Here's an interesting piece about that from the New York Times.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/23/...column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/23/...column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
Will cities run out of millennials?
- Thread starter retired711
- Start date
I read that article earlier today, and thought of some of the discussion that have been had on this board. As I've indicated in those discussions, I think that as millennials age and raise families, they'll move to the suburban house with back yards just like the baby boomer yuppies that preceded them. On the other hand, aging former yuppies, who are now empty nesters, are likely to move to more urban areas, as will the next generation of 30-year-olds, so there is not a real risk of vibrant cities dying (although they will continue to evolve, possibly replacing noisy bars with more subdued venues that would appeal to older patrons).
Agree. Cities are revived and will continue to do well but the collapse of suburbia and exurbia has been overstated. While exurban (fringes of suburbia) have declined they still possess the characteristics that will draw people in - cheaper housing, less congestion, reasonable proximity to jobs. Suburbs and exurbs would be wise to continue to make adjustments to keep and attract the people you mentioned. That can be done by beefing up main street type developments, offering more options than just single family homes, and increasing access to public transportation.
The reality is that many of the Gen X and others would live in cities too if they weren't so damn expensive and the school options were different. Money and kids drive a lot of decisions. Now less people are having kids or delaying so that changes the dynamics but only to a point.
Upstream, what you say has a lot of plausibility to it. But will cities continue to be attractive to empty-nesters if there are fewer young people in cities? Those young people help make possible amenities like restaurants and funky shops that empty-nesters like.
What the article does not get into is where these people are moving.
I get constant solicitations to sell my condo and move to Montclair, Westfield, Maplewood...the usual suspects.
Most other people I know are not moving to suburbs without a train, good schools, or both. And we have enough places in NJ that are outside of that category. What then?
I get constant solicitations to sell my condo and move to Montclair, Westfield, Maplewood...the usual suspects.
Most other people I know are not moving to suburbs without a train, good schools, or both. And we have enough places in NJ that are outside of that category. What then?
The three towns you cite are not exactly cheap. What will happen to millennials who are having children and can't afford those places? They will end up picking between the easy train access and good schools. If history is a guide, they will pick good schools. Flemington has excellent public schools and so people live there despite the difficult commute to NYC. How many suburbs can you think of with neither train access nor good schools?
I'd say most Flemington residents don't commute to NYC. You have pharma and finance much closer like Princeton, Hopewell, Bridgewater, New Bruns, etc.
Now that I think about it, you're probably right. My wife's late husband commuted to the World Trade Center for a while but, after the first bombing, got re-located to the Princeton office of his company. Note that there is no train between Flemington and any of the places you cite. It shows that train service is not essential to being a desirable suburb.
Yeah my girlfriend lives in Flemington so I've become very familiar to the area over the last year. We both work finance in Hopewell. When we go to the city we usually drive up to Raritan or Bridgewater and just take the train from there. Raritan Line sucks though as you have to transfer in Newark and I'm used to the NJ Coast and NE Corridor lines where you don't have to.
I really didn't know there was anything much in Hopewell. To me, it's just a place one reaches off Route 31. Didn't know that Raritan and Bridgewater have train stations. I agree that having to change trains in Newark is far from ideal. Maybe it's not so bad for people who take the PATH line into lower Manhattan.
Well if you own here you likely have the equity for Montclair etc.
I am thinking the exurban towns and areas like Warren and Sussex (outside of Sparta), Ocean County, some areas in Monmouth.
Don't want to hijack the thread so last I'll say but yes Merrill Lynch has a monster campus in Ewing/Hopewell Township. Probably 5,000-7,500 employees.
Montclair has walkable downtown areas. But it costs you. The lower cost alternative to Montclair isn't moving to Warren County, it is moving to Clifton, Little Falls, West Orange, or Nutley.
Most people who live in Warren County don't commute to NYC. They commute to jobs in NJ or to jobs in the Lehigh Valley.
Yes, we all must keep in mind that, since the 1960s, job growth has primarily been in the suburbs and exurbs. There are plenty of people who don't take a train or bus to a center city. That's part of what makes it so difficult to have effective mass transit systems.
Suburban office complexes have had trouble filling space though.
Between 14 and 22 percent of the suburban office inventory in these areas is “in some stage of obsolescence,” suggesting that between 600 million and 1 billion square feet of office space are far from ideal for the modern company and worker. That’s about 7.5 percent of the country’s entire office inventory.
Parsippany was one of the focus areas.
http://www.citylab.com/work/2016/01/the-sad-state-of-suburban-office-parks/422442/
Between 14 and 22 percent of the suburban office inventory in these areas is “in some stage of obsolescence,” suggesting that between 600 million and 1 billion square feet of office space are far from ideal for the modern company and worker. That’s about 7.5 percent of the country’s entire office inventory.
Parsippany was one of the focus areas.
http://www.citylab.com/work/2016/01/the-sad-state-of-suburban-office-parks/422442/
Yes I should have clarified. I think wealth is more concentrated in certain areas then was thought to be before the bubble when people were moving further out to beat unrealistic prices.
The thing is though that places like Warren County (and moreso Sussex) have a lot of areas where population is declining. When people leave, are they coming back? Is the kid that goes to college from there looking to return?
Do you really see these land-intensive complexes moving back to more urban areas? Given modern communications, suburbia and exurbia would seem ideal for them.
I think more and more employers are going to their desired employees. So I think many companies will move to areas where people want to live. It may not be NYC- it may be Jersey City or Stamford. But it seems to me a lot of "new" companies are in areas that a lot of people seem to like- SF Bay, Seattle, Denver and Boulder...nothing against Parsippany, and Morristown has become quite trendy.
In that same vein, I think a lot of employers are allowing telecommuting where they can. And there are definitely people, even millenials, who would rather live in the middle of nowhere. I just wonder though, if you could telecommute, and you like a real deserted area, why you would stay in NJ, when lots of other rural areas are more tax and nature friendly.
So I think even millenials decided they wanted to move to the burbs en masse, the big spread out office is generally in decline for other reasons.
How that plays out overall we can all speculate, but in NJ there is an urban shift and towns outside of the main train lines do look to be losing population.
No, more and more folks are working from home. Even in Pharma, which was the leader in large office complexes. Employees are going home, not cities.
But are they working from home five days a week? Some workers who did found that they were at a real disadvantage in finding out what was going on. So they need some place to go to, right?
I have 12 people on my team:
2 live in the DC area (in the office 1-2 days a week)
3 live in NYC (in the office 2-3 days a week)
1 lives in DE (in the office 1-2 days a week)
6 live in NJ (in the office 3 days a week on average)
I live 20 mins away and in 3-4 days a week (mainly due to my proximity)
This is becoming the norm, lots of work from the "home office". We use a web/ex platform for meetings and all of our conference rooms are integrated. Our office has a lot of flex/open space for folks to use. Traditional offices are now desks/work stations. You can fit twice the people in the same square footage when compared to the past. Also, rent prices are still much, much cheaper in the burbs than cities.
Thanks for the info. This is one of the rare times that we agree -- those office complexes are staying in the suburbs. But it does sound as though it is increasingly possible for employees to live in an urban area if they want because they don't have to be in the office five days a week. So maybe some millennials will be able to stay in the city and go to work in the suburbs -- although I doubt they'll want to live in the city once they have school-age children.
Yes, families with school-age kids will continue to leave cities, unless they have the money for private schools. One other dynamic that helps folks live in the cities and work in the suburbs is that the "reverse" commute is always better than the other way around. Cities still blow to get into.
I agree with that, but it's amazing how bad the reverse traffic can be in some places. The roads in the metropolitan NYC area seem to be congested in both directions for much of the day.
My wife and I are essentially the type of people at the center of this debate right now.
We are 30 years old, married, no children yet. We've been renting in Hoboken for many years and now have the cash to buy.
We are realistic about the size and things we give up to live in Hudson County (Hoboken, Jersey City, Weehawken, Edgewater). But we like the urban living, convenient commute, etc. Unfortunately the prices in these areas have skyrocketed the last 3 years. We both have great jobs and have a ton of savings, but still cannot find a place we'd like that wouldn't absolutely stretch us to the limits.
Just like everyone else our next option would be the suburbs with a nice downtown and train/good bus service. Those towns are nearly just as expensive and you get to buy yourself into a place that commits you to a lifetime of weekend chores and an endless money pit. Because a house that has been completely remodeled would be too expensive.
Essentially these market factors have led us to continue renting. Even though we have ample amount of cash ready to purchase.
We are 30 years old, married, no children yet. We've been renting in Hoboken for many years and now have the cash to buy.
We are realistic about the size and things we give up to live in Hudson County (Hoboken, Jersey City, Weehawken, Edgewater). But we like the urban living, convenient commute, etc. Unfortunately the prices in these areas have skyrocketed the last 3 years. We both have great jobs and have a ton of savings, but still cannot find a place we'd like that wouldn't absolutely stretch us to the limits.
Just like everyone else our next option would be the suburbs with a nice downtown and train/good bus service. Those towns are nearly just as expensive and you get to buy yourself into a place that commits you to a lifetime of weekend chores and an endless money pit. Because a house that has been completely remodeled would be too expensive.
Essentially these market factors have led us to continue renting. Even though we have ample amount of cash ready to purchase.
The major cities have to worry about housing affordability, not desirability.
There will always be high demand for these places particularly in a more high tech environment when working for home is an option. Working from home can be a bore if you aren't in an area that has a nice downtown where you can grab a coffee, work at a cafe, grab lunch or a drink, then add train access to 1 or 2 days at the headquarters in the City. People thought the internet and email would make us move further apart (prevailing thought in the early to mid 90s), but the exact opposite has happened.
The problem that NJ will have is companies with suburban office parks are relocating to the Sunbelt where the cost of living is a fraction of what it is in NJ. The suburbs on the trains will always be in high demand in NJ, but as companies send back office work to the Jacksonville's of the US, NJ auto-centric suburbs will suffer. It is much easier to convince employees to relocate from suburban NJ to Raleigh than from the Upper East Side to Raleigh.
There will always be high demand for these places particularly in a more high tech environment when working for home is an option. Working from home can be a bore if you aren't in an area that has a nice downtown where you can grab a coffee, work at a cafe, grab lunch or a drink, then add train access to 1 or 2 days at the headquarters in the City. People thought the internet and email would make us move further apart (prevailing thought in the early to mid 90s), but the exact opposite has happened.
The problem that NJ will have is companies with suburban office parks are relocating to the Sunbelt where the cost of living is a fraction of what it is in NJ. The suburbs on the trains will always be in high demand in NJ, but as companies send back office work to the Jacksonville's of the US, NJ auto-centric suburbs will suffer. It is much easier to convince employees to relocate from suburban NJ to Raleigh than from the Upper East Side to Raleigh.
the flex space paradigm also works to benefit the cities. If companies can have twice as many workers located in a flex space office because half are working remotely on any given day, then they can also cut the cost of urban office space. That gives workers who want to live in the city the ability to live in the city, and those who want suburban areas the ability to live in suburban areas with less concern over a commute they only have to make 2-3 days per week.
