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OTOH, you are complaining about the job market, etc. You might sit down and talk with your parents and find out what the job market was like when they entered it. Very few people had it easy.
The early Boomers were the best educated generation in American history, but there were way too many of them for the number of jobs available. It was really competitive for jobs and add affirmative action into the mix and it was especially hard for some. There was the draft and Vietnam. Today it is nearly the opposite, there are plenty of positions for qualified applicants but not enough have the qualifications needed. The younger generations can blame only themselves for not being qualified for the many jobs available. The easy degrees are not the ones in demand. Higher math, hard sciences, ie engineering, chemistry, are positions in demand, not humanities. Do you have a hands-on real world skill? Can you fix an airplane or an air compressor? Massage therapists are not really essential to an economic recovery. OK, I'm done. Good luck young ones.
The early Boomers were the best educated generation in American history, but there were way too many of them for the number of jobs available. It was really competitive for jobs and add affirmative action into the mix and it was especially hard for some. Today it is nearly the opposite, there are plenty of positions for qualified applicants but not enough have the qualifications needed. The younger generations can blame only themselves for not being qualified for the many jobs available. The easy degrees are not the ones in demand. Higher math, hard sciences, ie engineering, chemistry, are positions in demand, not humanities. Do you have a hands-on real world skill? Can you fix an airplane or an air compressor? Massage therapists are not really essential to an economic recovery. OK, I'm done. Good luck young ones.
This is funny, because I'm 29 years old (Gen Y) but I tend to agree with the boomers a bit more on this thread than I do with the people who think they are speaking for my generation, based on my life experience so far.
Katiana reminds me of my mom and I respect what she has to say, even when I disagree at times on other City Data forums, like on Politics & Other Controversies. Her comments that are along the lines of 'we didn't think we would do ______ when we were young, either' are fairly accurate, I think, and not meant to be condescending. She's sharing her life experience.
Priorities change throughout life and I'm finding that now, at 29, I'm living a life that I didn't imagine for myself when I was an idealistic 18 year-old senior in high school. And that's OK -- because I'm happy with how everything has turned out so far! A few things have happened during my 20s: I bought a house (that happens to be in the city), I found a job that I've been at for nearly 5 years, I lived in three cities in three different states (early 20s), and I'm thinking about adopting a child, for instance. I've noticed that my priorities have changed a bit. I'm concerned about things like property taxes (they rise, and the city public schools get more and more from me, but they never seem to improve), the cost of energy, quality of schools, overall cost of housing (is a condo in the city the most practical arrangement for my situation if I work in the suburbs?), taxation, food prices, etc. I call it growing up. I'm thinking about things that I didn't think about when I was younger and I'm making choices that probably would surprise some people who knew me when I was 18.
I wanted to live in the city when I was 18.. and I DO live in the city, yet, I've become more open-minded toward those who live in the suburbs. Everyone has priorities and sometimes a suburban setting is what best fits those priorities.
Just as an aside (and not as a personal attack against anyone specifically), I feel like a lot of my fellow Generation Y members are immature, babyish, and need to grow the hell up. Sometimes I'm embarrassed by my generation. No, I'm not perfect, but I feel like I've grown and matured a lot in my 20s, and I have friends who are the same age who still act like they're 18 year-olds.
If you really want to dissect queens village, maybe it would be better to ask in the NYC forum, instead of over analyzing it based on one picture
2. Trees grow in over time - yeah, if someone is indicting suburban development as a policy based on loss of trees which will grow in eventually, thats silly. OTOH if they are saying they just dont want to live in a subdivision like that NOW, thats a personal matter. and if they want to critique lower density autocentric development because of the amount of land that goes under asphalt, relative to the population, thats more legitimate, IMO
3. AFAICT, age, marital status, stage in life, are far more drivers of urban vs suburban preference than are birth cohort.
I remember when Boomers were being succeeded by gen X as 20 and 30 somethings, and my wife said "they arent as commited to being urban pioneers as we were - we will move off to the suburbs, they wont move in to the cities, and all the nabes like Bolton Hill will decline again" I said that wont happen - single, young, childless people will still be drawn to these nabes, esp if they work downtown. I was right, and in Baltimore and many other cities those nabes survived, even when succeeding cohorts were smaller in number than boomers. And of course in a few cities, like NYC and DC, such nabes have expanded dramatically, in a virtous cycle.
Just as an aside (and not as a personal attack against anyone specifically), I feel like a lot of my fellow Generation Y members are immature, babyish, and need to grow the hell up. Sometimes I'm embarrassed by my generation. No, I'm not perfect, but I feel like I've grown and matured a lot in my 20s, and I have friends who are the same age who still act like they're 18 year-olds.
There is A LOT of truth to that... but it's also to be expected, considering Y'ers were generally spoiled, coddled and helicopter-parented more than any other generation alive today.
in my location i don't buy the argument from boomers "yeah we were going to fix the cities but then we had kids." putting aside the dismissive tone, i think that if there was a reform movement when the boomers were in their 20s, that i would see physical evidence of it in the cities. but i don't. we would have a bunch of 70s condos or large scale rehab projects or something on the scale of what we have today. but it isn't there.
Location: from houstoner to bostoner to new yorker to new jerseyite ;)
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This thread has devolved into petty bickering and personal attacks and therefore will remain closed. No matter what generation you belong to, we are mostly all adults here-- act your age!
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