Turns Out Paying People Thousands of Dollars to Have a Baby Works Pretty Well

Ten thousand Euros for every baby. That's the reward the Finnish town of Lestijärvi promised local parents in 2012 for every new child born. Now, two years on, it seems that the plan, due to last until 2016, has been working well. Too well in fact. Such has been the spike in births that Lestijärvi is now reporting a new problem: it's run out of family-sized housing.

Before we start trying to remember the name of this baby boom metropolis in the making, a bit of context. No one is going to confuse Lestijärvi with Mexico City – it only has around 850 inhabitants. Located in central Finland, the small town is in an area where the hardly crammed together Finnish population starts thinning out for real en route to the Arctic Circle. It's no wonder that this fairly far-flung place (viewable on Google Street View) might struggle to maintain a population of young families. Given the size of the place, however, Lestijärvi’s birth spike is very impressive. In all of 2012, before the scheme was adopted, there was just one birth in the town. In 2013, there were 14. More importantly, the town is just the most generous of a large clutch of Finnish municipalities paying cash for new kids.