While Millennials have been moving into U.S. cities and spiking urban population, that influx may have already reached its peak, according to urban planning professor Dowell Myers of the University of Southern California. This article from Natalie Delgadillo of CityLab highlights how cities may have reached “peak Millennial,” with a potential shift to suburban living.
For all the talk of city-loving Millennials, some surveys show that plenty of them actually prefer the suburbs overall, and still plan to move there eventually. Census data released last year suggests that the suburban shift may merely be being delayed, not foregone: while Americans aged 25 to 29 are moving to the suburbs today at a slower rate than they did in the mid-1990s, those aged 30 to 44 are moving there at a faster one.
USC urban planning professor Dowell Myers is among the doubters. At the University of Texas City Forum last month, he ventured that cities have reached “peak Millennial,” or the highest influx and presence of Millennials living in urban areas – and, he argues, it’s only going down from here.
In 2015, those Millennials born in 1990 – the largest cohort born in any one year – turned 25. Myers argues this is an important milestone, marking the year that Millennials begin to take their housing and work situations more seriously. Many of them have already made the jump from their parents’ homes or college into a city-center, where they’re living independently and focusing on their careers. “At this age, you’re likely a single adult who’s been out of college for a little while,” Myers says. “And you’re starting to get more serious about establishing your independent adult life.”
This group of Millennials, along with all the ones that came before, Myers says, have been flowing into cities and causing a spike in the urban population. But from now on, there will be fewer young people moving into cities, because there will simply be fewer of them period. If you imagine the inflow of young people to cities as a faucet in a bathtub, Myers says, that faucet has been turned up higher and higher for the last decade or so. But now, it’s finally being slightly turned down by the dip in total youth population numbers. Additionally, as the largest group of Millennials grows older, many of them will begin to make the shift into suburban family life.
The basic consequence? U.S. cities that have been growing could begin to lose people again. This is a cyclical process that’s happened many times before, Myers argues. There are rising and ebbing tides of young people at any given time, and in the past, rising tides have always been associated with the growth of city populations, and lower tides with city population loss.
