the youth mental health crisis, the crucial role and responsibility of adults, and how kids take behavioral cues from those around them. This conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Rachel Cohen

There’s been a lot of confusing and often conflicting reports about youth suicide trends, especially since the pandemic. Can you outline for readers what we know?

Anna Mueller

Since 2007, rates of youth suicide in the United States have been increasing pretty significantly and substantially. Not all countries around the world are experiencing this, though some others are. 

With the pandemic, I feel like I have to plead the fifth since the suicide data is still sort of inconclusive. For some kids, the pandemic was really hard in terms of mental health. For others, it actually took some pressures away.

Rachel Cohen

Do we know why youth suicide in the US started going up in 2007? What are the best theories?

Seth Abrutyn

It’s a complicated question. As you’re probably aware, there’s been some recent very public academics like Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge who have been studying the relationship between social media and mental health, especially among adolescent girls. So there’s some argument that that’s part of it. Of course, that wouldn’t explain why it started in 2007, when social media and smartphones were not really ubiquitous in the way they are now, but it probably plays a role in accelerating or amplifying some of the underlying things that were happening prior.

Another part of the explanation might be that efforts to destigmatize mental health have given people greater license to talk about their mental health. So things that may have been hiding are now out there more, though that doesn’t necessarily explain why suicide rates have gone up, but it may help understand the context.

Kids today are growing up in an extremely destabilized environment, and the economy is extremely precarious. Add that to the fact that since 2007, LGBTQ kids have been able to be more freely out, which also then causes more attention to them and invites more backlash.

Anna Mueller

Everybody asks us that, and I’ll be honest with you, it’s my least favorite question because we just don’t have great data to assess any of these theories. A lot of this really just remains speculation. Social media is something important to consider, but I take a little bit of an issue with the theory that it’s what we should solely be focused on. It’s sort of an excuse to ignore other social problems, like the fact that over that same period, rates of school shootings have increased substantially, and now make things like lockdown drills a normal part of our children’s lives. 

There’s also been increasing awareness that climate change is a fundamental threat to everyone’s ability to survive and that the cost of college has wildly increased. So we have a lot of pretty challenging things going on.

Rachel Cohen

I was going to ask you about phones — since as you note there’s a ton of debate right now about their role contributing to worsening mental health, but they didn’t really come up in your book. What role did you see phones play in your research on teen suicide?

Anna Mueller

Phones facilitated kids talking privately and in spaces that adults couldn’t access. And they meant kids had access to information that their parents weren’t aware they received, like kids would often find out a friend had died by suicide by text. I think that’s something adults need to be really aware of — it means the burden is on us to have meaningful conversations with kids about mental health, suicide, and how to get help because we may not be aware when our kid gets hit with some information that’s going to be relevant.

Rachel Cohen

But did it seem like the smartphones were causing the mental health problems?

Seth Abrutyn

Social media didn’t even really come up in the book. When we were in the field [back in 2013–2016], Instagram was out, but it was really more a photographic, artistic thing. Instagram wasn’t about influencers, and Facebook, Vine, and Snapchat were around but kids didn’t all have smartphones yet. Flip phones were still quite available.

I think in our original fieldwork, a lot of the young adults were far more impacted by the internet, like they sat at home on a laptop or something like that. In our new fieldwork, what we see are kids who carry the internet on their phones wherever they go. Quickly we’ve habituated to the ubiquity of smartphones and social media.

Rachel Cohen

In your research, some of the teenagers who died by suicide had loving parents, friends, romantic partners. They didn’t necessarily have mental illness. Can you talk about what you learned with respect to risk factors and protective factors? 

Anna Mueller

In the community where we were working, it was a lot of popular kids who had seemingly perfect lives who were dying by suicide. Some of them probably did have undiagnosed mental illnesses, you know, there was some evidence that they were struggling with things like deep depression or eating disorders or other things. But it was never visible. And so what the community saw was this perfect kid just gone for no reason. 

It is tough, because on the one hand, what we learned was that this community had really intense expectations for what a good kid and a good family and a good life looked like. And so for kids who didn’t have a lot of life experience to know that there are a lot of options out there for how else to be in this world — they really struggled. Things that helped were having family or other adult mentors who could put things in perspective.

Rachel Cohen

Life Under Pressure is about youth suicide clusters, and I wanted to ask if you could talk more about this idea of “social contagion,” which comes up several times in your book. It seems community leaders were really nervous about saying or doing the wrong thing in the wake of a youth suicide for fear of contributing to another teenager deciding to take their own life. What does the research on social contagion in this context look like?

Anna Mueller

Exposure to suicide, either the attempt or death of somebody that a kid cares about — whether they admire them, identify with them, or really love them — can be a pretty painful experience. Suicide is often about escaping pain, and so seeing people role model suicide can increase that vulnerability for kids. Our work suggests that it’s not just pre-existing risk factors, there’s something uniquely painful about exposure to suicide that can introduce suicide as a new way to cope. 

Seth Abrutyn

If we take a step back, suicide is just like almost anything else. Smoking cigarettes, watching television, all the things that we end up doing and liking — a lot of it we’re learning from the people around us. And people are exceptionally vulnerable to influential others. That could be someone that’s very high status that we look up to like a popular kid in school, or it could just be a really close friend that we trust a lot. 

In the community, where there are these high-status popular kids dying by suicide, if the messaging is not done correctly by adults, if we don’t have adults who can actually help talk through what’s going on and help kids grieve appropriately, the story can easily become, well, for kids who are under pressure and feel distressed, suicide is an option. 

Rachel Cohen

The idea of social contagion has been coming up a lot in debates around youth gender transition too. Some adults say kids are being unduly influenced by their friends and social media regarding things like taking puberty blockers or pursuing gender-affirming surgeries. Other research contests the idea that social contagion is a factor, and some advocates say even the suggestion that gender identity may be susceptible to peer influence is offensive. Does your research in this area offer us any insights here, any more nuanced ways to think about this?

Anna Mueller

I’m not answering this. We can’t answer this. Sorry. We have ongoing work, and we can’t go there. And I don’t know the literature and we can’t go there. 

Rachel Cohen

Okay, so you don’t think it’s applicable — the social contagion research you’ve studied in the youth suicide context — to other contexts?

Seth Abrutyn

The only thing I would say is I think the word “contagion” is the word that’s problematic. We’ve tried to actually change that in our own research, and there’s pushback because it’s relatively accepted. It has a sort of folk meaning that everybody can kind of grasp on. The problem is it sounds like how people get the flu in a dormitory, right? But just because everyone shares a heating system and air conditioning system doesn’t mean it will spread like wildfire.

Sociologists don’t think of it that way. When behaviors and beliefs spread, it’s usually because people talk about them with each other, or watch people do something and then talk about it. And then they can text that to their friends and talk about it with each other, and in that sense it is contagious, if you want to call it that. I would call it more like diffusion.

Rachel Cohen

Part of your book is about the need to talk more openly about mental health issues. There’s been this public conversation recently about whether there’s been inadvertent consequences in the push to destigmatize mental illness, with one being that young people may now have become so familiar with the language and frameworks of psychiatric illness that youth can get locked into seeing themselves as unwell. 

Oxford professor Lucy Foulkes coined the term prevalence inflation to describe the way that some people consume so much information about anxiety disorders that they begin to interpret normal problems of life as signs of decline in mental health, and she warned of self-fulfilling spirals. Psychology professor Darby Saxbe also noted that teenagers, who are still developing their identities, may be particularly susceptible to taking psychological labels to heart. I wanted to invite you to weigh in on these questions and debate. 

Anna Mueller

I’m not sure that I find that idea to be really useful. One of the problems with adults right now is that we’re not listening to the pain that kids are experiencing, or taking it seriously. If I were to advocate for something, I would advocate for seriously listening to kids about their struggles and sources of pain, and working to build a world where kids feel like they matter. Obviously, helping kids build resiliency is incredibly important. We can do a better job at helping our kids navigate challenges, and I’m an advocate of letting kids fail, the road shouldn’t just be perfectly smooth. But I’m pretty fundamentally uncomfortable with not listening to kids’ voices.

Rachel Cohen

I don’t think anyone’s saying don’t listen to kids, but they’re saying that if you encourage kids to think of themselves as anxious, and if you give kids those certain frameworks to diagnose or understand their problems, and as you noted earlier a lot of this information is coming from social media —

Anna Mueller

We think of frames as ways for kids to express themselves. As adults, it’s our job to dig deeper into how they’re framing their lives. Can suicide be an idiom of distress? Yes. Research has shown that some kids use the language of suicide as a way to express themselves to the adults in their lives. Similar things with anxiety, but then our job is to unpack that and discover what does that mean.

Seth Abrutyn

I think what Anna is trying to say, and what our book is trying to say, is that adults are really responsible for the worlds these youth inhabit. And these anxiety frames maybe are something that spreads around on TikTok, but it’s also something that’s being generated by adults, and it’s actually something being generated from real things in their lives, like school shootings. 

The way that we talk about them, and the way that we don’t listen to them, is maybe not helpful to kids. As a sociologist, we’re sitting there thinking how do we make schools better places? Well, what are adults doing? How are we making schools safer spaces so that this anxiety frame is not something kids are talking about? 

Rachel Cohen

What are the big questions researchers are still grappling with when it comes to youth suicide?

Anna Mueller

I know one thing that emerged for me and Seth after our book is how can we look at how suicide prevention is enacted in the school building, so that we’re catching kids before they get to that? Since we did the fieldwork for Life Under Pressure, our research has involved working collaboratively with schools to strengthen kids’ ability to get meaningful care. We have begun to see some differences in how schools approach suicide prevention that are actually really salient to whether the school experiences an enduring suicide problem or recurring suicide clusters. 

Seth Abrutyn

Most schools know that trusted adults are a really important part of the school building. And so thinking about how do we get teachers to do little things, like one school building made sure every teacher between classes was outside of their room for five minutes, just standing in the hallway, just saying hi, smiling, and pointing out that you were there. We often think those things don’t make a big impact, but it does. If a kid is not having a good day, maybe they’re not the most popular kid, but if they see that someone remembers them, someone knows them, it makes a real difference.