There's been a lot of discussion over the last month on whether it's still possible to raise kids without being rich. Housing is a big piece of this, and if you need to buy a house where each kid has their own room, yes, that's expensive, but it's also not the only option. We didn't wait to buy a house (or have multiple bedrooms) before having kids, and I think that was the right choice for us.
To give you a sense of what this looked like, two configurations from early on:
Living with extended family, in a six bedroom ~2,500 sqft house with 8-10 people. Our baby first slept in a co-sleeper, and then in a mini-crib I assembled in our closet (door open).
After we bought a house our toddler was still in our room because I was renovating what would become her bedroom. There were two other bedrooms, but housemates lived in these, for a combination of us liking to live with other people and wanting to save money.
It was definitely not ideal! Trying not to wake the baby when you have different bedtimes, staying out of the bedroom during naptime, both parents waking when the baby does, etc. But there were also large advantages to a first kid at 28:
Having kids at a time in our life when we physically had more energy. Not to say we have no energy now at 40 and nearly-40, but ten years ago we did have more.
More years of overlap with our kids, and an even larger increase in how many years our parents overlap with them.
Better time in our careers for us to take leave: it's generally easier to be away as an IC than a manager.
Fertility is highly variable, but definitely gets harder as you get older.
Much more practical to have three kids.
Overall, I think this was a good choice for us. It's definitely not right for everyone, but I think hard rules of "buy a house first" and "have enough space that each kid can have their own room" are right for very few people.
There's a pattern of rising expectations for what it means to be doing ok, but sometimes people describe these as if they're rising requirements. For example, Zvi:
Society strongarms us to buy more house, more healthcare, more child supervision and far more advanced technology. The minimum available quality of various goods, in ways we both do and don't care about, has risen a lot. Practical ability to source used or previous versions at old prices has declined.
He focuses on childcare (reasonable!) but also discusses how this applies to housing:
You can want 1,000 square feet but that means an apartment, many areas don't even offer this in any configuration that plausibly works.
See also Aella:
being poorer is harder now than it used to be because lower standards of living are illegal. Want a tiny house? illegal. want to share a bathroom with a stranger? illegal. The floor has risen and beneath it is a pit
While Zvi, Aella, etc are pointing at a real problem (housing is way too expensive, primarily because we've made it too hard to build more in places people want to live; we should stop doing that), I think they're more wrong than right. They're overlooking a major option, families sharing housing with others:
Before we had kids we lived with another couple when they had their first kid. We were renting a 3br together in Somerville, walking distance to the Orange Line. The husband was a paralegal, the wife quit her job to watch their baby. My memory is that she didn't like being home full time with the baby and later on did a range of other things, but it was doable on one income and the option is still there.
One of my cousins lived in a 4br with their partner and another couple. Both couples had two kids. It was tight, and there were definitely downsides to having less space, but again, the option is there.
There are specific ways the "floor has risen", and both high minimum unit sizes and effectively banning SROs should be reversed. Similarly, we could make housing much cheaper with simple and broadly beneficial policy changes, and I would love to see a world where people did not have to make these painful tradeoffs. But "put lots of people in a medium-sized space" has always been a major way people saved money on housing, and is still a legal and practical option today.
(I asked my kids, "Imagine we could only afford a small apartment, and you had to share a bedroom with your sisters. Would you rather that they didn't exist so you could have your own room?" None of them did, and they were moderately outraged by the question, though they mentioned sometimes not liking their sisters very much.)