Why Millennials Are Flocking to Smaller Midwestern Cities
Americans tend to congregate along the coasts. As of 2010 — the most recent year for which data is available — some 123.3 million people, or 39 percent of the United States population, lived in such coastal counties, even though those areas accounted for 10 percent of the nation’s land mass (excluding Alaska).
That was a 40 percent increase from 1970, and the number is expected to increase by another eight percent by 2020. That’s right — another 10 million people are expected to flock to coastal areas by then.
Millennials are no different. They are most likely to wind up in cities like New York and Los Angeles, though that is beginning to change (albeit slowly) as people in that age group, facing crushing debt and a tight job market, seek out better employment opportunities and more affordable housing.
The Millennial migration tends to take them south and west, but the other trend is toward smaller Midwestern cites such as Indianapolis, Columbus, Oh., and Madison, Wis.
This is no small matter, considering the growing impact of this demographic. Millennials, defined as those born between 1981 and 2000, are expected to surpass Baby Boomers as the largest segment of the U.S. population in 2019, when they will number some 73 million, one million more than the Boomers.
It is expected that by 2020, Millennials could spend some $1.4 trillion, which amounts to 30 percent of total retail sales. The caveat, according to Forbes, is that they have shown themselves to be somewhat conservative spenders, in large part because of student debt.
That figures to make them less likely to enter the housing market, though other factors come into play when they settle along the coasts. A study by Apartment List, for instance, showed that someone living in the San Francisco area would take 28 years to save enough for a 20-percent down payment on a median-based home, while it would take just nine years in Minneapolis.
Small wonder that they have begun to move elsewhere.
The Midwest has not been immune to this trend; Illinois and Michigan are two of the four states that have seen a two-percent decline in folks from that age group. And while Chicago has the third-most college-educated Millennials in the country, that number grew by only 7.2 percent between 2010 and 2015, the lowest figure among 33 metropolitan areas studied by Forbes.com.
Columbus, by contrast, was one place seeing an influx of Millennials, ranking 23rd among 25 Millennial magnets nationwide, according to a study by the real estate analytics firm RCLCO.
The fastest-growing cities in the Midwest overall were Kansas City, Minneapolis, Indianapolis, Columbus, Grand Rapids and Des Moines, with Indianapolis joining Madison,as other cities favored by young people.
Columbus and Madison are both college towns, and the latter joins Indianapolis as a growing tech center. Other businesses, in the areas of health care, agriculture, transportation, finance and manufacturing, are also on the rise there.
The expectation is that this trend will only accelerate as Millennials age and their desire to own homes increases.
This article was originally posted on Patch
