Magazines that ran articles in 1970 concerning coerced population control: Science, Life, Reader's Digest, The New Republic, Discussion, Parents, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist, Newsweek, Time, Science Digest, Look, Mademoiselle, The New York Times Magazine
Fertility Rate of American Women (Expressed as the average number of children born per woman)
1957: 3.8
1977: 1.8
SOURCE: VITAL STATISTICS OF THE UNITED STATES
HOME SWEET HOME
Lois and Stephen Wolfson welcomed the birth of their first child in September, 1975--a son they named Adam. They brought their infant home to the Marina Del Rey, California, apartment where they had resided for a year and a half and where they had planned to keep on living. But not long after this happy occasion, they were informed by the manager of the apartment complex that they would be unable to renew their lease. The reason? Adam.
A year before Adam's birth, in October of 1974, Marina Point Apartments had changed its rental policy to exclude all families with children. Although they did allow those children who currently resided in the complex to remain, they would no longer rent to new families with children, nor to pregnant women. Although the Wolfsons had lived at Marina Point since February of that year, before the policy was adopted, the arrival of their son apparently rendered them ineligible to remain in their home. Because they were having a difficult time finding a new place to live, the apartment manager granted them a short extensionbefore they would be forced to vacate. But soon after this, the manager took the Wolfsons to court to evict them.
The new parents, feeling that they were being unlawfully discriminated against--as the sole reason for their eviction was the presence of their son--decided to defend their position in court. In the municipal court trial, the manager justified her no-children policy on the grounds that the apartment complex had no facilities for children or any place suitable for them to play. The fact that there were sixty-six families with children living in the complex at the time the new policy was adopted didn't seem to enter into the case. "Expert" evidence was presented to argue that children generally cause more wear and tear on property than do adults. Therefore, the argument went, the increased maintenance costs associated with children justified excluding them.
Lois and Stephen Wolfson offered testimony from both their upstairs and next-door neighbors that Adam's presence was in no way annoying to them. Furthermore, the manager presented no evidence whatsoever that the little boy had been disruptive or had damaged property in any way. During the trial, the judge conceded that, from the evidence, the court was satisfied that Adam had created no problems on the apartment premises. His ruling? The Wolfsons would have to move. Whatever the evidence, there were simply no laws protecting the rights of children against discrimination in rental properties. The couple appealed the decision to the California court of appeals, and the ruling was upheld. The presence of the infant justified eviction.
The Wolfsons were not alone in their predicament. In the seventies and early eighties, 70 to 90 percent of all newly constructed apartments in large cities such as Dallas, Houston, and Denver were strictly adults-only. In Dallas's case, a 1978 study showed that more than half of all apartment complexes, new and old, flat-out refused to accept children. Another 12 percent only accepted them with certain restrictions (not above or below a certain age, no more than one child per household, etc.). Thus a family with children in Dallas, the nation's ninth-largest city, had only a third of the available apartments from which to choose.
The situation in the fast-growing Los Angeles area, where the Wolfsons resided, was even worse. A study conducted in 1979 showed that seven apartment complexes in ten excluded children. An additional 15 percent allowed children only within certain age ranges. That left only one apartment in eight available to families with children of any age in the Los Angeles area. To add to the predicament, the problems were even more acute in newly constructed complexes. Across the nation, apartments constructed during the seventies were 60 percent more likely to exclude children than older units. Newer units alsotended to be of higher quality and located in better neighborhoods than older ones, shutting families out of much of the more desirable housing in our cities.
The California study also showed that median rents for apartments that allowed children were higher than for equivalent units that excluded them. So not only were parents forbidden from seven out of eight Los Angeles apartments, they had to pay more for the paltry choices given them. This price premium might illustrate nothing more than supply and demand, but the driving force was certainly a lack of supply, with parents paying the penalty. The judges in the Wolfson case even recognized that families with children have a more difficult time finding housing. Yet they justified their decision by noting that, after all, not all apartments have no-child policies.
Nationwide, the policies regarding apartment availability to families with children were similarly hostile. Only about one rental unit in four was available with no restrictions. In larger complexes, fewer than one unit in five was available unconditionally to parents with children. While some apartment managers have always excluded children for a variety of reasons, the number who decided these reasons were justifiable rose by 50 percent during the seventies. And these managers were not out of line with public sentiment. A 1980 study by the University of Michigan for HUD found that 40 percent of renters in buildings that maintain explicit no-children policies chose to live there specifically because of those policies. Even with single-family detached homes, one in five rentals was strictly off-limits to children.
Would not the building frenzy of that time, combined with lower birth rates, still have left families with adequate choices for good housing? Unfortunately not. The Michigan survey showed that nearly half of the respondents with children reported that when last looking for a place to live, they had found a suitable apartment but were forbidden to rent it because of the policies regarding children. This dilemma crossed all boundaries of race, income, gender of the head of household, and size of the apartment in question. This was not a problem of the poor or of minorities. It was simply a problem for all those who decided to raise a family. The obstacles faced by these parents included limited access to quality schools and day-care centers because they could not rent in their preferred area. Other families in the Michigan investigation reported having to choose apartments without convenient access to public transportation or in areas that forced them to make an undesirably long commute to work--a restriction that put strains on the family by making the time available for parents to spend with their children more limited than they would have liked.
Forbidding children wasn't a policy that was limited to cantankerous landlords. In fact, many communities, eager to tap the growing expendable income of single yuppies and increasingly wealthy senior citizens, actively encouragedadult-only construction by offering a variety of incentives to builders....
