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: , , , ,

In the News: Are Young People Going to Abandon Cities for the Suburbs?

August 6, 2011 by

We’ve previously discussed the debate concerning the future of the suburbs: specifically, whether young people are turning toward, or away, from suburban life in favor of a more urban experience.  On the one side, the Brookings Institute put out a white paper positing that traditional “white flight” from the cities to the suburbs was evolving into “bright flight” from the suburbs to the city — young people fleeing the suburbs to become part of the urban core. On the other side, we’ve seen pushback from some analysts pointing to Census data that actually supports the opposite argument, that young people are actually choosing to migrate to the suburbs.

Here’s Joel Kotkin in a piece that he published on his NewGeography site, which which was republished in Forbes, entitled  “Why America’s Young and Restless Will Abandon Cities for Suburbs”:

Some demographers claim that “white flight” from the city is declining, replaced by a “bright flight” to the urban core from the suburbs. “Suburbs lose young whites to cities,” crowed one Associated Press headline last year.

Yet evidence from the last Census show the opposite: a marked acceleration of movement not into cities but toward suburban and exurban locations. The simple, usually inexorable effects of maturation may be one reason for this surprising result. Simply put, when 20-somethings get older, they do things like marry, start businesses, settle down and maybe start having kids.

An analysis of the past decade’s Census data by demographer Wendell Cox shows this. Cox looked at where 25- to 34-year-olds were living in 2000 and compared this to where they were living by 2010, now aged 35 to 44. The results were surprising: In the past 10 years, this cohort’s presence grew 12% in suburban areas while dropping 22.7% in the core cities. Overall, this demographic expanded by roughly 1.8 million in the suburbs while losing 1.3 million in the core cities.

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These findings should inform the actions of those who run cities. Cities may still appeal to the “young and restless,” but they can’t hold millennials captive forever. Even relatively successful cities have turned into giant college towns and “post-graduate” havens — temporary way stations before people migrate somewhere else. This process redefines cities from enduring places to temporary resorts.

This is a really interesting debate, so we’ll continue to track it.  I think part of the divide depends on what you mean by “young people.”  The “bright flight” argument, to the extent that it points out the obvious tendency of unmarried, childless people in their 20s to move to cities, seems self-evident.  But the responding point, that those same people start to move to the suburbs in their 30s, seems equally self-evident.  That is, is anything really changing?

Put it this way: you could not have kept me in the suburbs when I was in my 20s if you pulled a gun on me.  For most of the last 20 years, in fact, I lived in cities even though I inexplicably kept getting jobs in the suburbs: I lived in Manhattan when I had a clerkship in Uniondale, Long Island; I lived in San Francisco when I was in graduate school in Palo Alto; and I lived in Manhattan for over 10 years while I taught in Brooklyn (technically, okay, not a suburb) and then started working in the Hudson Valley.

But over time, I not only found myself losing friends to the suburbs, but realizing that the things that were keeping me in the city were things that were becoming less a vital part of my life, and that I could have an easier life (particularly for me, who actually did a reverse commute) if I just gave in and move to the suburbs.

Which means I went through the exact process described by Kotkin: urban in my 20s, then moving to the suburbs as I got older.

To paraphrase an old quote from Winston Churchill: “If you’re not living in the city at twenty you have no heart, if you’re not living in the suburbs at forty you have no brain.”

Filed Under: News, Suburbs versus Cities Tagged With: , ,

Who’s Moving to the Suburbs? More Immigrants, That’s Who!

January 7, 2011 by

The New York Times reported recently on Census Bureau data that really challenges some long-held belief about who lives in and moves to the suburbs:

The country’s biggest population gains were in suburban areas. But, in a departure from past decades when whites led the rise, now it is because of minorities. More than a third of all 13.3 million new suburbanites were Hispanic, compared with 2.5 million blacks and 2 million Asians. In all, whites accounted for a fifth of suburban growth.

The information comes from the American Community Survey, which gathers data from about 10% of Americans between 2005 and 2009.  As the Legally Sociable blog pointed out, “the recent trend runs counter to the typical American immigrant experience one learns about in history class where immigrants settled first in big cities…then moved out to the suburbs in subsequent generations.”

If indeed we’re seeing a demographic shift like that in the suburbs, with increasing numbers of immigrants, that could be something that starts to soften the stark differences between the urban and suburban experience. If we’re really looking at a future where the suburbs are less “lily-white” and more diverse and ethnic, we might start to see the suburban experience bring more of both the advantages and the challenges of a vibrant and growing immigrant culture.

For example, at the risk of trivializing what is a very real and important demographic issue, maybe I’ll be able to get a decent bowl of soup or something out here.

Filed Under: News, Suburbs versus Cities, Who's Moving to the Suburbs? Tagged With: , ,

Suburbs in the News: Is it Wrong to Raise Your Kids in the Suburbs?

November 24, 2010 by

Really interesting post in Grist by Carla Saulter entitled “Moving to the Suburbs for your kids? Think again.” which argues that environmentally-conscious parents should resist the siren song of the suburbs if they care about the planet:

We Americans tend to believe that a healthy environment in which to raise children is a large, single-family home in a quiet, suburban community. Many of us are convinced that trading the polluted, crowded city for greener pastures (also known as the large backyards that usually come along with suburban homes) is the right decision for our children. Unfortunately, the farther we move from urban centers, the more auto-dependent, resource-intensive, and by extension, environmentally detrimental our lives become. Auto-dependent living is bad for our children; it’s also very, very bad for the planet.

She goes on to make the pro-urban argument that we’ve alluded to previously here, centering on the idea that dense city environments are better than suburban sprawl because they use fewer resources and allow for more personal connections that foster true community.

I agree with all that.  But I think the problem is that too much density can be a bad thing for many people.  That is, people love the cities precisely for the walkability, the close proximity, the access to culture and ethnicity and all that.  But that density comes at a price that’s too high for many people — namely, that to live in that kind of environment, you have to either give up personal space or pay what has become an almost ridiculous price to get some.  It’s one thing to prize living in an urban environment when you can afford a home that provides reasonably living space, including bedrooms for your kids.  It’s another to live with three or four other people in 600 square feet that costs you $600,000 to own.

The really unfortunate part of this whole debate is that we end up with basically polarized choices.  You have urban centers that provide all the good stuff, but are expensive to live in, and you have suburbs that create that stereotypical disaffection, but which are affordable. There’s not a lot of middle ground.

For example, when we were making a decision to move to the Manhattan suburbs, we really wanted to try to find a place where we would have some of the trappings of our urban life.  In the NYC metro area, there’s not a lot to choose from.  Nyack, our ultimate home, gave us some of that — a nice lefty culture, some diversity, a reasonable restaurant scene, a walkable downtown — but it’s probably only one of a few places that does (and even Nyack, which I like very much, is a very faint, pale version of a urbanized experience).

Filed Under: News, Suburbs versus Cities Tagged With: , , ,