Young People’s Love of Cities Isn’t a Passing Fad

Young people have been a key factor in the back-to-the-city movement—so much so that one study identified “youthification” as a special kind of gentrification. But some demographic experts (and the conventional wisdom) predicted that young adults’ fascination with urban living would fade as they settled down, got married, and had children, at which point they, too, would follow their parents and grandparents to the suburbs.

Perhaps not. A new peer-reviewed study (the article is forthcoming in the Journal of Regional Science) finds that not only have young people been a driving force in the urban resurgence of the past two decades, but they favor living in central urban neighborhoods significantly more than previous generations did at the same stages in life.