SLOWING BIRTH RATES WILL HURT THE WASHINGTON STATE HOUSING MARKET

Washington State just released some very interesting, but equally disturbing, information in birth rates in our State.

Apparently we are running out of children.

A report published today by Washington State shows that in 2015 the birth rate tumbled to only 9.9 babies per 1,000 population, against a death rate of over 12.7 per 1,000. For comparison purposes, in 2000, the birth rate was 17.9 per 1,000.

If this trend continues, the State population will drop dramatically between now and 2025 and a decline of this magnitude will have profound negative impacts on total demand for housing in our State and I believe it will function to cause home prices to drop precipitously.

The State, always keen to boost birth rates, now calculate that by the year 2025 only 16% of West Coast citizens will be Washingtonians against 22% now. Governor Inslee sounded the alarm bells on this in a speech in Olympia on March 21st.

Following this address, two State Senators are now enthusiastically endorsing a new directive to raise birth rates and to harmonize legislation on fertility. The proposed directive would oblige all Washington counties to introduce incentives to increase birth rates – e.g. by raising family allowances and reducing taxation for large families.

Controversially, the same senate sub-committee wants to impose a statewide tax of 15% on the cost of all contraceptives sold in the State and use the revenue – an estimated $50M annually – for an education program on the advantages of having more babies.

A second aim is to harmonize the wide variation in birth rates within our component counties. Counties east of the Cascades, for example, have a birth rate of 21.5 per 1,000, twice the State average. If the directive is adopted, Grant County will have to run a pilot surveillance scheme of married men's behavior in their leisure hours—backed up, if necessary, by a system of baby licensing. County officials have reacted angrily, calling the scheme “just harmonization for harmonization’s sake”.

The sub-committee hopes to follow up this directive with a parallel one designed to balance the number of immigrant children in each of the thirty-nine counties within Washington. The plan has been christened by Olympia bureaucrats as the “newly-arrived parents' preferential infant exchange system”, but the resulting acronym may hurt the project's chances of making it through the House.