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This article doesn’t jive whatsoever with my anecdotal experience as an urban dwelling elder millennial. As my friends and family form families, they either st

• rayiner 7y ago
  Do you and your friends make a lot of money? I’m the same age, and the only people I know starting families in the city are high income professionals. My wife and I (snobby city people) toughed it out until our daughter was ready for kindergarten, but even we weren’t willing to spend $1 million+ on a house in one of the few good school districts in DC when the time for that came. I’ve traded cocktails at the Peninsula for, well, cocktails at the Maggianos, but I can park right next to the entrance and not have to drag a stroller around, so that’s pretty great.
  • hoodwink 7y ago
    Based on these replies, I guess it is just my bubble. My peers and I graduated into the finance boom and were able to ride the paycheck economy before the Great Recession.
    • dajohnson89 7y ago
      what is the paycheck economy?
  • inferiorhuman 7y ago
    I’ve traded cocktails at the Peninsula for, well, cocktails at the Maggianos, but I can park right next to the entrance and not have to drag a stroller around, so that’s pretty great. Driving to a bar to drink alcohol is great? It's better than being able to walk to a bar or take public transit? How? To me that sounds incredibly reckless.
    • rayiner 7y ago
      If you’re planning on having more than a couple of cocktails with dinner, you can always Uber. Ride sharing has been a huge boon for suburban areas. We can actually walk to a bar from our house (there happens to be a bar in our car dependent suburb) but it’s only a $10 Uber ride to the downtown of the satellite city where we live. For the two of us, Metro fare in DC wouldn’t be all that much cheaper.
      • pen2l 7y ago
        Well, you’ve certainly changed rayiner :) I have a distinct memory of you taking the other side in a comment a couple years ago (too lazy to dig it out now) talking about how easy it is being in nyc transit with a stroller
        • rayiner 7y ago
          Oh man. When my wife and I were in our 20s with one kid in New York, being hip urban parents was easy. I did not realize how unscalable that was. The second kid kills you.
          • pen2l 7y ago
            I am a pretend dad of three kids (I babysit my sisters kids very often). Once the littlest is above 4, it gets a lot easier. :)
• 6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
  Urban SF dwelling elder millennial here. My experience is the opposite. Everyone seems to end up in the suburbs (the peninsula). Eventually, I'd like to too.
• santaclaus 7y ago
  > Curious if this is my bubble or consistent. Depends where you live! I’m in Pittsburgh and there is still a culture here of bailing to the well heeled suburbs (cough cough Fox Chapel) when having kids. You couldn’t pay me to leave the city core, but the Midwest still clings to that suburban status symbol life more than the rest of the nation.
  • WkndTriathlete 7y ago
    > but the Midwest still clings to that suburban status symbol life more than the rest of the nation. I can't speak for all of the Midwest, but to add an anecdatum: I live in a suburb of Minneapolis/St. Paul. As (relatively) nice as those downtowns both are they are both still far noisier, dirtier, and more expensive to live in than the suburb I'm in; further, I look out at wildlife daily at my backyard that extends 1.5 acres, which I find quite pleasant. "Status symbol" has nothing to do with it.
• atwebb 7y ago
  >having a kid or two and staying in NYC or SF is the ultimate status symbol I understand it's expensive but it reads like you're tied to the city, I'm missing the status symbol portion, likely because I'm nowhere near either location. I've seen some of this, people move out because of schools or sports/events for kids specifically. To your point there are definitely more staying put than I would have initially assumed, I like a bit of each. Many suburban homes are massively oversized and have sprawling neighborhoods. Again, personal anecdote, I am seeing a lot of action in suburban governments focusing on connecting neighborhoods and rectifying some of the massive sprawl issues of the 90s by filling in differently and adding connecting trails/sidewalks.
  • hoodwink 7y ago
    I’m not tied to “the city”. In fact, I rather loathe SF and NYC (just finished a 3 year stint in SF). I’m just anti-suburbs. I’m pro-livable smaller cities like Philly, Austin, Denver, Nashville, Portland, Pittsburgh, etc. I’m extremely bullish on even smaller cities as the next wave, but that’s a separate story.
    • dajohnson89 7y ago
      could you elaborate on the smaller cities theory?
    • ericd 7y ago
      Know any good very walkable (with mixed zoning a la French towns) small cities with reasonable tech scenes in the US and good schools?
    • atwebb 7y ago
      I'm from one of those smaller cities. It is not a liveable city without the suburbs for most families, soon it really won't be without generational wealth. A majority of the millennial families are moving to the suburbs (or forced their by increased prices). The downtown areas are heavily skewed towards tourists or the childless/single similar to my previous post. I'm bullish on them too but, then again, there's a financial interest in my having that stance. EDIT: I'm curious what you think is a reasonable salary to live in the downtown/midtown areas of the smaller liveable cities.
• koolba 7y ago
  > Seriously, no one I know my age (35) willingly moves to the suburbs. Curious if this is my bubble or consistent. My anecdata is the total opposite. Every newly married couple I know that’s looking to have kids has either already left city living or the migration is in progress. The well off ones keep their old spots as a pied-a-terre for a distant future but there’s a universal distain for city life.
  • seanmcdirmid 7y ago
    Where do you live? I can imagine that the suburban exodus is more true for Midwest and southern cities and less true for west coast and northeastern ones.
    • almost_usual 7y ago
      Most of the people I know in the Bay Area are leaving SF and headed to either the Peninsula or East Bay when they have kids. Most people I know with kids are in the Peninsula. I do know a couple in their 40s with kids in the city. They did the opposite, went from the Peninsula to the city years ago (before the city became very expensive). I’d argue it’s a lifestyle decision more than anything else. Each couple or family has their own reasoning about why they moved. The attitude in the city is much more keep to yourself. Suburbs are gossipy and people tend to pay attention to everything. I would argue there are much more ‘mega wealthy’ people outside of the city.
      • seanmcdirmid 7y ago
        Is it really fair to call the peninsula suburban? I guess south and east of San Jose, but the Bay Area is heavily urbanized and pretty dense.
        • nitrogen 7y ago
          There are lots of houses and open space south of SF.
• opportune 7y ago
  No, most older millenials with kids that I know are moving to less expensive cities or the suburbs. I think it's mostly because in the US we have this idea that middle class+ kids need to be raised in detached SFH with front and back yards. The thing about SF and NYC (and Seattle and Chicago) is that most of the nicer, semi-affordable areas with SFH are actually in suburbs: the peninsula, Long Island/Westchester/gold coast, Bel-Red, North shore. There are definitely cities where affordable, nice SFH areas are not in suburbs, but usually they are the smaller ones that don't have/need the same degree of density
  • hoodwink 7y ago
    Agreed on less expensive cities.
  • jacobolus 7y ago
    > I think it's mostly because in the US we have this idea that middle class+ kids need to be raised in detached SFH with front and back yards. The ones I know mostly moved back to near where their parents live, because childcare and housing in SF are expensive. If they could have e.g. taken their rent-control with them from a 1-bedroom to a 2-bedroom apartment, or had better family leave and subsidized daycare, I get the impression a good proportion would have stayed for at least several more years.
• wahern 7y ago
  My take is that there is no clear-cut cultural dynamic. The article even tacitly admits that by explaining that the new so-called trend is limited to very specific areas centered around employment centers. The notion that culture is a predominate driver of urban-suburban migration never sat well with me. In nearly every place around the world these migrations are driven predominately by economic factors, particularly employment and housing costs. Except for the relatively wealthy, every other preference necessarily takes a back seat. The post-WWII generational migration to suburbia beginning in the 1940s is arguably an exception. OTOH, it was clearly driven by the automobile and accelerated by the interstate system opening up cheaper land without losing access to employment. But now traffic and other factors, such as regional industrial and commercial specializations, have made distance relevant again. The same trends that drove the return to urban areas persist. Because NIMBY suppression of housing development accelerated the rise of housing costs, we very quickly saw counter pressures back out to the suburbs. I'd argue this is still very much inline with an overall trend back toward cities, because the economics of distance and employment continue to favor density now more than ever. Again, the article admits this by explaining that the newly growing suburban cities are conspicuously close to urban centers generally, and employment centers specifically. Culture, racism, schools... these reasons resonant with people, but all these preferences take a back-seat to economic realities. If you're lucky enough to be able to say that you forwent opportunities for non-economic reasons, you're almost by definition part of a minority because the vast majority of people in this country do not enjoy such privileges of choice, at least not to any substantial degree. To that extent expressed preferences are incapable of explaining the fundamentals of large, national trends. When people give a reason for choosing a city or a suburb, they're often missing the forest for the trees--they're explaining their choice among a small set of options filtered by their means, not the reasons for the set of options they could realistically choose from.
  • tropo 7y ago
    The cultural dynamic is intertwined with economic factors. If you will have a 2-income family, you'll want to be where multiple jobs are within a commute. The 1-income family or single person can simply move as needed. If you will have a large family, you'll prefer a location where a large house is affordable. If you won't have a family, that doesn't matter. Cause and effect go both ways. People following a traditional lifestyle are pushed out of cities by economic factors, and people following other lifestyles are pushed into cities. Meanwhile, city dwellers are discouraged from living traditionally due to economic factors, just as non-city dwellers wanting two incomes have trouble finding that second job.
• zdragnar 7y ago
  For my group of friends, about 2/3 got out of the city as quick as they could. For the same price house, the suburbs offer a lot more bang for the buck, significantly less crime, and several of them don't even have kids yet. Granted, we don't live on one of the coasts. Part of what makes flight out to the suburbs easy is that public transit and driving in for commuting to work isn't terrible, though about half of us are working remotely now, so it's really more about access to occasional entertainment than anything. Personally, I moved out to a cabin in the woods, though I'm still close enough to the big city if something comes up. It does crimp my job opportunities since I don't want to commute in on a daily basis- I'm now limited to remote work, which has a much larger talent pool to compete with. Even still, there's nothing I would trade it for. Maybe when I'm old and senile, but until then, you won't catch me moving back.
  • hoodwink 7y ago
    For the record, I also moved from SF to a cabin in the woods, enabled by remote work.
• dahfizz 7y ago
  Raising a kid in a city is the "ultimate status symbol" exactly because it is very expensive and difficult. Most people would prefer a more comfortable, more affordable life. Plus your savings on rent would buy you a very nice "status symbol" car and pool.
• deleted 7y ago
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• wtvanhest 7y ago
  Commute times keep us in the city with a 10 month old. By the time he is 5, we are going to have very tough decisions to get the right set of tradeoffs.
• Causality1 7y ago
  Depends on the person. Personally you couldn't pay me enough to live in a big city. Looking out the window and not seeing trees, hearing an unending background of vehicles, and the smell all made me want to kill myself. These days all I hear out the window are insects and birds and when I look up I see stars, not advertisements. It feels so, so good.
• burlesona 7y ago
  This is my experience as well, that some people are moving the the burbs, but those who are complain about it and basically say “I didn’t really want to move but I got priced out.”
• irrational 7y ago
  I'm not sure other than my own anecdotal experience. I have a number of coworkers who as 20 somethings lived in the city and said they never wanted to leave. But then in their 30s they started marrying and having kids and without exception moved to the suburbs.
• asark 7y ago
  Same (age) demo as you. Among my friends and expanded co-worker circle, folks with kids split ~50/50 "would prefer urban"/"would prefer suburban or country". 100% are suburban. Deciding factors? Proximity to family (all 'burbs) and/or school quality. You live in the city if you're too poor to live where the good schools are, or you're so rich you can afford very high housing costs for a good in-the-city neighborhood plus tuition for private school. Out in the country, all the schools are bad—not inner-city bad, but bad. That leaves the 'burbs. [EDIT] I take back the 100%: a few former co-workers without kids are urban-dwellers, and exactly one who took a chance on the charter school lottery and would surely have moved out if it'd gone the wrong way.
• sirkneeland 7y ago
  Could be a bubble. I'm imminently planning to leave the city for the suburbs (34, newly married)
• surfmike 7y ago
  It reflects a decent chunk of people, but you’re in a bubble for sure based on the data of the article. Data point: just had over half my friends move from cities (SF) to the burbs (peninsula) as they had kids.
• chad_c 7y ago
  Doesn’t jive with my experience either. Out of my 10 or so closest married friends, only one moved outside of the city (Atlanta). I have several friends trying to move back to Atlanta from much more expensive cities. I think cost is more important than city vs suburb. There are ridiculously expensive suburbs outside of Atlanta.
• lr4444lr 7y ago
  Wait until your friends experience the school systems for their kids. Not all, but I predict a significant number will consider the move.
• dagw 7y ago
  This article doesn’t jive whatsoever with my anecdotal experience as an urban dwelling elder millennial. My personal anecdotal experience is that it was pretty much 50/50. Half stayed and half left as soon as they could afford it. But even among those that stayed in the city most eventually left 'down town' for more quite and residential parts of the city. edit: Furthermore I'd say that of those that left half did so gladly and half did so reluctantly.
• mruts 7y ago
  I thought moving to Connecticut with kids was the ultimate status symbol.