Poll: Age for Dating and Marriage

[Ken]

Ken in the past has indicated that he thinks people will be leaving rural areas like Belleville, PA to move to the cities because there is no financial future in the rural areas.

Sounds like people might be moving from Vancouver, Washington to Belleville, PA in the near future.

People aren't leaving Vancouver. It is actually one of the fastest growing cities in Washington and Clark County is the fastest growing large county in the state. New housing is being built like crazy. Coincidentally I was just in Belleville last week for a family reunion. I didn't see any signs of growth whatsoever. In fact it looks to be shrinking. Looking at the census reports, it looks like the populations of both Belleville and Mifflin County actually peaked around 1960 and have been slowly declining since. It is also an aging community with a median age of 58.7 whereas Vancouver has a median age of 37.5

Regardless, I would recommend young people in either place to wait until their early 20s to get married.

I wonder what the difference is in home ownership rates between areas like Vancouver and rural Pennsylvania for the age brackets of 20-30 years old, and 30-40. Are all these young people who are apparently flocking to places like Vancouver more or less likely to own homes than those in rural areas?

According to the Federal Reserve, the home ownership rate in Mifflin County PA (Belleville) is about 74% and in Clark County WA (Vancouver) it is about 69% so not dramatically different. Of course they don't disaggregate by age. There are a lot more apartments around here and my daughter's friends who have stayed local and not left town for college tend to rent shared apartments or houses rather than buy. Which I don't think is a bad thing. Home ownership is a questionable burden to take on until one is truly settled.

But I would be the first person to argue that we need to build more housing and also a greater diversity of housing. That is starting to happen around here but it is like trying to turn a battleship or supertanker. I do see a lot of high-density infill projects coming online which is a good thing for young people. Former malls and industrial parks are being converted into higher-density mixed use housing and commercial which is a good thing on a lot of levels.

Diving into the grind of endless wage labor to support a family and mortgage at age 18 might be the right path for some young people. But I don't think the majority.

[JohnH]

Vision for the future:







Incidentally, a cheap apartment in the last picture above would go for about $500,000 for a 430 sq ft unit.

[Ken]

We aren't China. Here in the real world, this is the sort of family-friendly multi-family development that is being built around here on urban infill land (currently vacant lots):

https://thevicwa.com/future-of-the-vic.html
https://www.gglo.com/project/the-heights-district-plan/

Of course it is a free country. If you want to stay in rural Ohio outside the reach of zoning and building code enforcement you are free to do so. Why the desperate opposition to any change from 1950s car-centric suburbia? Housing is a market like any other. If developers don't build what people want then they will fail and go bankrupt. Let the market decide.

But the bottom line is this. If you want to see affordable housing for young families in the urban areas of this country where most of the jobs are, then it is going to be higher density. The endless sea of 3,000 sf single family homes on 1/4 acre suburban lots that we spent the past decades building isn't getting the job done. And it isn't what vast numbers of young people actually want either.

I want my kids to be able to be able to live productive and rewarding lives, get married, and raise their own kids in the community in which they grew up. That means building more housing and more types of housing. This stuff isn't complicated. It's not enough to just idly comment on what age young adults should date, get married, and have children. We also have to build a world in which they are able to do so. And for everyone, not just those who happen to live in a few insular rural communities.

[Ernie]

But the bottom line is this. If you want to see affordable housing for young families in the urban areas of this country where most of the jobs are, then it is going to be higher density.

It would be nice for you if this was the case...
But as we noted earlier, jobs in cities pay less and are less available/plentiful per capita for young people. So not sure why this would seem like a solution.

[Ken]

But the bottom line is this. If you want to see affordable housing for young families in the urban areas of this country where most of the jobs are, then it is going to be higher density.

It would be nice for you if this was the case...
But as we noted earlier, jobs in cities pay less and are less available/plentiful per capita for young people. So not sure why this would seem like a solution.

I don't think that is the case at all, unless you are limiting the discussion to a small number of manual labor type jobs in the trades geared towards young men without college educations like construction and and agriculture. And even then, not so much. My youngest daughter wants to be a psychologist. Is she more likely to find employment in a larger metro area or a rural agricultural town?

In every field but agriculture and resource extraction, cities provide economies of scale for both employers and employees that rural areas simply cannot hope to match. That is why cities have been the economic engines of the world since the Bronze Age. And also why Paul's mission and evangelism was largely to cities across the Roman Empire and not rural areas: Corinth, Thessalonica, Antioch, Caesarea, Rome, Damascus, Jerusalem, etc. All the largest and most prosperous cities of the empire.

[mike]

But the bottom line is this. If you want to see affordable housing for young families in the urban areas of this country where most of the jobs are, then it is going to be higher density.

It would be nice for you if this was the case...
But as we noted earlier, jobs in cities pay less and are less available/plentiful per capita for young people. So not sure why this would seem like a solution.

The labor rates for the trades are pretty similar in our rural area of PA to what they are in, say, Lancaster County where the real estate is much higher. Part of that is because there is more competition for construction jobs. So young people in Lancaster have a more difficult time with home ownership. And we're seeing plain people from eastern PA increasingly move into western rural areas of the state. We have our first Amish community. Weaverland Conference Mennonites are buying up land and properties. And for decades, people like them have owned hunting land, cabins, and second homes in rural western and midwestern PA because of how much cheaper our real estate has been.

Right now, you can't buy a farm in our county for even close to a reasonable price, because the Amish have bought everything that's on the market, even some that wasn't on the market, for prices often well above what property owners even expected to get. Still, a young couple from one of our own conference's churches in east is moving out here this summer, I assume at least in part because they were able to afford a house in this area. The Amish that are moving here are into farmland, and so I don't think they have really impacted regular housing prices that much.

[ken_sylvania]

Anyway, what 15, 16, 17, or 18-year old could be trusted with taking over a family business or family farm. No dad in his right mind would turn it over entirely to someone that young. Let him manage a bit of the business? Maybe. My oldest sons don't currently have interest in working in my business, and my next son is 13, and he has said a few things that make me think he could ultimately be interested, but I can hardly grasp how many years of training he will need to even begin to think of a management job, let alone ownership.

It's a whole different thing for a 17-year-old to start and run his own small business compared to handing him the controls to a 30-50 employee operation.

[Ken]

Anyway, what 15, 16, 17, or 18-year old could be trusted with taking over a family business or family farm. No dad in his right mind would turn it over entirely to someone that young. Let him manage a bit of the business? Maybe. My oldest sons don't currently have interest in working in my business, and my next son is 13, and he has said a few things that make me think he could ultimately be interested, but I can hardly grasp how many years of training he will need to even begin to think of a management job, let alone ownership.

It's a whole different thing for a 17-year-old to start and run his own small business compared to handing him the controls to a 30-50 employee operation.

I think the more typical pathway would be like my cousin who took over the family dairy. He was married at 18 and moved onto the farm with his new wife and my aunt and uncle moved next door but they ran the farm together for at least 5 more years until my uncle finally decided that things were in hand and he could semi retire and go off with my aunt and do other things with their lives.

I doubt the keys to any big family farm operation get turned over to a teenager upon turning 18.

[JohnH]

My nephew moved to America right before he turned 18 and upon arriving here, promptly got to work learning about cement work, initially just as a temporary job to make some more money. (The rest of us may have had a bit of an agenda...) He learned the ropes, and eventually worked his way up after about a year into working for a better boss by the time he was 19, and worked for him for about 2 years, so age 19 and 20. By the time he was 21, his boss was desiring to sell the concrete business, and made an offer to him to work out owner-financing, so he could pay off buying out the business with profits from the business as he was able. The paperwork was finalised by the time he was 22.

He got married at age 20 in the middle of all of this going on. He's 23 now and has 2 children. They bought a home with a few acres when he was 20.

His original plan was to move to America and get a basketball scholarship and go to university to study accounting. Now he knows plenty about accounting from running a small business - and is pretty sure he wouldn't have enjoyed that as a career, and is happy to pay other people to run his payroll and prepare business taxes, which can be complex.

I don't see why many other young people couldn't do something similar. Being set up with your own house on a 15 year mortgage and running your own business by age 22 is very reasonable. By the time they are 35, their house will be paid off and so will the business.

[temporal1]

JH:
.. I don't see why many other young people couldn't do something similar. Being set up with your own house on a 15 year mortgage and running your own business by age 22 is very reasonable. By the time they are 35, their house will be paid off and so will the business.

i know a tender young couple, late teens, Christians, still in HS, he does part time diesel repair, $50/hr.
i silently wish he would whisk her away, marry, leave the nonsense, start their lives .. leaving doors open to what they choose.

Your scenario seems reasonable, doable, admirable.

This after witnessing so many young women wait until 30+ to marry, often having fertility problems, fear of Downs Syndrome, etc.
And, frankly, women so independent and ill-prepared for marriage, they’re unwanted. Young men are often choosing to marry out of their culture+faith, in hopes of having a wife that values husband+family. (JD Vance and DJT could be examples?) i see it on the ground level all the time.

Young women in the left-west are under impossible pressure to “have it all” EARLY - the results are disappointing.

i have never attended a church where i was aware of formal rules about marriage ages, but, generally, 18-20+, now with much world pressure to make it 30+. i believe it was normalizing BC pills and abortion and divorce that raised the ages to 30+.