I think families aren’t coming, or happening once people of child-bearing age are here, because of this:

https://livingwage.mit.edu/counties/50027

An actual living wage to have one child here is $38.08/hour with two parents and one working, or $41.73 with one parent in the household. That’s annual salaries of $79,206 and $86,798 respectively.

The Census’ American Community Survey has 13% of Hartford households making 75-100K; 16.5% making 100-150K; 8% making 150-200K, And 7% making >200K. I think we should focus on allowing folks to have a kid singly, but perhaps we be more fair to employers (never thought I’d say that) and split the difference between single and partnered parenthood. That’s a cool $83K. Since this distribution appears to be a bell curve, even though 83K isn’t halfway up the block of income data it’s in, the lower half of the block likely contains half the population in the block, so if we remove 7% we’ll have a roughly accurate % of population under our $83K.

This means (6.5+16.5+8+7) 38% of households in Hartford make enough money to be said to have a “living wage with one kid.” 62% of households here are unable to have a family without extreme hardship. I spent most of my working life hovering right around the living wage marker for my location, or just under it. (Living wage for NO kids.) This existence is hard. It’s a real marker, which should be trusted.

Since a good portion of the households we’re discussing (basically, those who would have a kid if they felt they could) are 2-person households, average household size in the group is definitely something above 1. And it can’t even have one offspring without extreme hardship. That means we don’t have an economy in Hartford whose participants—we’re all forced into participating, aren’t we?—can increase the population. At least without poverty, or de facto poverty.

So 38% of Hartford can afford to have a kid without extreme hardship. According to the 2021 American Community Survey, 23.5% of Hartford households have children living in them.

As we know, some folks choose poverty for the chance at having a kid. And “more power to ‘em.” But my takeaways—for me, not for you necessarily—are: 1. don’t ask why this society isn’t having kids. 2. never say this society is irresponsible, because it’s clearly very responsible with money; and 3. if we think families with kids are important, either for diversity of humanity or just the long-term sustainability of an economy… the situation I describe here is what we need to rectify.