Millennials will move to the suburbs when they’re ready, just like everyone else…

May 5, 2016 by

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As an early Gen-Xer, I have to roll my eyes every time I see a think piece about Millennials and what they want out of life.  The Gen-X curse is to grow up in the shadow of the the most solipsistic generation in history, the Baby Boomers, and now in middle age to endure the entitled brats they raised.

And so we see it again in a recent article in my local suburban newspaper about — wait for it — what local suburbs are doing to attract Millennials to live there:

Faced with aging populations, stagnant post-“great recession” economies and static or declining tax bases, local villages, towns and cities are eyeing millennials and young professionals as potential saviors. It’s the same story across the nation as communities look for ways to attract 18- to 34-year-olds.

With an estimated 75.4 million people in that age group, the Pew Research Center says millennials surpassed the nation’s 74.9 million baby boomers last year, making them the largest generation in the U.S. Their numbers alone suggest that millennials will soon drive the economy and culture, and that the communities they choose to call home will reap the benefits.

So what are these suburbs doing to try to attract 20-somethings to come live there?  All the stuff that, say, people like me would have liked 20 years ago, the stuff that 20-somethings ALWAYS like: affordable rental apartments, nightlife, restaurants, entertainment, recreation, hiking trails, mass transit to the city.

I mean, are they hiring EXPERTS to tell them this, that young people want affordable housing?  That young people want restaurants and nightlife?  Do we really need a focus group of Millennial Panelists to tell us that they like going out at night?

My god, these people drive me crazy.  There’s nothing special about them, nothing new in the attitude that they want to live in the city and hate the idea of moving to the suburbs.  These 25 year olds are like all 25 year olds, going back to when the suburbs were invented.

Let me save everyone a lot of time and money: Millennials will move to the suburbs when they grow up, just like everyone else.  

So stop wasting your time.  You’re never going to get a 25 year-old to move from the greatest city in the world just because you have an artisanal “home-decor shop that purveys mono floral honey produced by nomadic beekeepers in Sicily.”  No matter what they do in New Rochelle, or Mount Vernon, or Dobbs Ferry, or Hastings, they’re never going to create anything that’s more than the faintest, palest imitation of what Millennials can get in Manhattan. And why settle for downtown White Plains when you have the real thing 20 miles away?

If you don’t believe me, here’s what a Millennial herself had to say about these efforts:

Developers try to convince millennials of the “value” of these new luxury developments by installing high-end appliances, but value isn’t just having a dishwasher and Sub-Zero fridge. They also try to recreate the convenience of New York City by building “urban villages,” but, to me, transit-oriented, mixed-use developments are little more than ersatz recreations of what comes naturally in big cities. All the amenities might be there, but, at the end of the day, they’re just another suburban development that feels too sterile and artificial, closer in spirit to a retirement community than somewhere a person in their 20s wants to live. And really, if all I wanted was to live in an overpriced, luxury apartment on a block with an artisanal coffee shop that’s not too far from a train station, I’d live in Manhattan.

If you can get past the self-centeredness of a 25 year old typical of a generation taught by their Baby Boomer parents that Galileo was wrong, you can see the problem.  There is absolutely nothing that developers or planners can do to attract young people to the suburbs by trying to compete with the city.

Millennials, like all other young people, are only going to move from the city if one of two things happen.

First, they’ll move if they can’t afford it. And mostly they can’t, not anymore. When I was 25, my first apartment in the city was $700 a month for a studio on 34th street right above the Lincoln Tunnel, which represented about 30% of my monthly income.  You know what that studio rents for right now?  $400,000 a month.  Seriously.  It’s very expensive in the city.

Even then, though, young people will do anything to avoid moving to the suburbs. Even move to Brooklyn, which is basically a suburb but don’t tell anyone or you’ll kill the market.  And now they keep going deeper and deeper into Brooklyn until they eventually they’r going to realize that they’re living in Coney Island and it’s actually further from midtown than White Plains.

Second, they’ll move to the suburbs when they get married and have kids, and  realize that they need closet space.  After all, that’s basically why the suburbs were invented — as a place to settle down.

But here’s the good news for these suburban towns: Most people grow up.  The baby boomers thought the only time they’d go to the suburbs would be to dance in the mud at Woodstock, and they eventually settled most of the Hudson Valley.  Generation X never thought they’d move to the suburbs, and here I am.  And Millennials don’t think that they’ll ever move to the suburbs, but they will.

But not because they opened a new artisanal pickle shop in Dobbs Ferry.  They’re going to move to the suburbs for the same reason that everyone does — because babies make noise and you can’t sleep in the same room as them.

Filed Under: Humor, Living in Manhattan, Living in the Suburbs, Suburbs versus Cities Tagged With: , , , ,

Reasons You’ll Love Living in the Suburbs: Cuter Vermin

August 13, 2012 by

One of the nicest things about living in the suburbs is that you get a better class of vermin.  In the city, you got your three basic types of vermin: rats, mice, and cockroaches.  They’re all horrible.  And no matter where you live, or how nice your place, you end up dealing with them at some point.

Rats, of course, are the worst, but unless you’re living in a hovel, you probably don’t have them in your home.  It’s just that they’re everywhere else, hiding out and just waiting until you’re staggering your way home after a long day at work or a long night of drinking, just biding their time until they JUMP OUT FROM BEHIND THE GARBAGE CANS GAHHHHHHHH.  Just the worst.  I’ve seen rats the size of cats, bigger than most dogs people have in the city, pacing around on the subway tracks, in alleys — they’re everywhere in the city.  Now, I guess we must have rats in the suburbs, too, but I just don’t see them as much.  I think rats like the city better.  They’re very sophisticated, those rats.

I had mice in my apartment, of course, pretty much every apartment I ever had in Manhattan. The only good thing about having mice was that I could pretend that I was their MOUSE GOD.  Like a real God, I had the power of life or death over them.  I could be a beneficent God, getting lazy and leaving food on a dirty plate in the sink, creating a bountiful harvest.  Or I could be a vengeful God, smiting them with the Plague of the Trays of Glue.  When you’re 25, living alone in the city, no money, working for The Man, you take your opportunities to be ALL-POWERFUL where you can get them.

But I wasn’t really cut out to be Mouse God.  I’m too much of a softie, definitely more of a New Testament Mouse God.  Mouse traps are horrible things.  Have you ever heard a mouse scream when he realizes that he’s stuck in a glue trap.  It’s a horrible sound.  And then what are you supposed to do with a glue trap that has a mouse stuck to it, the poor mouse terrified, struggling to get away, looking at his Mouse God and begging for mercy?  Horrible.  I never knew what to do — the kind thing would be to kill it quickly, but I don’t quite have it in me to take a hammer and beat a mouse to death with it.  And if you throw it away, you’re consigning that mouse to a miserable starvation death in the garbage.  No good option.

Now, cockroaches are a different story.  When I’m retired, I’ll happily take a part-time job hammering cockroaches to death, if someone was willing to pay me to do it.  DIE COCKROACH DIE.  No problems there. Very satisfying work.  I’d hammer away all day long.  So would you.  Nothing worse than coming home, turning on the light, and seeing a bunch of cockroaches scurrying away from your kitchen sink.  And then you also have those “water bugs,” which are giant mutant cockroaches that sneak into bathrooms.  Every time they did construction on our block, we’d get an infusion of those water bugs everywhere we had a faucet.

So if you were to ask me what I love about the suburbs, I’d have to say that I love the better class of vermin we have out here. Three years, I’ve yet to see a mouse, a rat, or a cockroach.  Instead, we have really cute vermin, like deer.  Seriously.  Deer.  That’s our biggest problem.  Because, you know, they eat stuff from the gardens.  Isn’t that awful!  And instead of rats, we have squirrels.  Cute little squirrels, big bushy tails, scampering joyfully from tree to tree, saving up those nuts for winter.  Awwwwwww.

Of course, once in a while, a bear comes down from the local state park and tries to eat us or our dogs.  That’s not good.  And one more reason why I live in a condo, because most bears have trouble navigating elevators.

But that’s unusual.  And, anyway, what’s worse — dealing with rats and mice and cockroaches in the city every single day, or taking a very small chance of someday getting eaten by a bear in the suburbs?

I thought so.

 

Filed Under: Humor, Living in Manhattan, Living in the Suburbs, Reasons You'll Love Living in the Suburbs Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

The Grass is Always Greener: Why People Who Live in the Suburbs Want to Live in the City, and People Who Live in the City (Surprisingly) Want to Live in the Suburbs

October 28, 2011 by

Greg Hanscom put up an interesting take on Grist.org on the discrepancy between where people say they want to live (dense cities) and where they actually seem to be ending up living (sprawling suburbs).  He points to polling data that came from the real estate advising firm RCLCO showing that 88% of Millenials and even their Baby Boomer parents express a desire to live in denser and less car-dependent settings, which is in conflict with census data showing population growth in the suburbs and declines in the cities.

His take:

  • Lots of Millenials would LOVE to move to the cities, but to do that they need of them jobs that no one seems to be able to get these days. So they’re camping out at their parents’ place in the suburbs, “watching It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia reruns and dreaming of big city living.”
  • Although crime is down in the big cities, but not enough to diminish frightening images of the city as violent places.
  • And although young people like to live in the cities, they pack up for the suburbs as soon as they have kids.

Finally, he makes a brilliant point that maybe this is all about something deep in the American psyche that makes us consistently pine for that which we don’t have, almost a “grass is always greener” perspective that affects all of us.  He points out that according to a 2009 Pew poll, 46% of the public “would rather live in a different type of community from the one they’re living in now — a sentiment that is most prevalent among city dwellers.”

It’s a brilliant post, and I think he’s right on all counts.  Without question young people want to live in the cities — why wouldn’t someone who is 25 prefer to live in a place with abundant nightlife opportunities, ethnic diversity, culture, and public transportation that allows you to drink your face off and still get home safely?  And, conversely, it’s also abundantly clear that people tend to gravitate toward the larger living spaces afforded in the suburbs once they start filling up their 600 square foot apartment with a bunch of screaming children.

Moreover, I think there’s something to the “grass is greener” affect.  Most people who live in the city tend to settle down into a torpid state where they take all that great city stuff for granted.  Like me, they stop going out so much, particularly as they get older, and spend more time in their home and surrounding neighborhood.  And then they increasingly realize that, boy, it really sucks to spend 90% of your time in a two-room apartment, so they pine away for the larger, greener pastures of the suburbs.  Then, of course, you have people like me who move to the suburbs for a lot of good reasons, but look around one night at the Cheescake Factory and think that they’ve made a terrible, terrible mistake.  Essentially, we all want what we don’t have, particularly if we used to have it.  It must be something deeply wired into our brains to keep us constantly on the move, always looking for something better, that helped us get through the caveman days.  But it really does make it difficult to appreciate what you have.

So I have no problem admitting that I’m one of those people: I moved to the suburbs, but I really do miss living in the city, and I’m certainly happy that I got my 17 years of urban living in before I exiled myself.

I’ll also say this: if you’re reading this, and you live in the city, go do something. Go to the park, or a club, or a great restaurant, or stare at paintings.  That’s why you’re living in the city, why you’re sacrificing all that money and comfort.  So go do it.  Before it’s too late.

Filed Under: Advice, Living in Manhattan, Living in the Suburbs, News, Suburbs versus Cities Tagged With: , , , ,