Why are young adults returning to the city?

Much has been said about Millennials — the generation born from 1980 through the late 1990s, sometimes called Gen Y and Echo Boomers — choosing downtown living.

Two-thirds of this cohort believes it is important to live in walkable neighborhoods, the consultant Robert Charles Lesser & Company has reported. As downtowns revive, Millennials often account for the lion’s share of the market.

In June we reported that the nation’s Driving Boom, which last six decades, is over — largely because Millennials are driving less. “Between 2001 and 2009, the average yearly number of miles driven by 16- to 34-year-olds dropped a staggering 23 percent,” wrote Brad Plumer in The Washington Post. Rising costs of driving, barriers to teenagers getting licenses, technology that makes car-free living easier, and preference toward urban living are reasons for the trend, the article explained.

The latter factor may be the most important, but Plumer doesn’t explain that preference. Millennials apparently drive less because they prefer walkable places and they prefer walkable places because they drive less. Let me take a stab at answering why.

Millennials are the children of the Baby Boomers — America’s first suburban generation. When Boomers came of age, a few revitalized urban places like SoHo — but for the most part they embraced the suburban lifestyle. Why aren’t Millennials doing the same? One possibility is rebellion — but I think it’s more than that.

How suburbs and cities have changed

Consider that suburbs and cities have changed dramatically. Many Boomers grew up in the Leave it to Beaver suburbs of the 1950s and 1960s, which still held on to  the memory, at least, of strong community ties. Other Boomers grew up in cities before the economic and social disintegration of the urban core. Yet when Boomers flew the coop, in the 1970s, cities were in free fall. Residents were leaving in droves, crime was skyrocketing, and neighborhoods were in decay. This reality permeated popular culture. To choose urban living then was to swim against a powerful tide.

By the 1980s and 1990s, when the Boomers were raising the Millennials, the suburbs had lost most vestiges of traditional community that they retained in the 1950s. According to a market study for the reviving downtown of Wichita, Kansas:

“Younger singles and couples comprise 71 percent of the market for new dwelling units within the Downtown Study Area,” wrote Zimmerman-Volk Associates, the authors. “This generation—the Millennials—is the first to have been largely raised in the post-’70s world of the cul-de-sac as neighborhood, the mall as village center, and the driver’s license as a necessity of life. In far greater numbers than predecessor generations, Millennials are moving to downtown and urban neighborhoods.”

This generation looked around their home towns and saw something missing. They found that something in neglected historic urban centers. After 2000, when the Millennials began to leave home, cities had hit bottom and were on the way up. Crime had peaked in the early 1990s and was dramatically falling off in many cities.

Moreover, the Echo Boomers went to college. Millennials are the most educated generation in history. As Christopher Leinberger has reported, Washington DC has the most educated populace in the nation, and the highest demand for walkable urban centers. The higher the education level, the greater the demand for urban living, he says.

Millennials grew up in far suburbs in the 1980s and 1990s, and then lived in walkable college neighborhoods for four years. Along with a taste for urban living, they also had acquired the highest levels of student debt in history, which puts a damper on their appetite for car and house loans.

But the biggest incentive may be their peers. They want to go to walkable places, because that’s where their friends are. The tide has shifted and it’s carrying 80 million people inward. This generation doesn’t want to go back to the ‘burbs.

Robert Steuteville is editor and publisher of Better! Cities & Towns. This article appears in the August print issue.