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Okay let me repeat. I moved to baltimore at age 26 a corp transferee. I and a few others my age -single or childless couples - moved to urban nabes - Bolton Hill, Mt Vernon, Otterbein. Several single folks chose affluent low rise apt complexes in suburban baltimore county. Almost everyone moved to the suburbs when they had kids. Thats just what you did. While different cities had different patterns, I think this pattern was common for baby boomers in large metros.
Today, it seems like the young childless persons who both work in the city and reside in suburban areas are much more the exception. Even when they work in the suburbs they seek out places with some of the charesterics associated with urban living. And while the majority move out - they tend to wait longer. Often till the kids are school age. Sometimes till the kids are middle school age.
Thats a change. There are many possible reasons for it.
Will things remain this way in 20 years? will they revert back to the boomer pattern? Will they go further than they have in the urbanist direction? I do not know.
I didn't see your earlier posts before I made my comment.
I see what you're saying, but I just don't agree with you. But maybe you're right, after all, we're both talking about our own personal experiences and people we know.
But if there are more young families living in urban areas now, I think that's just because the percentage of people living in urban areas has increased overall. So not only are there more people in their 20s and 30s living in urban areas, there are also more old/older people as well. My point was that I don't think there is anything unique about our generation that makes us crave the things that an urban environment provides more than prior generations did when they were young.
I didn't see your earlier posts before I made my comment.
I see what you're saying, but I just don't agree with you. But maybe you're right, after all, we're both talking about our own personal experiences and people we know. .
I think there is data supporting my POV, but I don't have any handy right now.
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But if there are more young families living in urban areas now, I think that's just because the percentage of people living in urban areas has increased overall. So not only are there more people in their 20s and 30s living in urban areas, there are also more old/older people as well.
As I suspect Jeb will point out, there really arent more people, as a proportion of the population in urban areas vs suburban areas - there may be more white people, more college educated people, but the working class, lower middle class families, etc, have continued to depart (DC is one of several exceptions to have significant net pop growth - not so in Philly, Baltimore, Chicago, etc) limiting ourselves to the demographics I think you have mind - Im not sure - there is anecdotal evidence of empty nesters going back to cities, but ive seen claims that the numbers really arent that great - for say 40YO single or divorced folks, Im not sure.
I would need data, but, again, my impression, for all its worth, is that the shift such as it is is heavily led by millenials.
According to one of my Millenial kids, newly married couples that age are choosing older SFHs closer in in established neighborhoods rather than similarly priced but larger ones out in the exurbs. Annandale seems to be an area that's particularly attractive with that group as prices there are relatively reasonable. Anyone else seeing this as an emerging trend? What do you think are some implications of it?
I think young families and younger people like me are are happy with less closer into the City. I'm single and bought a late 90s condo, but if I had a few hundred grand extra that a partner could help with, it would likely go into a smaller, older house in Arlington or Alexandria rather than a McMansion in the burbs.
the other aspect of numbers - the baby boomer cohort was bigger in absolute numbers than the succeeding cohorts. Way back in the 1980s my wife was worried if succeeding cohorts would even be able to keep up the neighborhoods we boomers had transformed - since they (gen X - the millenials were of course not born yet) were fewer in number - and she didnt expect them to love cities any more than we did (perhaps to love them less).
yet in succeeding years - not only in baltimore and DC, but in many metros - not only have the areas transformed by boomer yuppies remained desirable and vibrant, but many additional areas have become so. In the face of smaller birth cohorts. Something has to be driving that trend - maybe its a return among all cohorts driven by cultural change or by gas prices/congestion - but I think its not unreasonable to think that the urban preference of college educated millenials is greater than that of college educated boomers.
My friends and my husband and I are all "millenials" (80's babies). Those of us who have purchased property have chosen to either a) be as close to work as possible, or b) if the work location is yuck, chose a home near public transportation and night life.
We all work. A lot. Most of us put in 10+ hour days at the office, many travel out of town for weeks at a time, etc. My friends are mostly lawyers, IT consultants, business people. When you have to be in the office so often, a commute is the last thing you want. And if you have to commute, you have no energy for large property maintenance when you get home. It's much more appealing to have a townhouse in Bethesda where you can walk to dinner after you get home, than a house in the suburbs where you have to cut the lawn after work.
I don't see this changing in my social circle once kids are coming. None of my friends plan to stop working once babies come (who knows, this may change...but currently this is the plan), so the idea of adding a bigger home, a longer commute, and more maintenance on top of kids' activities seems counter-intuitive. It would be a better use of time/money for many of them to pay for private school as necessary than to add another hour or two in the car each day and pay for the extra childcare.
Practical sensible decisions are necessarily going to be based on personal preferences - how much do you value being near bike lanes, say vs how much do you value having a large lawn (since those are often tradeoffs) etc = which ARE at least potentially subject to cultural change. So even discounting people choosing "urbanism" for ideological reasons, cultural shift can be at work. I mean most people in America are not living so close to subsistence that they are not in some way making choices that express their preferences, which are rooted in culture.
Of course in the case of DC, Arlington, etc its difficult to seperate the cultural shift from the impact of congestion and gas prices. In places where people reverse commute, or seek "urbanism" in places where traditional suburbia is quite affordable (One Loudoun?) it may be easier to make a case for pure cultural shift. As I said above in someplace like Annandale, the case for pure response to transportation costs (both $ and time) is easier to make. I think there are other close in places that are similar to Annandale in this respect.
I also wonder how we seperate out cultural change from technological and institutional change. A minor example - the growth of bike facilities, and of car sharing services like Zipcar, have made it easier for households to live owning fwer cars (either carfree or "carlite"). That doesnt mean preferences for convenience vs costs vs aesthetics have changed - but that the availability of certain products has shifted the balance (in the other direction, improved gas mileage and alternate fuel cars may make longer auto commute lifestyles more viable, especially if combined with self driving cars)
Right. It's complicated, with numerous variables at work, so there's also a choice involved in using a term like "cultural shift." I'm not the language police, so at the end of the day I can't object if someone wants to use such a term, although my sense is that those who do so tend to be advocates for an urban lifestyle and/or like to think of themselves as in the vanguard. As long as they are honest with the facts, it's their prerogative.
I agree with you insofar as Annandale is concerned. It has few attributes of a hip suburb, but it does has a fairly nice and affordable housing stock. To the extent that younger people and families are buying houses there, I expect some considered places like Arlington and could not stomach how little they'd get for their money, while others may have considered places like South Riding and decided they were too far from their jobs. I think that, many decades ago, there was some thought to building Metro along Columbia Pike; had that happened, Annandale might look more like Ballston today.
Right. It's complicated, with numerous variables at work, so there's also a choice involved in using a term like "cultural shift." I'm not the language police, so at the end of the day I can't object if someone wants to use such a term, although my sense is that those who do so tend to be advocates for an urban lifestyle and/or like to think of themselves as in the vanguard. As long as they are honest with the facts, it's their prerogative.
I admit to liking urban living, but still want to explore whether cultural shift is happening, and in what way. Note, not all cultural change, is simply an arbitrary shift in preferences ("I like nutmeg, you like thyme" whatever). Sometimes there is cultural learning involved - for example I am more inclined to use chopsticks than my parents were, not out of an intrinsically greater preference, but because I learned younger how to use them, and so the cost benefit of using them is different for me - Im less likely to drop food or otherwise make a fool of myself with them.
Many aspects of urban living involve learning - both about how to overcome negatives and about positives to take advantage of. As more people live in urban areas, the knowledge of how to do so with less inconvenience may grow more widespread, changing tradeoffs. Thats a change I would call a cultural change, though its not a change in deep preferences.
Similarly I think over the last 30-40 years there has been a learning in "how to transform a place" For decades urban planners and policymakers were stymied with how to overcome the mutually reinforcing externalities associated with issues of housing decay, poverty concentration, poor amenities, crime, etc. They tried to wipe the slate clean with urban renewal, which worked in a few cases, but was often blighted by both its political heavy handedness, and the poor architecture and urban design associated with it. In the 1970s and 80s the solution arose from the grassroots - in which housing bargains motivated disregard for the other externalities, and those were minimized by starting at a "good" end of a neighborhood, or in the place with the best archtecture, with a waterfront, etc. And then bootstrapping occured, as more people were drawn in, amenities grew, crime decreased, etc (the parallels with the process of carving farms out of forest land were what motivated the "pioneering" term).
But I would say even in the late 1980s it was not clear how widespread this could be - if it was limited ONLY to places with victorian arch, with the best locations, etc. Over the last 20 years I think its become almost routine - everyone knows the pattern, and real estate speculators and other entrepreneurs anticipate it.
Im not sure if one calls that a cultural change - but its a learning that will not be forgotten, and that has changed locational patterns independent of changes in the price of gasoline, etc.
My friends and my husband and I are all "millenials" (80's babies). Those of us who have purchased property have chosen to either a) be as close to work as possible, or b) if the work location is yuck, chose a home near public transportation and night life.
We all work. A lot. Most of us put in 10+ hour days at the office, many travel out of town for weeks at a time, etc. My friends are mostly lawyers, IT consultants, business people. When you have to be in the office so often, a commute is the last thing you want. And if you have to commute, you have no energy for large property maintenance when you get home. It's much more appealing to have a townhouse in Bethesda where you can walk to dinner after you get home, than a house in the suburbs where you have to cut the lawn after work.
I don't see this changing in my social circle once kids are coming. None of my friends plan to stop working once babies come (who knows, this may change...but currently this is the plan), so the idea of adding a bigger home, a longer commute, and more maintenance on top of kids' activities seems counter-intuitive. It would be a better use of time/money for many of them to pay for private school as necessary than to add another hour or two in the car each day and pay for the extra childcare.
Times don't change much - lol. I could have written this post, myself, 15 or so years ago! That's life in the DC area....
We wound up moving a little further out (all the way to West Springfield from Annandale) and buying a house on a 1/4 acre because we missed having bbqs, a yard and we simply got sick of sharing parking spaces with the neighbors. By late 20's/early 30's we had pretty much stopped going out on the town so having a nightlife wasn't important to us. Having a little privacy and space was what motivated our move. Kids came later.
Times don't change much - lol. I could have written this post, myself, 15 or so years ago! That's life in the DC area....
We wound up moving a little further out (all the way to West Springfield from Annandale) and buying a house on a 1/4 acre because we missed having bbqs, a yard and we simply got sick of sharing parking spaces with the neighbors. By late 20's/early 30's we had pretty much stopped going out on the town so having a nightlife wasn't important to us. Having a little privacy and space was what motivated our move. Kids came later.
Like I said...maybe we'll all change our minds. We're all late 20's/early 30's now, and we still have bbqs and get togethers in townhouses. Honestly, we are the only ones with a SFH, and no one is willing to trek "all the way out to Burke" to spend time at our place, so we're constantly heading out to Arlington/Bethesda/DC to their townhouses or condos.
Our jobs are in suburbia, so we were able to buy in suburbia and maintain a <30 minute commute. Our friends mainly work downtown though, and the trade off just isn't worth the extra commute. The ones who already have kids are content (for now!) to raise little ones in townhouses to have the extra time at home. If they could afford SFH's 10 minutes from work, I think they'd jump on it--but that's not an option financially.
I agree about the good schools, and you could be right about my circle of friends. After all, I know maybe about 20 couples in that scenario and there's a lot more people than that. My point is that pretty much everyone wants a short commute, newish house bigger than 2,000 sq ft, and good schools for their kids. So if all of my friends could afford it, they would have stayed in DC and Arlington - but not all can. So the ones that stayed have tended to be wealthier and could afford to send their kids to private schools while the ones that left for the suburbs had to make some sacrifices. But either way, I don't think their thinking or priorities are that different from Generation X or Baby boomers.
Where did most of them grow up? In those same places or are they largely transplants from out of the area? Did they go to public schools here? I'm curious if that may be a difference.
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