With the suburban offices, either I'm bringing my lunch, or I'm driving somewhere to go eat. In both cases I'm in a sensory bubble, and that's bad. So I think Tony's idea has a lot of validity.
The companies that get the best people are the one's located in downtown. That alone increases productivity.
Sure "Lots of people don't want to live or work in a large city." is technically correct, but pretty much every other person wants to be able to walk to work, walk to resturants and never have to touch a car except for trips outside where they live. That lifestyle doesn't exist when you work in office parks.
The only argument for living in the burbs is price. People say "I want a yard"... if you had the money you would have it in the city.
Sure, some people make tradeoffs and would rather have the yard, but most people I know move to the burbs because of price and justify it with the yard. Most of the top talent lives in cities.
Are there exceptions? Of course.
I'm not sure we can say that youth wanting to move into cities is the main reason for rent increasing. That would seem to make a complex market far too simple.
A counterpoint: http://www.businessinsider.com/trend-reversal-young-american...
The article is 2 years old, but cites 2010 US Census data which found:
The article observes that 25-34 year olds were also flocking to cities in the 90's, based on data from the 2000 Census. However,
"In the last ten years, [the 25-34 year-olds from 2000's] presence grew 12% in the suburbs and shrunk by 22.7% in "historic core cities," like New York and San Francisco, according to Joel Kotkin at Forbes."
This may suggest a nuance, where urban areas are attractive to people with little relative wealth (can always find "cheap" apartments) and exploratory social lives (not yet married / having kids). And it suggests that the drive isn't necessarily novel.
But given some money and changed social needs, the same people end up moving out to where they have more space and greater comforts.
Even here in Germany, the same trend is evident -- lots of young and old people in the city centers, and a lot more families and middle-aged people out in the lower-density areas.
Something I've noticed working in a couple of city environments is that most of the variety of restaurants in the area I don't take advantage of anyway since their geared towards dinner patrons and/or are overpriced for the kind of quick lunch I want during the work day. So I usually end up boiling down an urban work area to a half dozen places to eat.
A suburb area I worked in before had twice that many with good lunch options within a 5 minute walk. A couple nearby office campuses require a short drive, but at least 2 dozen good lunch places to eat within a 5-10 minute drive.