From Business Insider:
Millennials are moving to ‘the most boring places in the world’
For nearly two decades millennials morphed dense, amenity-rich urban neighborhoods across America into exclusive playgrounds for the young and childless. Compared with Gen Xers and baby boomers, a much larger share of millennials moved to cities in their young adulthood — and stayed for longer. They wanted craft-cocktail bars over picket fences, walkable commutes over two-car garages, SoulCycle over swimming pools. In turn, cities were yassified in their image.Th
That “youthification” trend has accelerated: Cities are getting younger, faster, from San Francisco to Boston, Salt Lake City to Seattle, Austin to Denver. But it’s not millennials who are making them younger — it’s Gen Zers. (Gen Z, it should be noted, isn’t exactly thriving in urban real-estate markets. About a third of Gen Z adults are thought to live with their parents, and many don’t think they’ll ever be able to own a home.) Millennials, meanwhile, are aging out and getting priced out into suburbia.
Recently, the Suburban Jungle Group, a real-estate advisory firm that specializes in helping New York City dwellers move to surrounding suburbs, has been getting a lot of calls from millennials freaking out as their lifestyle grows out of reach. They got pandemic-era deals and signed two-year leases, and they’re seeing their rent skyrocket. “Clients call us in a panic, saying, ‘I got my renewal, I have 30 or 60 days to let them know, and my rent is increasing up to 30-plus percent,'” said Allison Levine, the firm’s director of communications.
The pandemic only steepened a trend that’s been ousting millennials from cities for years: rising housing costs in cities.
Census data indicates that in 2022 adults between 20 and 29 were more likely to say they moved for housing-related reasons than for family- or employment-related reasons. Hyojung Lee and his colleagues at Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies have found that cities with the most expensive rents and the smallest shares of apartments with three or more bedrooms lost the largest shares of their millennial population to the suburbs in recent years.
To Lee and his colleagues’ surprise, millennials aren’t moving to nearby dense, walkable exurbs. They’re getting way out to peripheral suburbs.
“It turned out that millennials are moving to the most boring places in the world,” says Lee, who’s now a professor at Seoul National University. “They’re moving to really single-family-dominated areas with very few urban amenities.”
John Natale, a real-estate agent based in Wall Township, New Jersey, calls this phenomenon “drive till you qualify.” He says it used to be that he could find his clients a home in their price range in whichever county they wanted to be in. Now, because prices in exurbs have swelled since 2022, his millennial clients are being priced out of anything within striking distance of New York. “People are adjusting one, two, maybe even three counties over just to be able to afford a house,” he said.