North American millennials are cost-conscious and fleeing their cities in droves, but they’re not running to rural enclaves just yet.
A global survey of urban millennials from YouthfulCities found that young workers in America and Canada have the itchiest feet and think their city governments are most responsive.
Breaking slightly from the global trend, they’re most concerned with safety, affordability, education, and transit in their urban environments.
The survey included millennials in Montreal, Toronto, New York City, Washington DC, Chicago, and Los Angeles, along with millennials in 26 other cities across four continents.
For North American millennials, they’re anything but stuck. Mobility has become the new normal, as 71 percent of them expect to leave their current city within 10 years, the most of their peers.
“From the perspective of millennials, there are no negative consequences to their increasing mobility. It opens up more opportunities, experiences, learning and self-development,” the report noted.
Changing cities for a college degree, a new job, or a different environment can drive the youth elsewhere. North American millennials aren’t the only ones, either. The lowest millennial move rate was in Asia, which was still high at 45 percent.
“Millennials and their younger counterparts can and will ‘vote with their feet,’ and this is a global phenomenon … Not only do they represent the cultural and economic future of urban areas, they also provide a critical and lucrative tax base,” the report wrote.
That’s great news for economic growth. With more labor mobility, businesses hire the most qualified workers, who then earn more, and productivity can improve. With a young population that’s less averse to leaving where they grew up, opportunity can flourish.
One city that could gain is Philadelphia. It’s one of the few American cities that are affordable for young workers who lack a college degree — along with Detroit, Atlanta, and Kansas City. Other second-tier cities such as Pittsburgh, Iowa City, and Minneapolis have the allure of a low cost of living and a strong economy. As the biggest coastal metropolises become more expensive, those cities could gain from a more mobile populace.
Indeed, millennials ranked affordability as the worst-performance attribute in their cities. They were most concerned about safety, affordability, education, and transit issues. That doesn’t mean they’ll “flee big cities in droves.” Western Montana might have affordability, but rural areas lack much of the appeal that affordable cities offer. The exodus from the cities is the exodus from expensive cities to affordable cities.
Millennials in North America were the happiest compared to their international peers. Their most urgent issues were affordability, employment, and safety. So long as cities outside the hubs of New York, Los Angeles, Boston, and Washington DC can market themselves to millennials and offer the alternative they want, the next hipster mecca could be Provo, Utah or Raleigh, North Carolina.
