Why the Millennials are Moving to Cities (and what the suburbs should do)

I’m looking for someone – anyone – who predicted the decline in vehicle-miles-travelled (VMT) or the drop in applications for driver’s licences by the millennials. What is the reason for this unanticipated change? Or for the move by young people back to the cities their parents fled?

Ben Adler in Grist comes up with some suggestions in this peice: “Here’s how the media is getting the story on cities & millennials wrong.”

First of all, it’s important to put this urbanization in context. … New York, one of the first cities to experience gentrification on a mass scale, started to see its population decline reverse in the 1980s. But that’s not because more people were actually moving to New York than leaving it, just that the net out-migration was low enough to be outweighed by natural population growth from births. New York has only actually started to gain more migrants than it loses in the last three years, and most of New York’s in-migration is from outside the U.S.

… All that said, there is a grain of truth to the Times’s observation. A handful of coastal and upper Midwestern cities are attracting more young professionals than before and are retaining them for longer. Some suburban-style Sun Belt cities such as Phoenix, which grew dramatically between 1960 and 2005, have seen their population level off.

Still, the Times ignores one of the most important reasons: transportation. The article makes no mention of cars, gasoline, or driving. But the aversion to being car-dependent, and the cost of owning, maintaining and gassing up a car, is one of the main factors in millennials’ affection for cities such as San Francisco, Portland, Chicago, or New York. …

The Times tells us that, in suburbia, “Demographers and politicians are scratching their heads over the change.” Instead of scratching their heads, they should be putting in sidewalks and improving bus service. They should also change zoning codes to remove minimum parking requirements, compel buildings to engage the street instead of hiding behind a surface parking lot, allow greater density and a mix of uses.

Many of the urban neighborhoods that are so appealing to young people were developed as suburbs. But if they were built in the late 19th century, they were designed to accommodate bipedal human beings rather than cars. There is no reason that, just because a town is outside a major city’s limits, it cannot be built, or rebuilt, that way today. Maybe then the ‘burbs will be more appealing to young people who don’t want, or just can’t afford, a life tethered to an automobile.