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Why Generation Y Is Causing The Great Migration Of The 21st Century

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Re: Why Generation Y Is Causing The Great Migration Of The 21st Century

#11

Post by scarmig »

I'm sympathetic to the viewpoint that it's important to watch cities as central to our future. This article, however, relies a bit much on psychological gobbledygook. Helicopter parents, Friends, the Google bus...

Even the one graph they provide is more or less incomprehensible. What would be useful to see is land prices in inner urban areas, average lived population density, and comparative migration patterns for young adult populations (ideally taking into account long term lifestyle pattern trends).

My general take:

Places like NYC, SF, and Chicago are definitely growing, but not at some particularly spectacular rate; IIRC it's at pace with US population growth as a whole. Instead the areas with the highest population growth have been the sun belt for the past decade, which is hardly the "smart" urban growth that people go nuts over.

The demographics, however, are changing in a much more meaningful way. Gentrification will continue and accelerate. Not everyone will live in the city: instead it will be a professional ruling class working in government, finance, law, technology, and business (and their associated servants), with everyone else relegated to the decaying suburbs.

So if you want to see the future, look at Paris.

Re: Why Generation Y Is Causing The Great Migration Of The 21st Century

#12

Post by learc83 »

gte910h wrote: post #9
learc83 wrote: post #5

There's plenty of truth in that article, but I can't help but think that this trend is almost purely a product of demographic changes. People wait longer to get married and have children, so there way more 25-30 year olds who worry more about living within walking distance to a bar and less about a backyard and a nice school. Many of the urban Gen Y the article talks about will move back to the suburbs when they have…

>Atlanta Public schools are pretty horrible What do you mean? APS mostly gets issues with disparity of performance (aka, the children of the rich people far outperform the children of everyone else). Sure, there are bad ones. But don't live there: http://www.atlantapublicschools.us/site/default.aspx?PageTyp... This explains why you may think the schools are bad: http://midtown.patch.com/articles/grady-high-school-one…

I was mainly talking about things like the recent widespread systemic cheating.

44 out of 56 schools were cheating on the CRCT.

Edit: by things like that, I mean an environment where that large a percentage of schools feel pressured to cheat.

I'm aware that state and federal rules and standardized tests are responsible for some of the pressure, but none of the other school systems in the metro-atlanta area had such wide spread cheating even though they were under the same state and federal pressures. I'm going to say there is something wrong with the way the school district is ran if 44/56 schools are cheating.

Re: Why Generation Y Is Causing The Great Migration Of The 21st Century

#13

Post by saryant »

rollypolly wrote: post #8
saryant wrote: post #4

I absolutely fall into this category. Grew up in suburbs of LA, San Francisco, Houston and the outskirts of Cheyenne, WY. Now I'm about to move into the Montrose area of Houston. I hate driving and now I'll be taking metro rail to downtown and I'll be close to great restaurants, grocery stores and cafes. Even if I do need to drive, I'll be smack in the middle of what I consider the "good" parts of Houston so I won't…

I dream of a post-car America. But wouldn't that require places like Houston to build massive amounts of public transport?

Yes, of course. And I don't really expect that to happen.

Right now Houston has one light rail line running from Reliant Stadium, through the med center and Rice University/Museum District into downtown. They are building several new lines right now but still aren't reaching into the suburbs.

I don't expect Houston to become a post-car city in the reasonable future.

Re: Why Generation Y Is Causing The Great Migration Of The 21st Century

#14

Post by wtn »

scarmig wrote: post #11

I'm sympathetic to the viewpoint that it's important to watch cities as central to our future. This article, however, relies a bit much on psychological gobbledygook. Helicopter parents, Friends , the Google bus... Even the one graph they provide is more or less incomprehensible. What would be useful to see is land prices in inner urban areas, average lived population density, and comparative migration patterns for y…

Chicago shrank by 6.9% from 2000-2010.

Re: Why Generation Y Is Causing The Great Migration Of The 21st Century

#15

Post by scarmig »

wtn wrote: post #14
scarmig wrote: post #11

I'm sympathetic to the viewpoint that it's important to watch cities as central to our future. This article, however, relies a bit much on psychological gobbledygook. Helicopter parents, Friends , the Google bus... Even the one graph they provide is more or less incomprehensible. What would be useful to see is land prices in inner urban areas, average lived population density, and comparative migration patterns for y…

Chicago shrank by 6.9% from 2000-2010.

That's... very weird and surprising. NYC grew by low single digits, while SF did a bit more. I incorrectly assumed this was shared across most major cities.

I'm not sure how that affects my prediction, one way or another.

Edited to add: a table with actual data. The 2000s have not been kind to most cities. By comparison, the USA as a whole grew 9.7% from 2000 to 2010.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/census/2011-04-07-1Aciti...

Re: Why Generation Y Is Causing The Great Migration Of The 21st Century

#16

Post by thejteam »

ryanhuff wrote: post #10
rayiner wrote: post #2

Article describes me to a T. Grew up in the suburbs of DC, and after having moved to progressively bigger cities over the last 10 years (Atlanta, Chicago, and soon New York), I can't imagine ever again living in a place where finding you're out of contact lens solution involves a 45 minute car trip to the nearest CVS.

Having lived in suburban communities all of my life, I have never lived further than 10 minutes away from a CVS type of store. Perhaps your experience is more rural than suburban?

I'm pretty familiar with the DC suburbs and between normal daytime traffic(not even considering morning or afternoon rush hour), traffic lights, and the time to get to a main road from you community(very slow speed limits) a half hour wouldn't surprise me at all and 45 minutes is very possible.

Re: Why Generation Y Is Causing The Great Migration Of The 21st Century

#17

Post by TheFuture »

toyg wrote: post #7
learc83 wrote: post #5

There's plenty of truth in that article, but I can't help but think that this trend is almost purely a product of demographic changes. People wait longer to get married and have children, so there way more 25-30 year olds who worry more about living within walking distance to a bar and less about a backyard and a nice school. Many of the urban Gen Y the article talks about will move back to the suburbs when they have…

The self-driving car will still need energy to run. Suburbs are built on the principle that energy is cheap. That is no longer the case.

The self driving car will be much more energy efficient, especially if they can communicate with each other to optimize traffic flow

Re: Why Generation Y Is Causing The Great Migration Of The 21st Century

#18

Post by learc83 »

toyg wrote: post #7
learc83 wrote: post #5

There's plenty of truth in that article, but I can't help but think that this trend is almost purely a product of demographic changes. People wait longer to get married and have children, so there way more 25-30 year olds who worry more about living within walking distance to a bar and less about a backyard and a nice school. Many of the urban Gen Y the article talks about will move back to the suburbs when they have…

The self-driving car will still need energy to run. Suburbs are built on the principle that energy is cheap. That is no longer the case.

Gas prices have gone up, but adjusted for inflation not outrageously so.

http://inflationdata.com/inflation/images/charts/Oil/Gasolin...

Additionally gasoline isn't the only energy source. Once solar power reaches grid parity and electric cars are popular gas prices won't mean much.

You're right that energy is finite and if we stay on the current energy consumption growth curve, energy will continue to get more expensive.

However by that logic--extrapolating the decrease in time it takes me to run a mile each week--I'll be able to teleport in a few months.

Population growth slows when a country becomes developed and at some point we will reach an equilibrium.

Re: Why Generation Y Is Causing The Great Migration Of The 21st Century

#19

Post by [deleted] »

learc83 wrote: post #12
gte910h wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Atlanta Public schools are pretty horrible What do you mean? APS mostly gets issues with disparity of performance (aka, the children of the rich people far outperform the children of everyone else). Sure, there are bad ones. But don't live there: http://www.atlantapublicschools.us/site/default.aspx?PageTyp... This explains why you may think the schools are bad: http://midtown.patch.com/articles/grady-high-school-one…

I was mainly talking about things like the recent widespread systemic cheating. 44 out of 56 schools were cheating on the CRCT. Edit: by things like that, I mean an environment where that large a percentage of schools feel pressured to cheat. I'm aware that state and federal rules and standardized tests are responsible for some of the pressure, but none of the other school systems in the metro-atlanta area had such w…

[deleted]

Re: Why Generation Y Is Causing The Great Migration Of The 21st Century

#20

Post by nostromo »

I'm noticing this play out on the ground in Seattle. There's a big box Target opening up right downtown. It used to be that if you wanted anything from Target, WalMart, BestBuy, etc., you had to go on an adventure to the suburbs. I've noticed other retailers are making moves to smaller stores located in city centers (like BestBuy recently announced http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/business/2012/04/best-buy-releas...).

Also, Amazon is surprisingly still located downtown(ish). Most companies its size prefer to locate somewhere suburban on a sprawling corporate campus. It could be a competitive advantage; I know a number of young people who would stay away from Microsoft because of the dreaded commute to Redmond.

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