Developers should build more apartments for families, study argues

In the years since the Great Recession, apartment construction in the United States has boomed. And more of these new homes have been smaller units, with fewer bedrooms, including studio apartments.

A recent paper from the Institute for Family Studies, a nonprofit that focuses on strengthening marriage and family life, argues that developers are underserving a key segment of the market by continuing to overwhelmingly target apartments to households of roommates and families without children. And the authors argue that fertility rates could be boosted by diversifying the kind of units that get built.

While it made sense to construct smaller units to cater to financially strapped, later-to-marry millennials in the 2010s, the authors argue that developers have made a mistake by continuing t