The housing boom could put more Americans in a babymaking mood

• Research shows that homeowners are more likely to have children when their home value increases.
• The New York Times found that US homeowners have gained more than $6 trillion in housing wealth during the pandemic.

Americans have been clamoring to buy homes over the past few years — and they could become eager to fill them as well.

The New York Times' Emily Badger and Quoctrung Bui found that over the past two years, American homeowners have gained more than $6 trillion in housing wealth due to the short supply and high demand of US housing during the pandemic.

And with growing wealth, more Americans could opt to have children.

Economists Michael Lovenheim and Kevin J. Mumford found in 2013 that households with rising home values were more likely to have children, potentially making a family-planning difference for the millions of Americans who own their homes — more than 65% of American households, according to the most recent US Census data.

A $100,000 increase in housing wealth means that homeowners are 16% to 18% more likely to have a child, Lovenheim and Mumford concluded.

The company Black Knight, which tracks the mortgage market, estimates that over the past two years, the average homeowner with a mortgage has gained $67,000 in "tappable equity," according to The New York Times. That's cash which households can access while still maintaining 20% of the equity in their homes, which lenders often require.

And in many of the country's largest metropolitan areas — such as Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle and Austin — the change in average tappable equity during the pandemic has been well over $100,000. In San Jose, California, it's over $200,000.

A decade of data shows that the US birth rate has been declining since the Great Recession. A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report from last year found that the US birth rate fell by 4% between 2019 to 2020, the sharpest single-year decline in almost 50 years, and the lowest number of births since 1979.

And that's at least partially due to young adults not having kids because they can't afford to. A 2020 Merrill Lynch survey of 2,500 American parents found that respondents who had their first child after 2010 were 40% more likely than those who did so before 1970 to cite finances as playing a role in becoming a parent.

But if Lovenheim and Mumford's research is any indicator, growing real estate wealth might change that — especially as millennials muscle their way into the housing market at unprecedented rates.

Financial stability encourages families to have kids

The Merrill Lynch survey shows it's not necessarily that young people are deciding not to have kids — although that's one factor. Young adults just don't want to consider having children until their financial and housing situations are stable.

"Owners essentially have infinitely lived leases," Richard K. Green, director of the University of Southern California's Lusk Center for Real Estate, wrote in a 2013 study for U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. "This longevity indicates they can assure that their children remain in a stable environment, and, more specifically, can remain in a school district that their parents find desirable."

Lovenheim found that families whose homes experienced higher price growth while their children were in high school were more likely to send their children to college. He and economist C. Lockwood Reynolds at Kent State University also wrote that the children who went to college were more likely to attend public flagship universities than community colleges.