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Millennials, being young, are low/early on the lifetime earnings curve. Their incomes can be expected to increase as they age and move up the career path.l
Older/earlier generations there are unlikely to enjoy income gains comparable to millennials - if they had more money they'd already be living elsewhere - and therefore it is the non-millennial older residents likely to be displaced.
Millennials, being young, are low/early on the lifetime earnings curve. Their incomes can be expected to increase as they age and move up the career path.l
Older/earlier generations there are unlikely to enjoy income gains comparable to millennials - if they had more money they'd already be living elsewhere - and therefore it is the non-millennial older residents likely to be displaced.
Bingo. If they, when young, didn't do what's expected, I have zero sympathy for them. And don't pull the "they had health issues" excuse. Millions have had health issues and soldiered on. And very few of them had those issues when young. The problem only cropped up when they failed to increase their career then found themselves with health issues as they got older. Those health issues probably wouldn't have been so catastrophic is they had been in a better career.
After watching a lecture from Jeff Speck, I found a consistent theme within the reasoning behind his plans for Lowell, Mass which seemed to be centered in part around attracting millennials. Many cities seem to follow this theme as millennials have been the driving force around gentrification efforts by flocking back into the urban centers to seek a more walkable, livable area.
I, like many of my millennial peers, am currently sitting in my suburban apartment and will have to get in my car to drive to work tomorrow morning despite the fact that I would rather live downtown near my office and walk to work or even ride my bike on the walkable downtown streets. I would be the poster child of what city planners in our town were trying to attract when they reduced automobile lanes and put in bike lanes, green space, and downtown apartments/lofts/ and condos.
This begs the age old question as to what can be done to gentrify downtown yet not price out the ones that will breathe life into the city? Many times the idea of affordable housing comes in. While that is a great solution to ensure diversity within a city, it does not address pricing out millennials as many college-educated 20-somethings will make too much to qualify.
Though millennials have been the force moving into urban cores, studies have shown they are now beginning to go back to the suburbs due to being priced out thanks to gentrification as well as greater competition in the housing market of urban cores from affluent retirees looking for maintenance free living in walkable communities close to amenities.
While this is something that should not come as a surprise to anyone and furthermore, something that is certainly relative depending on the city, it still begs you to ask what can be done? What will the future of cities be if millennials are priced out and replaced with boomers? With suburban developers looking at new urbanism to build, will this ultimately re-create decay in our urban cores once the baby boomers begin to die off? Could a rise in public transit running out to these redefined suburbs do more harm to inner-cities than the interstates did in the 50's as public transit is more limited and in some cases, less convenient than getting in your car and hopping onto a freeway?
Would love to here some greater insights as to how others see this playing out in the future or what can be done about it.
The people who are moving to the suburbs are millennials who are native to the cities. Millennials who are from urban areas are less educated, tend to have children early and are vying for more space for their offspring's. Also millennials from cities are looking for better cost of living and better quality of life. You saw these exact same comparisons with urban blacks from the north moving to the suburban parts of the south. The people moving to urban areas are mainly white millennials, and the reason why is that suburbs lack jobs in white suburbia. You cant have a degree in fine arts in suburbia, or have an English major. Such degrees wont get you far in white suburbia, compared to having a degree in engineering, criminal justice, nursing, education and so on.
Suburbs are also changing. Urban suburbs are coming along, suburban living with urban flare. This I like very much. A good example of this is New Rochelle which is outside of NYC. or Crystal City in DC.
To answer the thread title question - YES! Those are the people starting out in life, moving frequently, buying houses, etc. Not entirely, but people in their 20s/30s are the bulk of the latter two.
Rather than restrictive parking regulations, adopt the Donald Shoup approach--let the market determine the parking, instead of some bureaucrat's equation. Parking requirements intended for car-centric neighborhoods have no place in a downtown, but if a developer really wants to spend a lot more to provide parking there because they think it's right for the customer base they are pursuing, more power to them.
There are some ways to limit or mitigate against gentrification--like affordable housing policies that require a percentage of affordable housing. It both cools the construction market somewhat and also ensures that a neighborhood will still have a mixed-income population, which limits the signals to the market that properties should be priced higher, and scares out the yuppies who won't move to a neighborhood if they see poor people in it. Flexibility in zoning to allow micro units can help, to some extent, but often developers consider larger units a better investment because square footage and OSB is cheap, while the base stuff required for each apartment (plumbing, kitchen, HVAC) is pretty much just as expensive for a 1000 sf unit as for a 350 sf unit. Promoting denser infill in an existing potentially-gentrifiable neighborhood can help reach that goal too, as long as there is some protection for the existing housing--both single-family homes and apartments. Where I live, there are beautiful historic districts but most of them are mixed in with 1950s-1970s apartment buildings, which has acted as a buffer against gentrification for many years, because the folks looking for consistently-charming neighborhoods of only historic homes were dissuaded by the occasional Fifties "dingbat" or Seventies mansard four-plex in between the Queen Annes and Craftsman bungalows. Not that I advise random demolition in intact historic neighborhoods--but those who received limited damage have the potential to retain a more diverse population, if there is still room for subsequent new growth to take the edge off population pressure. And, ideally, some requirement that at least a few of those units be affordable to those making lower-than-average income.
Yeah, right! See this post from the Denver forum:
Quote:
Originally Posted by SkyDog77
While definitely think the implementation has been very bad, what this thread is missing is the real "why".
All the new condo buildings that are and have been going up in Cherry Creek North have only been required to build a single parking space per unit. It's left Cherry Creek in a parking crisis as many of the units house multiple adults with multiple cars. These people have been parking at the mall and walking home, leading the mall to need to do something.
I believe a pay for parking system would be effective and not detrimental to the mall business if they simply did 4 free hours instead of just one.
I ride my bike in to Cherry Creek now whenever possible because messing with parking has become too difficult.
More flexible housing options are needed in gentrifying, popular and getting expensive areas.
Micro units ~350 sf and less restrictive parking regulations where adequate transit is present to lessen the cost of building and having an ability to add more units per total building sf.
Cherry Creek is a shopping mall in the Cherry Creek neighborhood of Denver in this case. It's also a creek.
Wburg's post referring to downtowns
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