Why Generation Y Is Causing The Great Migration Of The 21st Century
placeshakers.wordpress.com
placeshakers.wordpress.com
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.
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...
For example, Boston is growing at a decent rate. Boston however has a tremendous education, health care, biotech/pharma, finance and high-tech industries. Boston crime is also at all-time lows. However, small cities in Massachusetts such as New Bedford, Fall River, Worcester, and Lowell are continuing to see people move out -- usually towards Boston, but also towards smaller suburbs that are continuing to grow. Actually, Boston bedroom communities aren't exactly hurting, as they're pretty decent at attracting lots of good jobs on their own (particularly the 128 corridor).
A great contrast is Philadelphia versus Pittsburgh. Although within the same state, they're still 300 miles apart and the differences in their industries and crime do much to determine how their populations are growing and falling respectively.
Worcester is at a cross-roads now. It has excellent proximity to Boston and Providence. It has a strong bio-medical industry as well as three highly regarded universities (Holy Cross, WPI, and Clark) as well as several smaller, less known ones. Several major hospitals too. If Massachusetts can sort out the commuter rail situation and cut travel time down to <45min between Worcester and Boston then it could really take off as an alternative to Boston for people with families and on budgets.
It does have its issues. Certain neighborhoods are giant crime-pits (Main South, Vernon Hill etc.) On the other hand it has an extremely safe, pleasant west-side with some pockets of high-affluence. East and North Worcester range from OK to good. It's a very spread out city despite having 180K people living in it which unfortunately means cars are a must.
It's all going to be about transportation. Commuter rail to Boston will improve, part of the deal to allow CSX to expand its freight yard in Worcester was to add 10 - 20 more trains to Worcester between now and 2020. The Pike bypasses Worcester but since the completion of the 146 connector that has stopped being a real issue. If those things occur, and it is a big-if, expect the urban-downtown area of Worcester to boom as it's a small downtown area and it will be important to tightly pack around the train station because of the lack of transportation around the rest of the city.
A lot of the oil companies are starting to move out of downtown. Exxon as always been up in The Woodlands, ConocoPhilips is out at Highway 6 and I-10. Shell is moving a lot of people out to their west Houston facility and BP recently opened a huge new expansion to their campus in the same area.
Now, urban Houston, which I would say is anything inside the 610 loop, still grew by a large percent though I'm not exactly sure what that is.
I'd also argue that there's never been a better time to live in Houston. Growing tech sector, amazing healthcare sector with some of the best hospitals and research institutions in the world. Also a food scene which is possibly the most interesting and innovative in the nation right now.
http://igpa.uillinois.edu/content/census-reveals-population-...
Thanks to the economy, however, the trend is somewhat reversed:
http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20120406/BLOGS02/1204...
Off the top of my head some modern comedies that don't fit are Modern Family, Parks and Recreation, and Desperate Housewives.
There were plenty of classic shows set in the city as well. Mary Tyler Moore, The Jeffersons, The Bob Newhart Show, Three's Company, Taxi, Welcome Back Kotter.
Modern family is about people older than Gen Y members and is set in Hollywood. While they're not downtown, they spend "fun" time there.
Many of the urban Gen Y the article talks about will move back to the suburbs when they have children.
A 1-2 bedroom apartment is fine for 2 people, but apartment living gets rather cramped when you have 4 or 5 people living there.
Atlanta Public schools are pretty horrible, I can't imagine many of my friends who currently live in the city staying there when they have kids who are school age.
Additionally the rise of the self driving car is going to completely torpedo 90% of the advantages of living in a city.
Clearing up 1 mile of stop-and-go is not going to make up for the 9 miles from your house to the city streets on your 10-mile commute.
Personally, I'm also pretty sure the net effect of self-driving cars will also be to spread out the suburbs even more too. Most people imagine self-driving cars that are still owned by you and have single-owner use patterns, but the economics of that don't work; in nothing flat owners start renting their car out during their off times, AirBnB style, and it's a short hop from there to simply providing cars as a service. Somebody is going to get very rich being the somebody who wins on the network effects and creates "the" transportation-as-a-service company. It's going to be an enormous change, and I find it unlikely it's going to play to the city's advantages in terms of people actually moving there.
Notice that cars have markedly different highway vs. city mileage ratings. The old BMW I used to drive would get better than 26 (not great by today's standards) on an open freeway, but 17-18 in city traffic due to repeated acceleration and idling. Algorithmically optimized traffic flow would allow cars to spend more time in the highway range.
This is an over-generalization. Yes, city mileage is generally lower than highway, and yes, it is because of stop-and-go. But markedly different? My old car got 32 freeway, 29 city. My current car gets 27 freeway, 25 city. Cars with a large difference, like your BMW, suffer either from poor aerodynamics or engine configuration. (That is to say, the particular engine setup operates very inefficiently when accelerating from a stop) Now, the most damning evidence of all- the Prius gets 40 freeway, 44 city.
Automating drafting is an interesting suggestion, but anecdotal evidence from hypermilers suggests that even when drafting close behind a big-rig, you typically only net a few percent. In addition, to get any kind of measurable improvements from drafting behind a regular car, you'd basically have to ride their bumper. It seems unlikely we will permit computers to try this any time soon.
In the end, my point is not that improved traffic flow is worthless- it is a win in nearly every aspect- but that it is a small, incremental win. It is not going to reduce our energy consumption enough as to obviate our dependence on cheap energy, which ties back in to the earlier point this discussion spawned from:
Suburbs are built on the principle that energy is cheap. That is no longer the case.
We can drastically increase fuel efficiency by making our cars out of carbon fibre, and it doesn't have to be more expensive or less safe. Check out Amory Lovin's concept car for one example.
We believe lighter = less safe, despite evidence to the contrary (in reality it's smaller = less safe, lighter = safer). Perhaps computer controlled cars will allow us to stop feeling the need to fortify our cars more and more, making the road less safe for everyone.
Whoops, you're right, that is a silly mistake on my part.
And that's if you're driving a Mini Cooper.
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.
But gas prices are themselves a big (maybe even the largest?) drivers of inflation, since they are not only counted themselves as they result in price raises for a lot of other products, like food.
http://jerrykhachoyan.com/gas-expenditures-as-a-percent-of-p...
Yes other components of personal expenditure are affected by gas prices which affects the percentage, but when an individual is considering where to live the only component of gas price that matters is it's direct cost.
http://mjperry.blogspot.com.au/2012/04/natural-gas-prices-fa...
As fracking takes off globally they'll probably decline even further.
Cars can run on natural gas. Many, perhaps even the majority of taxis do in Australia.
When people get self-driving cars whatever is most economic, natural gas, petroleum or electric power will be used.
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-step...
RE Grady (and others): "Focus schools are either for graduation rates lower than 60% or achievement gaps in achievement or graduation rate between the highest performing subgroup and the lowest performing subgroup. They are on it because of the gap on graduation rate between their highest subgroup and their lowest subgroup."
Basically, lots of child performance in school is based on who your parents are, not what your school does.
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.
http://www.ajc.com/news/volume-1-of-special-1000798.html
http://www.ajc.com/news/volume-2volume-2-of-special-1000571....
http://www.ajc.com/news/volume-3volume-3-conclusions-why-100...
It's actually a pretty interesting read, with testimony and specific allegations.
Mean scores aren't as high for the APS schools: http://www.atlanta.k12.ga.us/domain/104
I agree, its all about having kids and growing up. Once your children become your priority, your school district becomes important, and every major urban center in the USA has a school system somewhere between bad and god-awful. Watch the movies Waiting For Superman and The Cartel if you want to see what a mess that situation is. I don't see it getting resolved in the next 5-10 years, which is when gen y will start having kids.
Contact your legislators for any solve-all plan you have that will "fix" the costly inept educational system. As for your impositions or projections on others path through life, save them, it looks like they generate a lot of passive aggressiveness in you already.
Now we tend to self segregate and choose to live in places with people like us. As professionals choose to live in cities instead of suburbs, schools around them will likely be better funded.
1) Curriculum 2) Safety
It's one thing to make the argument that most public schools are mediocre and the parents need to be more involved in their kids lives to make sure they stay focused and do well. But it's quite another to willingly send your kids to a school with drugs, gang violence, and an abundance of teen pregnancies just because you don't want to commute to work every day.
For example, in NYC the center has gentrified; most of the slummy areas of Manhattan are now desirable to live in. While areas that used to be quiet and suburban in Queens and the Bronx have ended up being sketchy, in a sort of inversion. In most of Europe that's also happened; if you can help it, you don't want to send your kid to a school district in the Paris suburbs, if there's any way you can manage to get them into a good urban district.
As a different example, Houston is developing into a strange multiple-rings shape. The city center is gentrifying (medical center, Rice area, downtown), while the inner suburbs are going downhill as the housing stock gets older (60s/70s-construction suburban neighborhoods aren't looking so good anymore), and then really far away suburbs with newer construction (20+ miles, 1990s-present housing stock) are upscale again.
It seems that what has happened is that, for the majority of American cities, they grew as an either/or option: you're either in the city, or you're in the suburbs, and the car enabled that in cities where it could. The cities which were geographically constrained, such as NYC or SF, were unable to sprawl outwards, and have commutes within reason, so the middle-classes stayed. That means things like good schools are able to exist because the demand was always there from the middle classes that didn't leave.
Part of that I think is also because some of the costs that incurs aren't properly charged. There was a proposal in Houston to charge developers for the cost of new infrastructure. For every 10,000 new homes built in a new suburb, for example, you can estimate what new capital infrastructure they'll need: on average 1 elementary school, 0.5 high schools, 1 fire station, 1 police station, X miles of roads, X miles of sewers, etc. (whatever the real numbers are). Add the estimated cost of that up, divide by 10,000, and charge that as a per-house assessment on new developments. That proposal failed, though, so new developments' indirect capital costs are subsidized by homeowners in the older areas of the city.
The interesting component is how the development gets financed in a Ponzi-esque scheme. Suburbs are built out with municipal bonds, which subsidize the build outs of services (schools, police, fire stations, roads) while keeping property taxes low. Once the suburb is completely built out, the taxes double or triple to pay back the bonds. Then the next suburb just north or south of it is built with more new bonds and the cycle continues.
There's a stripe running east west through the center, following the hills and the area immediately south of the hills, from Santa Monica to Griffith Park. That stripe is notably higher priced, with prices within the stripe generally increasing towards the ocean.
Then there's a ring around that stripe where prices decrease for a while, and then move up again to be sort of traditionally suburban in pricing.
And then there's the strange outer regions like Topanga / Calabasas / Malibu, where you move waaaay up the scale again.
Are you sure this is a recent phenomenon? Just two examples I'm aware of:
Rolling Stone recently ran an article on the fratboy culture at Dartmouth: (the university "Faber College" was based on) http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/confessions-of-an-i...
(It was amazing and disturbing how many of the "traditions" described in the book are mentioned in the Rolling Stone article, 50 years later...)
[1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Real-Animal-House-Fraternity/dp/B0...
My anecdotal, local information shows people highly motivated to do things outside of the University and heading to upper 5 or 6 figure salaries at tech start ups, financial firms, and established software and engineering companies.
I also see students pursuing advanced degrees in Physics, Math, and other sciences who truly want to do research that expands our understanding of the world.
Do I think we're "some sort of elightend [sic] urban dweller"? No. But I certainly am skeptical that we any more immature than the generations before us, of the generations to come.
The rise of what? We've seen some experimental designs, but I don't see the "rise" coming any time soon. Plus, the price of oil is more important factor --as for them "coordinating with other vehicles to increase efficiency" (as someone writes in a comment below), well, that seems marginal, especially since we are discussing driving OUTSIDE of the city.
Nevada already implemented regulations to allow companies to test drive self driving cars on its roads, and all it will take for the rest of the nation to follow is for Google get California on board.
The technology is already here. It's all about regulation and politics now, and there is so much money to made that it's just a question of when not if.
If I can't buy a self-driving car in 10 years, I'm going to build my own.
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During a half-hour drive beginning on Google’s campus 35 miles south of San Francisco last Wednesday, a Prius equipped with a variety of sensors and following a route programmed into the GPS navigation system nimbly accelerated in the entrance lane and merged into fast-moving traffic on Highway 101, the freeway through Silicon Valley.
It drove at the speed limit, which it knew because the limit for every road is included in its database, and left the freeway several exits later. The device atop the car produced a detailed map of the environment.
The car then drove in city traffic through Mountain View, stopping for lights and stop signs, as well as making announcements like “approaching a crosswalk” (to warn the human at the wheel) or “turn ahead” in a pleasant female voice. This same pleasant voice would, engineers said, alert the driver if a master control system detected anything amiss with the various sensors.
The car can be programmed for different driving personalities — from cautious, in which it is more likely to yield to another car, to aggressive, where it is more likely to go first.
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Also, the Wikipedia page indicates the same: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_driverless_car
Of course, it may have been pre-programmed, but I don't believe so. What I don't think it can yet do is navigate arbitrary systems like drive-thrus.
The current state of the technology is really impressive, but there are still real technical problems to solve before it is something that is ready for you to buy. As far as I know, nobody has successfully driven a driverless car in snow, for example.
Snow is really the last technological problem left. Rain is fine, but heavy snow completely blocks almost all visual indicators.
That being said, it's not an insurmountable problem and there are plenty of places where snow is almost never a problem.
If you look at the DARPA grand challenge. In 2004 the farthest anyone got was 7 miles. Yet one year later 5 vehicles successfully completed the 150 mile course, and all but one of the 23 finalists surpassed the 7 mile best from the previous year.
If California said that beginning in 2015 it would be legal for private citizens to own and operate a self driving car, I have no doubt there would be several companies with commercial products the first day they were legal.
The obstacles are almost totally political at this point.
No matter who is doing the driving, walking a few blocks is more convenient than driving a mile. And anyway, walking is more fun.
I grew up in suburbs, and the article described my experience perfectly. I may someday move away from the urban core, but I don't forsee myself ever living more than a block or two from a few cafes and a market.
Driverless cars will help almost all of those. Think how much more viable zip cars would become if you didn't have to get to the car in the first place. If you could just call a car with a smartphone app and it would show up.
Parking is a non issue because it drops you off at the door, and it can go park wherever is cheapest or just head off to another customer and you can call another one later.
>walking a few blocks is more convenient than driving a mile.
That's true if you live somewhere with a climate similar to Southern California, but there are plenty of places where I definitely do not want to walk a few blocks during most of the year.
Congratulations: You've just described taxi cabs.
That's around 10 times the cost of a car, and a quick google search shows that the average taxi in San Francisco uses $20,000 per year in gas (down to only 7k for hybrid taxis).
So in short, the largest cost (other than in places like New York where it cost a million for a taxi license) is labor, which driverless cars remove.
Driverless cars will not be as cheap as cars which require drivers.
There will be ongoing operational and maintenance costs which cars with drivers do not have.
Liability insurance will likely be lower for driverless cars, but damage and theft insurance will likely be higher.
Not every cab needs to be operated 24/7, there are clear peak and non-peak times which allow for fewer than #Cabs x 5 drivers for full practical coverage.
And, of course, there's no guarantee that any savings in operation would be passed on to the consumer (see electronic publishing).
So I don't think it's automatic to say driverless cars will result in cheaper transportation costs. It's possible , but it's far from guaranteed.
I have a pretty fair knowledge of the Google car and the Stanford cars that came before it. The equipment at scale isn't really that expensive and can be fairly easily retrofitted onto existing cars.
Even if it ends up costing 50k and an extra 20k per year in maintenance (which is probably too high for a computer and a few actuators and sensors) taking driver labor out of the equation results will result in vast cost savings as a percentage of total operation costs.
>theft insurance will likely be higher
Theft will be nearly impossible for an average criminal. Remove human controls and you've instantly defeated 99% of car thieves.
Call it three drivers for practical coverage. Now we're at $120k for labor (3 x40k). But we've added 50k to operations in other areas. So now we're saving 70k in overall costs. Which is good, but a long way from 200k.
If you just needed 1 driver for the car, then there's a net loss with the driverless version (with these theoretical numbers anyway).
Perhaps the most efficient method would be a base fleet of driverless cars that operated 24/7, with peak times adding in cheaper cars with human drivers....
In this case it's likely that they would be. Book publishing is a rather unique case in that it's a million natural monopolies; if you want to read The Hunger Games, you're not going to be satisfied with a close substitute. Taxi services are fairly commoditized- excluding medallions, pretty much any automated taxi to show up at your door and bring you where you need to go is going to be acceptable. Thus you've got a much higher elasticity of demand thanks to this substitutability, so consumers capture more of the surplus. There's a low barrier to entry, so consumers can and will just switch to any cheaper option that comes along.
Plus, driverless cars can't form taxi associations with reasonably large voter blocs.
No matter how much tech you throw at it, walking down to the corner market for vegetables is more efficient (in a purely value/cost sense) than driving the same amount of time.
My wife and I lived in New York for several years. We walked a few blocks to the grocery nearly every day. Was it awesome every time? Honestly, no. Winters can be brutal.
But it was better than trying to hail a cab and wasting 10 bucks. And in the end, it felt good. Walking a little every day is good for you.
I think driverless cars will eventually revolutionize longer trips, but I don't see it competing with living in urban cores much. Many people want to be able to walk or ride a bicycle as part of their daily routine. Many people want to be in close physical proximity to other people. Driverless cars don't reduce any of these desires.
Of course they do. But the average car is only driven a few hours a day. If you take the total fixed costs of a car and divide it amongst dozens of people, it's much cheaper than ownership.
I also expect insurance prices to drop dramatically for self driving cars, given that over 90% of accidents are caused by human error.
Additionally I don't think parking will be a problem with all of the now empty driveways of former car owners. Just give a discount for zip car service to customers in exchange for using their driveways to park downtime cars.
>But it was better than trying to hail a cab and wasting 10 bucks. And in the end, it felt good. Walking a little every day is good for you.
>Many people want to be able to walk or ride a bicycle as part of their daily routine. Many people want to be in close physical proximity to other people.
All of those are true and I think given demographic shifts--people marrying and having kids later, resulting in more single or childless 20-30 year olds--we will definitely see growth in urban centers.
However, I think it's almost purely a result of demographic shifts not some new desire to live in cities. Young childless people have always wanted to live in the city, we just have more of them than we used to.
OK, without the actual numbers it's hard to debate the details here. Maintenance will obviously be higher, and depending on the competition and regulation, cost could vary dramatically.
But we're getting off topic. Earlier, you said:
> the rise of the self driving car is going to completely torpedo 90% of the advantages of living in a city.
Saving money on car ownership is not 90% of the value of urban life for me, and never has been.
> However, I think it's almost purely a result of demographic shifts not some new desire to live in cities. Young childless people have always wanted to live in the city, we just have more of them than we used to.
I don't believe this either, and it's what I was getting at earlier. I don't foresee myself every living outside of walking distance from essentials, especially once I have children. I hear the same from my peers, but I guess time will tell.
The climate issue can easily be addressed with a good coat and maybe a decent pair of snow boots. I really can't express how lazy and decadent this argument sounds to me--if it's not a clear, sunny day, you have to ferry yourself around in a thousand pounds of steel?
Just so you know I'm not talking shit, whenever I could, I'd walk 10, 20, 30 minutes across campus and across town in anywhere from 0 to 100 degree weather, in snow, rain, hail, anything you could name. I had insulated canvas grocery bags so my ice cream wouldn't melt in the summer and my milk wouldn't spoil in the summer. And I'm a pretty lazy and spoiled person when it comes to physical comfort.
You'd save money and it would be better for the environment if you took cold showers, but are you going to? Are many other people going to? Or are you going to buy a hot water heater and continue paying maintenance and energy costs for it. (I experimented with taking only cold showers--in the winter--for a few months btw)
And if you compare the climate of Los Angeles to New York, Boston, Portland, or Vancouver--empirically, it turns out climate isn't a determining factor.
I have no idea why anybody who is not in finance would care to live in NYC. That's a late-boomer bias, probably caused by watching Barney Miller.
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.
The city gov is trying to make the downtown more livable, but it still needs more commercial presence; there's a bit too much housing and not enough places to buy what you need. And public transit could be better obviously.
The Connector:
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/misc/09-06connectorFS.as...
> I know a number of young people who would stay away from Microsoft because of the dreaded commute to Redmond.
I did it for four years and will never do it again, Connector or not.
Northgate isn't out in the suburbs, it's quite well inside
of Seattle's city limits.
I live at 9th and Madison, and I don't own a car. Northgate is way the hell far away from downtown: probably 20 minutes by bus.
In fact most will struggle to keep their place in the socio-economic scale, some will go down from middle class, and it's not "the future", it's already happening.
But I guess is far more "positive" to say YGens just "don't like suburbs anymore" rather than admitting that if suburbs were indeed still cool most wouldn't be able to afford a house there anyway.
Let's be honest, even many boomers and XGens had to get into massive debt to buy a house in those places, and some are living under a tarp now.
Not talking about the problem doesn't make it go away...
Its worth also noting that a lot of this is down to government and planning laws, which in the 1950s (generally when they were introduced on a wide scale) hugely subsidised suburban development and road building, to the expense of existing urban areas (which were largely unfunded). 60 years of cumulative common sense has led to a re-emergence of city centres as nice places to live (and cost-effective for governments) rather than the 'slums' of the early century.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight
Another part of the governmental subsidy problem is that governments by design tend to redistribute wealth out of cities and into rural and suburban areas. It even happens at multiple scales; Seattle pays taxes to the Washington State government which are then redistributed to outlying towns, but Washington pays taxes to the US federal government which are then redistributed to Wyoming and Alaska. Until governments are redesigned along the principle that human beings, and not parcels of land, are the true stakeholders, this will be a systemic problem.
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 have far to go nor will I need to bother with highways too often.
Okay, so Houston isn't a paradise of car-independence but I think the Montrose, Washington Heights and Rice Village areas of Houston definitely fit this article well.
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.
I do see more construction nearer to the center, at least. There are condos and townhomes in the Medical Center area that were abandoned and/or slums 10 years ago.
Houston is a great 'secret city' that few know about, but the effects of its lack of public transport (insane traffic on the freeways) can be seen daily.
But you are correct, If I was to move back down there I would immediately try to get a place in the Heights or Montrose.
Absolutely. Fortunately my new employer is in the middle of downtown but the fact that the big employers in Houston are leaving the 610 loop does skew the population distribution.
I've read elsewhere that the statistical center of the Houston region by population is almost at Highway 6 and I-10 now, largely due to growth in Katy.
Given that Katy ISD is opening five new high schools in the next few years at 3.5k students each, it's not really surprising.
For instance, Cook County in Illinois (where Chicago is located) saw a 3% drop in its population from 2000-2010. By contrast, Cass County in North Dakota (where Fargo is located) saw a 21% population increase from 2000-2010.
(source was 2010 census - http://www.usatoday.com/news/census/index?refresh=1)
Now, there are parts of ND that are growing, which is largely attributed to oil sands exploration. Which is attracting blue collar workers from some of the declining cities.
It's very difficult to make predictions on such trends, however, and the article's points rely on a great number of undisclosed assumptions on the future.
If I am old and divorced i'd rather have neighbors across the hall than a house to maintain, even if I can afford it.
Source? By the last numbers I've seen, net wealth increases directly with age.
What you see above and below is where the US stood in 2007. Again because this data is as close to 100% accurate as you can get.
Avg Net Worth Bottom 25%: $4,600 Avg Net Worth Next 25 – 50%: $21,700 Avg Net Worth Next 50 – 75%: $78,900 Avg Net Worth Next 75 – 90%: $242,800 Avg Net Worth Top 10%: $1,606,600
Compare to Chicago where running out of contact solution means taking the elevator down 28 floors to the 7-11 in my building.
And I don't know about So-Cal, but Nor-Cal "suburbs" are far denser than in DC. People call Silicon Valley a bunch of suburbs, but as far as I can tell its a series of small urban centers connected by a highway.
Of course I have also never learnt to drive despite now being 40. I can NOT thrive in a suburb. It also helps that I found a damn nice area to live.
But honestly I think this owes as much to deliberate urban planning efforts in the 80s/90s to "revitalize downtown" as it does to anything GenY wants. It is now easy and fun to live in the city again, instead of it being a desperate scary place; all the poor people now largely live way the fuck out in the burbs and have nightmare commutes to their shitty city jobs.
What this means is that living outside of a major city is just untenable, because changing jobs means changing cities, and no one wants to do that every few years. If you loe uour job or just need to change, and you live in New York, you're OK. If you live in Dayton, Ohio, though, you're somewhat out of luck. The appeal of the star cities is skyrocketing because of this change: because the rest of the cities just don't have large enough job markets, considering how specialized most modern work is and how frequent job changes are becoming.