Effects of multi-family housing on marital fertility in Iran: population policy implications

The hypothesis of the relationship between housing types and fertility, which was originally developed and tested in Bogota, Colombia's housing study, is reexamined using Iranian data of urban married women of reproductive age. The findings of the study clearly and consistently show that women living in single-family housing units have significantly higher actual and desired fertility than women living in multi-family housing units, regardless of their major social, economic and demographic differences. Furthermore, the analysis of the relative effects of socioeconomic and demographic variables on fertility indicate that housing types have greater effects on fertility than wife and husband's level of education, when the effects of other variables are controlled. This study implies that crowding and density, which generally are the outcome of high fertility, do have feedback effects causing fertility to decline. This provides some evidence for the hypothesis of self-generating fluctuations in population growth which maintains that a large population will face stiff economic competition, lower incomes, congestion and crowding if other means of production as well as social infrastructure do not expand simultaneously. Finally, this study suggests an optimistic sign of fertility reduction in the large urban populations where the single-family housing units are being replaced by multi-family housing units mainly because of high cost of land, material, and labor, and the shortage of housing units. Most of the large cities in Iran today fit the above descriptions.