If France is anything like my native Portugal, people aren’t having kids mainly because housing is so stupidly expensive - how exactly do you expect people to have the 2.something average number of kids needed to maintain population levels when they can’t leave their parents home until their mid 30s and even just going from a 1-bedroom to a 2-bedroom to have a room for child costs many years worth of a couple’s after-tax income?

Meawhile salaries in real terms have stagnated for a decade.

Even with the best of intentions, even in the middle class people are entering their 40s by the time they can afford to have a second child so most stick to 1 or even don’t have any children.

What’s required is not flashy bullshit such as letters like this which very pointedly ignore the housing bubble and the politicians’ blame in pumping it up, but instead measures to make housing affordable, such building lots of public housing to increase the Supply side of the Market and limits on multiple house ownership and non-resident ownership to stop investor speculation in Housing and thus weaken the Demand-side price pressure.

Of course, what the neolibs in power have done instead is increase immigration claiming that “we have a lack manpower” (after decades of making it unaffordable for people to have children and give them a good life) and then their Fascist mates can use that to claim that life is bad because of the immigrants.