Pittsburgh: a sweet spot for post-young'uns
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"Pittsburgh's always behind the national trends." With a shrug or an eye-roll, that's our explanation for anything from the lack of gourmet food trucks on city streets to the persistence of mullets on local heads.
But every once in a while, lagging behind can mean getting ahead. You examine the trendsetters' mistakes and correct your own course while there's still time. What if this were the case with Pittsburgh's decades-long population loss?
"Why America's Young and Restless Will Abandon Cities for Suburbs." That was the headline on a Forbes magazine article last week in which "New Geographer" Joel Kotkin updated -- and debunked -- the much-ballyhooed shift of Americans from sprawling suburbs to denser city living.
Though urban planners have been celebrating this trend for over a decade, Mr. Kotkin wrote, the latest census results show "a marked acceleration of movement not into cities but toward suburban and exurban locations."
Why? Because 20-somethings snared by the appeal of "bright lights, big city" -- from Manhattan to Portland, Ore., to Austin, Texas -- eventually get older and "do things like marry, start businesses, settle down and maybe start having kids."
For the sake of these milestones, the millennial partiers are now 35- to 44-year-olds fleeing the city. Across the country, this cohort grew 12 percent in the suburbs but declined 22.7 percent in the core cities -- dropping a whopping 40 percent in Boston.
"Even relatively successful cities have turned into giant college towns and 'post-graduate' havens -- temporary way stations before people migrate somewhere else," Mr. Kotkin wrote. To counter this trend and keep more young parents in urban settings, cities must address their problems: "weak job creation, poor schools, high taxes and suffocating regulatory environments."
First Published July 25, 2011 12:00 am
