The Mismatch: Where young people want to live and where the jobs are

From Salon:

The millennial job paradox: America’s next great generation loves the city — but can’t work there

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If you’re looking for evidence of a shift toward urban life, the data in housing is probably the strongest. The country is building more apartment buildings than at any time in decades, which is believed to portend a long-term structural shift. Most large U.S. cities have gained residents since the 1990s, reversing decades of population loss.

According to Pew findings from this summer, the nation is virtually deadlocked between preferring a community where “the houses are larger and farther apart, but schools, stores and restaurants are several miles away,” and one where “the houses are smaller and closer to each other, but schools, stores and restaurants are within walking distance.” Nielsen reports that millennials are in favor of the latter option at a rate of nearly two to one. …

Eric Jaffe reports that young people are actually commuting by car at a slightly greater rate than they were in 1980. Even in some of the countries’ largest metros — Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Baltimore, San Antonio and San Diego — car commuting is more popular than it used to be.

At first, that seems surprising, because these places registered some of the largest percent increases in college-educated millennials living downtown between 2000 and 2010: a 138 percent increase in St. Louis, 92 percent in Baltimore, 91 percent in San Diego. (Miami and Los Angeles round out the top five.) You’d think twenty-somethings living in and around the city center would be more likely not to drive.

But living near downtown doesn’t necessarily place these people any closer to their jobs. In Minneapolis and Pittsburgh, only one in four jobs is within three miles of downtown. In Baltimore, it’s one in five, while fully half of all jobs are more than 10 miles away. Whatever “great inversion” may be occurring in housing choices is emphatically not happening in employment geography.

This has consequences for transportation choices: You can live in an old section of Louisville, Minneapolis or Cleveland where shops, bars and friends are a short walk away, just as they were 100 years ago. Employment, however, ain’t where it used to be. “Sprawling development patterns are very difficult for any mode of transportation besides the automobile,” says Adie Tomer at Brookings. “It leaves millennials — or really any other worker — with limited accessibility options if they decide not to use a car.” …

For most of American urban history, people followed jobs, living beneath clouds of factory smoke or in cramped quarters near bustling ports. But the transportation revolution, from the horse-drawn omnibus to the private car, untied that knot. Most people can now live miles from work. Suburban office parks joined corporate campuses, malls and semi-rural factories to create a donut of employment around the old city. Jobs followed people. …

The result of this mismatch between urban living and urban employment is a new culture of city life, where leisure is king and work – outside of restaurants, stores and bars – is nowhere to be seen.

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 Full story here.