8 ms·

I'm noticing similar sentiments among friends in New York City. Everyone came here for jobs/culture/friends after graduating, but the mad-rush of millennials is

I'm noticing similar sentiments among friends in New York City. Everyone came here for jobs/culture/friends after graduating, but the mad-rush of millennials is making the city more and more unlivable. Nobody wants to spend their thirties in a cramped, overpriced studio, but nobody is ready to leave their hip, startup lofts for the drudgery of a Westchester office complex (let alone endure an hour commute into the city every day). Smaller cities (the Portlands, New Havens, and Columbuses of the country) will continue to inherit the overflow, with those cities that have the lowest cultural cachet taking the lowliest remnants. Given the demand for urban environments by businesses and consumers, it seems like the only thing holding back any city from heavy growth is incompetence or negative reputations.

chaosbutters314 9y ago
What is wrong with westchester? It doesn't smell as bad, you can get a place for the same price as nyc with 4x the space and you're only a 1 hr drive away if you don't try to go during rush hours. A big problem I see with going to westchester to nyc is the parking costs in nyc. Like $50/day is wayyyyyyyy too high to be sustainable. And the trains are just too slow, it is faster to drive from where I am in westchester than take the train.
- schnevets 9y ago
  I meant the Westchester comment as a bit tongue-in-cheek. More of the stereotypical opinion among my generation, rather than my own opinion. I'm actually shopping around in the Hudson Valley with my fiance atm. Regardless, the "corporate campus" will need to go through a reimagining if it wants to appeal to city-weary knowledge workers. This will require some more lateral thinking beyond replicating Facebook's Headquarters in White Plains, NY.
tmh79 9y ago
> but the mad-rush of millennials is making the city more and more unlivable IMO, the problem is the policies of the city that are unfriendly to growth and make housing a zero sum game, the problem isn't than people expressing their preferences.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- sliverstorm 9y ago
  It may not be a zero sum game, but it at least approximates/approaches zero sum. How exactly would you change downtown Manhattan such that anyone & everyone who wanted to live there could?
  - twinkletwinkle 9y ago
    You've drawn a false dichotomy between the current situation and an unrealistic scenario. The truth is there could be more growth and room for more people without it being room for literally everyone.
    - sliverstorm 9y ago
      Right, and that's what I mean by it approximates/approaches zero sum. I'm not arguing against development, I just think a lot of the pro-development folks imagine that cities are making things zero sum with their policies, when real property will always have that element.
      - Dylan16807 9y ago
        Housing does not inherently have a major zero-sum factor until you're inside one of the densest downtowns in the country. In the general case it's all about policies and whether they allow demand to turn into construction.
  - RealityNow 9y ago
    > How exactly would you change downtown Manhattan such that anyone & everyone who wanted to live there could? That's not what we should be striving for. We should be striving to allow people to comfortably live and work outside of just downtown Manhattan. The biggest obstacles to that are zoning laws and a decrepit subway system that makes traveling between boroughs outside of Manhattan practically impossible.
nugget 9y ago
Is there a way to measure which cities are benefiting, and by how much?
- rayiner 9y ago
  Not really, because yuppie employment doesn't move the needle in most places. Pittsburgh is having a real renaissance with a tech scene built around CMU. There are new restaurants where you can get a bone marrow whatever. [But the city is on pace to post another double-digit percentage population loss this decade.] Edit: I can't read. Pittsburgh has only lost 0.7% since 2010: https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/pittsburghcitypennsylvania,US/PST045216 https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/pittsburghcityp....
  - YuriNiyazov 9y ago
    Did the renaissance start a decade ago? yuppie job growth takes a while to move the needle - first all the nonyuppies have to move out
  - ghaff 9y ago
    To this point, the urbanization trend is often overstated because, in the sense that people here use it, it's actually fairly limited. A lot of it is about college educated twenty-somethings moving to a handful of dense urban cores. Broader urbanization is much less pronounced and, to the degree it's a trend, it's mostly to what a lot of people here would be more inclined to call suburbs than cities.
  - rhapsodic 9y ago
    > But [Pittsburgh] is on pace to post another double-digit percentage population loss this decade. Out of curiosity, where did you get that information?
    - graphitezepp 9y ago
      I live in PGH and am to lazy to find a link, but can confirm that population is rapidly declining.
overcast 9y ago
I've seen quite a few New Yorkers moving Upstate to Western, NY. Rochester has been having quite a renaissance in the last 5-6 years. Especially in the food/cocktail scene. Outside of NYC, it's probably the best in the Northeast as far as I'm concerned. RIT, University of Rochester, and other top schools. Easy commutes, short rush hours, Fingerlakes, Great Lakes. There's multiple festivals nearly every week during the summer months. The Public Market is the second oldest in the entire country, and amazing. Far, and away the best grocery chain in the country (Wegmans). Also recently received $600 million in funds for photonics research. Also cost of living is LOW, any decent wage here, especially in tech. You'll live like a king.
- jrjarrett 9y ago
  I left Rochester in 2004, before the Kodak plane completely augered into the ground next to the Xerox, B&L, etc. I'd moved there after college because it seemed to be the last Upstate place with any life in it but that all drained away. What's changed in the intervening time? What's drawing people there, specifically for jobs?
  - pcsanwald 9y ago
    Everyone I know who has moved upstate has done it because they can work remotely as a software engineer, and they are either from there, or just like the quality of life / cost of living balance. So, I would say the availability of remote work rather than industry. There's obviously a significant sample bias in the above.
  - overcast 9y ago
    A lot of research has come here, especially with University of Rochester, and RIT getting a research program. UofR is a HUGE employer, Paychex, Rochester General Health, Wegmans, and like I said previously the food, and drink scene has just exploded. There are quite a few restaurateurs, chefs , and bartenders that have moved upstate from downstate. I'm directly involved with that stuff, so I hear/eat/drink quite a bit.
- dcole2929 9y ago
ghaff 9y ago
You're pretty much describing how Manhattan has been for many decades. New grads go into finance and they just have to live where the action is. Fast forward a few years and the vast majority of them take jobs elsewhere or move out to the burbs.
winter_blue 9y ago
> but nobody is ready to leave their hip, startup lofts for the drudgery of a Westchester office complex (let alone endure an hour commute into the city every day) I live in New York City, and I can certainly empathize with the no one wanting to do endure a long daily commute in a crowed, cramped, subway full of people where you likely might not get a seat. (LIRR/MNR/NJT are great in comparison (but terrible in frequency).) But I dissent on your comment on living and working in Westchester (or really any suburbia in general). I understand people think the city is hip and all, but I really like greenery, nature, having a lot of space, being able to get to places in the comfort of your car, reasonable/low cost to own a home, generally low cost of living, the lack of noise, clean air, etc, etc. What's so dull about it?
- MarchHare 9y ago
  Getting to use a car quickly becomes having to use a car in much of the U.S. There is a lot of middle room between suburbia and NYC for build environments.
- Sleeep 9y ago
  I'm not familiar with Westchester specifically but, to me, suburbia isn't good for any of those things you mentioned. To me suburbia feels like a giant mass produced parking lot and is an incredibly depressing display of concrete! Nature is nowhere to be found in the suburbs. The real estate is very expensive in desirable suburbs and traffic is still bad in the suburbs, just bad in a different way than in a bigger city. Right now I live in what I guess would be described as a town. Its ~100 miles from any major urban area and it's much more effective at providing the majority of the things you mentioned plus amazingly short commute times! It also has some sorts of benefits you would associate with the city as well - for example, I can walk to at least 10 establishments as well as 2 parks whereas when I lived in a suburb the street I lived off of was 4 lanes 45 MPH and didn't even have a sidewalk. Even if it did have a sidewalk the noise of a mass of neverending SUVs buzzing past is unpleasant. You would also have no problem driving almost everywhere in a smaller city.
  - smallnamespace 9y ago
dpflan 9y ago
It would be nice to see the visualization of the inflow-outflow: the people eagerly coming in to the city, then then gradual spreading out to adjacent metro areas as the city gets more crowded and unlivable. This style of growth would probably benefit from efficient, affordable, convenient transit options, like the high-speed rail teasers that pop-up every now and then in the news about connecting the east coast's major cities. Taking hints from the likes of Japan to support this growth; and other examples and ideas would be cool for discussion here as a solution to this metro-area-growth. > https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/sep/30/-sp-shinkansen-bullet-train-tokyo-rail-japan-50-years https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/sep/30/-sp-shinkanse... > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C5%8Dkaid%C5%8D_Shinkansen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C5%8Dkaid%C5%8D_Shinkansen
Tokkemon 9y ago
True facts, I just moved to Westchester after living in NYC for almost 20 years. An opportunity came to buy a lovely house overlooking the Hudson and I leapt at it. Brooklyn really had started to grate on me even though I was used to the "lifestyle" of living in New York.
Ologn 9y ago
> Nobody wants to spend their thirties in a cramped, overpriced studio, but nobody is ready to leave their hip, startup lofts Well I think this is it. I was born in New York City, and while it may be more expensive than some town in the Midwest, the housing problem is not like it is in San Francisco. On the other hand, if you insist on living in Greenwich Village or Williamsburg then you will have to pay. If you're OK with living in a slightly older, not super exciting, middle class neighborhood that has a half hour commute to the city, then you have plenty of affordable options. Another thing about New York affordability is rent in some towns in the Midwest is cheaper but you need a car, in New York City you can get around pretty well without a car. Also a commute into Manhattan does not have to be an hour. You can make a map of the rent prices of apartments in boring but decent neighborhoods that are within 10 minutes commute of Manhattan, then 20 minutes, then 30. Plenty of options. For myself, I can walk out my door and in less than thirty minutes walk out of a train in Penn Station. I used to live in another part of the city and my apartment door to office desk commute was less than 30 minutes.
sjg007 9y ago
It's probably in one's interest to be an early adopter in the tech migration (or wait for a collapse) unless you win the IPO lottery. You can get something nicer closer to work in a trendy area before prices go through the roof.
Spooky23 9y ago
This is just the normal migration pattern. Once you have kids and get married, the advantages of living in a big city start to go away. Those fun bars and restaurant become generators of noise and parking problems. The fun diverse neighborhood translates into a school district where the legacy of desegregations means your kid will be dragged across the city for school. The list goes on.
RealityNow 9y ago
NYC is a pretty terrible city to live in by first world standards unless you're wealthy. Crappy shoeboxes in tenement buildings that used to house servants go for outrageous prices, overcramped, awful subway (though Americans think it's amazing because they're not used to big cities that don't require a car). People put up with it because of the jobs, the people, the cosmopolitan nature of it, not needing a car, and because there aren't any comparable cities in the U.S. in terms of size, density, and significance. Millennials don't seem to be as fond as suburbs as the boomers (I personally hate suburbs). NYC used to be a city where artists and writers could live, but it's become a city of trust fund kids, corporate shmucks, and tourists. Everybody works all the time - not because they're working on groundbreaking stuff - but to make a buck. Personally my plan is to work remotely and go somewhere else, most likely outside the country because nothing in the car-obsessed suburban sprawl-infested U.S. compels me.
- cylinder 9y ago
  Mostly true, but they have built new highrise towers in Brooklyn. I am probably living in the most convenient building in the US right now, with lots of amenities in a very comfortable 1bdrm. The problem is it's still $3400/mo+ and all the buildings are rentals, no buying, and most of all this is not sustainable for us as a couple who plan to have kids so we have to jump ship. It's also very true that so many Americans are willing to put up with NYC because there's not many other options for proper cities in the US. The public transportation sucks and there's now a divide where everyone I know seems to be grabbing Uber to work which is totally ridiculous and irresponsible.
njarboe 9y ago
I would guess that one of the big reasons that there are a "mad-rush of millennials" into select cities is that most of the ambitious, type-A personalities used to try and pick a mate in the high density environment of a selective university. That is not nearly as common now but un-paired people still want/need a high density of potential mates that meet their minimum standards. Choosing what happening city to move to after college is now much more important instead of getting a job(s) and moving directly to a home selected for raising the kids.

chaosbutters314 9y ago

What is wrong with westchester? It doesn't smell as bad, you can get a place for the same price as nyc with 4x the space and you're only a 1 hr drive away if you don't try to go during rush hours. A big problem I see with going to westchester to nyc is the parking costs in nyc. Like $50/day is wayyyyyyyy too high to be sustainable. And the trains are just too slow, it is faster to drive from where I am in westchester than take the train.

schnevets 9y ago
I meant the Westchester comment as a bit tongue-in-cheek. More of the stereotypical opinion among my generation, rather than my own opinion. I'm actually shopping around in the Hudson Valley with my fiance atm. Regardless, the "corporate campus" will need to go through a reimagining if it wants to appeal to city-weary knowledge workers. This will require some more lateral thinking beyond replicating Facebook's Headquarters in White Plains, NY.

tmh79 9y ago

> but the mad-rush of millennials is making the city more and more unlivable IMO, the problem is the policies of the city that are unfriendly to growth and make housing a zero sum game, the problem isn't than people expressing their preferences.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
sliverstorm 9y ago
It may not be a zero sum game, but it at least approximates/approaches zero sum. How exactly would you change downtown Manhattan such that anyone & everyone who wanted to live there could?
- twinkletwinkle 9y ago
  You've drawn a false dichotomy between the current situation and an unrealistic scenario. The truth is there could be more growth and room for more people without it being room for literally everyone.
  - sliverstorm 9y ago
    Right, and that's what I mean by it approximates/approaches zero sum. I'm not arguing against development, I just think a lot of the pro-development folks imagine that cities are making things zero sum with their policies, when real property will always have that element.
    - Dylan16807 9y ago
      Housing does not inherently have a major zero-sum factor until you're inside one of the densest downtowns in the country. In the general case it's all about policies and whether they allow demand to turn into construction.
- RealityNow 9y ago
  > How exactly would you change downtown Manhattan such that anyone & everyone who wanted to live there could? That's not what we should be striving for. We should be striving to allow people to comfortably live and work outside of just downtown Manhattan. The biggest obstacles to that are zoning laws and a decrepit subway system that makes traveling between boroughs outside of Manhattan practically impossible.

nugget 9y ago

Is there a way to measure which cities are benefiting, and by how much?

rayiner 9y ago
Not really, because yuppie employment doesn't move the needle in most places. Pittsburgh is having a real renaissance with a tech scene built around CMU. There are new restaurants where you can get a bone marrow whatever. [But the city is on pace to post another double-digit percentage population loss this decade.] Edit: I can't read. Pittsburgh has only lost 0.7% since 2010: https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/pittsburghcitypennsylvania,US/PST045216 https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/pittsburghcityp....
- YuriNiyazov 9y ago
  Did the renaissance start a decade ago? yuppie job growth takes a while to move the needle - first all the nonyuppies have to move out
- ghaff 9y ago
  To this point, the urbanization trend is often overstated because, in the sense that people here use it, it's actually fairly limited. A lot of it is about college educated twenty-somethings moving to a handful of dense urban cores. Broader urbanization is much less pronounced and, to the degree it's a trend, it's mostly to what a lot of people here would be more inclined to call suburbs than cities.
- rhapsodic 9y ago
  > But [Pittsburgh] is on pace to post another double-digit percentage population loss this decade. Out of curiosity, where did you get that information?
  - graphitezepp 9y ago
    I live in PGH and am to lazy to find a link, but can confirm that population is rapidly declining.

overcast 9y ago

I've seen quite a few New Yorkers moving Upstate to Western, NY. Rochester has been having quite a renaissance in the last 5-6 years. Especially in the food/cocktail scene. Outside of NYC, it's probably the best in the Northeast as far as I'm concerned. RIT, University of Rochester, and other top schools. Easy commutes, short rush hours, Fingerlakes, Great Lakes. There's multiple festivals nearly every week during the summer months. The Public Market is the second oldest in the entire country, and amazing. Far, and away the best grocery chain in the country (Wegmans). Also recently received $600 million in funds for photonics research. Also cost of living is LOW, any decent wage here, especially in tech. You'll live like a king.

jrjarrett 9y ago
I left Rochester in 2004, before the Kodak plane completely augered into the ground next to the Xerox, B&L, etc. I'd moved there after college because it seemed to be the last Upstate place with any life in it but that all drained away. What's changed in the intervening time? What's drawing people there, specifically for jobs?
- pcsanwald 9y ago
  Everyone I know who has moved upstate has done it because they can work remotely as a software engineer, and they are either from there, or just like the quality of life / cost of living balance. So, I would say the availability of remote work rather than industry. There's obviously a significant sample bias in the above.
- overcast 9y ago
  A lot of research has come here, especially with University of Rochester, and RIT getting a research program. UofR is a HUGE employer, Paychex, Rochester General Health, Wegmans, and like I said previously the food, and drink scene has just exploded. There are quite a few restaurateurs, chefs , and bartenders that have moved upstate from downstate. I'm directly involved with that stuff, so I hear/eat/drink quite a bit.
dcole2929 9y ago

ghaff 9y ago

You're pretty much describing how Manhattan has been for many decades. New grads go into finance and they just have to live where the action is. Fast forward a few years and the vast majority of them take jobs elsewhere or move out to the burbs.

winter_blue 9y ago

> but nobody is ready to leave their hip, startup lofts for the drudgery of a Westchester office complex (let alone endure an hour commute into the city every day) I live in New York City, and I can certainly empathize with the no one wanting to do endure a long daily commute in a crowed, cramped, subway full of people where you likely might not get a seat. (LIRR/MNR/NJT are great in comparison (but terrible in frequency).) But I dissent on your comment on living and working in Westchester (or really any suburbia in general). I understand people think the city is hip and all, but I really like greenery, nature, having a lot of space, being able to get to places in the comfort of your car, reasonable/low cost to own a home, generally low cost of living, the lack of noise, clean air, etc, etc. What's so dull about it?

MarchHare 9y ago
Getting to use a car quickly becomes having to use a car in much of the U.S. There is a lot of middle room between suburbia and NYC for build environments.
Sleeep 9y ago
I'm not familiar with Westchester specifically but, to me, suburbia isn't good for any of those things you mentioned. To me suburbia feels like a giant mass produced parking lot and is an incredibly depressing display of concrete! Nature is nowhere to be found in the suburbs. The real estate is very expensive in desirable suburbs and traffic is still bad in the suburbs, just bad in a different way than in a bigger city. Right now I live in what I guess would be described as a town. Its ~100 miles from any major urban area and it's much more effective at providing the majority of the things you mentioned plus amazingly short commute times! It also has some sorts of benefits you would associate with the city as well - for example, I can walk to at least 10 establishments as well as 2 parks whereas when I lived in a suburb the street I lived off of was 4 lanes 45 MPH and didn't even have a sidewalk. Even if it did have a sidewalk the noise of a mass of neverending SUVs buzzing past is unpleasant. You would also have no problem driving almost everywhere in a smaller city.
- smallnamespace 9y ago

dpflan 9y ago

It would be nice to see the visualization of the inflow-outflow: the people eagerly coming in to the city, then then gradual spreading out to adjacent metro areas as the city gets more crowded and unlivable. This style of growth would probably benefit from efficient, affordable, convenient transit options, like the high-speed rail teasers that pop-up every now and then in the news about connecting the east coast's major cities. Taking hints from the likes of Japan to support this growth; and other examples and ideas would be cool for discussion here as a solution to this metro-area-growth. > https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/sep/30/-sp-shinkansen-bullet-train-tokyo-rail-japan-50-years https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/sep/30/-sp-shinkanse... > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C5%8Dkaid%C5%8D_Shinkansen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C5%8Dkaid%C5%8D_Shinkansen

Tokkemon 9y ago

True facts, I just moved to Westchester after living in NYC for almost 20 years. An opportunity came to buy a lovely house overlooking the Hudson and I leapt at it. Brooklyn really had started to grate on me even though I was used to the "lifestyle" of living in New York.

Ologn 9y ago

> Nobody wants to spend their thirties in a cramped, overpriced studio, but nobody is ready to leave their hip, startup lofts Well I think this is it. I was born in New York City, and while it may be more expensive than some town in the Midwest, the housing problem is not like it is in San Francisco. On the other hand, if you insist on living in Greenwich Village or Williamsburg then you will have to pay. If you're OK with living in a slightly older, not super exciting, middle class neighborhood that has a half hour commute to the city, then you have plenty of affordable options. Another thing about New York affordability is rent in some towns in the Midwest is cheaper but you need a car, in New York City you can get around pretty well without a car. Also a commute into Manhattan does not have to be an hour. You can make a map of the rent prices of apartments in boring but decent neighborhoods that are within 10 minutes commute of Manhattan, then 20 minutes, then 30. Plenty of options. For myself, I can walk out my door and in less than thirty minutes walk out of a train in Penn Station. I used to live in another part of the city and my apartment door to office desk commute was less than 30 minutes.

sjg007 9y ago

It's probably in one's interest to be an early adopter in the tech migration (or wait for a collapse) unless you win the IPO lottery. You can get something nicer closer to work in a trendy area before prices go through the roof.

Spooky23 9y ago

This is just the normal migration pattern. Once you have kids and get married, the advantages of living in a big city start to go away. Those fun bars and restaurant become generators of noise and parking problems. The fun diverse neighborhood translates into a school district where the legacy of desegregations means your kid will be dragged across the city for school. The list goes on.

RealityNow 9y ago

NYC is a pretty terrible city to live in by first world standards unless you're wealthy. Crappy shoeboxes in tenement buildings that used to house servants go for outrageous prices, overcramped, awful subway (though Americans think it's amazing because they're not used to big cities that don't require a car). People put up with it because of the jobs, the people, the cosmopolitan nature of it, not needing a car, and because there aren't any comparable cities in the U.S. in terms of size, density, and significance. Millennials don't seem to be as fond as suburbs as the boomers (I personally hate suburbs). NYC used to be a city where artists and writers could live, but it's become a city of trust fund kids, corporate shmucks, and tourists. Everybody works all the time - not because they're working on groundbreaking stuff - but to make a buck. Personally my plan is to work remotely and go somewhere else, most likely outside the country because nothing in the car-obsessed suburban sprawl-infested U.S. compels me.

cylinder 9y ago
Mostly true, but they have built new highrise towers in Brooklyn. I am probably living in the most convenient building in the US right now, with lots of amenities in a very comfortable 1bdrm. The problem is it's still $3400/mo+ and all the buildings are rentals, no buying, and most of all this is not sustainable for us as a couple who plan to have kids so we have to jump ship. It's also very true that so many Americans are willing to put up with NYC because there's not many other options for proper cities in the US. The public transportation sucks and there's now a divide where everyone I know seems to be grabbing Uber to work which is totally ridiculous and irresponsible.

njarboe 9y ago

I would guess that one of the big reasons that there are a "mad-rush of millennials" into select cities is that most of the ambitious, type-A personalities used to try and pick a mate in the high density environment of a selective university. That is not nearly as common now but un-paired people still want/need a high density of potential mates that meet their minimum standards. Choosing what happening city to move to after college is now much more important instead of getting a job(s) and moving directly to a home selected for raising the kids.