The Antiplanner » Tag » Millennials

Tag Archives: Millennials

Housing Preferences by Age

By | | Housing, Useful Data
Leave a comment

Supposedly, young people today prefer to rent multifamily housing over buying single-family housing. This claim is used to justify policies aimed at densifying cities by rezoning neighborhoods of single-family homes for multifamily housing. As the New York Times Timothy Egan writes, “An unholy alliance of socialists and developers threatens to destroy the city’s single-family neighborhoods with a major upzoning.”

Data from the 2017 American Community Survey can help put this claim to the test. Table B25125 breaks down housing into six types: single-family, multi-family, and other (mobile homes, boats, RVs, vans), each owned or rented, and reports for householders (one of the adults in the household) of ages 15-34, 35-64, and 65-plus. We can compare the results with table HCT004 from the 2000 census to see how young people (and middle-aged and seniors) lived in 2017 vs. how they lived 17 years before.

In 2017, 29 percent of householders under 35 owned and 20 percent rented a single-family home, while 2 percent owned and 44 percent rented multifamily housing. But that’s not much different from 2000, when 31 percent owned and 16 percent rented a single-family home and 2 percent owned and 42 percent rented multifamily. Continue reading →

Myths of Obesity and Millennials

By | | Regional planning
12 Comments

Nine years ago, the Antiplanner called claims that suburbs caused obesity “junk science.” Research since then has validated that view.

For example, Health and Place journal is focused on “all aspects of health and health care in which place or location matters,” so might be presumed to have a slight bias for an assumption that place influences obesity. Yet it published a 2012 literature review of dozens of papers on the subject that concluded that most failed to account for self-selection bias, that is, that people who might be overweight prefer to live in the suburbs. Thus, any relationship they may have found between weight and suburbia “cannot provide strong support for causality.”

A paper published by MIT’s Center for Advanced Urbanism reviewed several other metastudies that reported “the inconclusive nature of the relation between urban form and public health.” The MIT paper was written specifically in rebuttal to a paper by people associated with the Congress for the New Urbanism, and chided the authors of that paper for failing to disclose their association with that group, “an organization known for certain urban biases linked to their design agendas.”

Continue reading →

The Millennial Dream

By | | Housing
9 Comments

A new survey from Trulia confirms similar surveys in the past: Millennial housing preferences really aren’t much different from those of previous generations. Contrary to claims that most Millennials want to live in inner-city multifamily housing, nearly 90 percent of Millennials aspire to buy a single-family home. Moreover, the vast majority hoping to live in suburbs or small towns, while only 8 percent say they want to live in a central city.

The myth that Millennials want to live in cities is so pervasive that one news report claimed that the results of this survey contradict the “reality” that people are moving to the cities. In fact, as Wendell Cox has shown, central city population growth was slower in the 2000s than the 1990s, for both Millennials and the population in general. Meanwhile, suburbs and small towns continue to grow faster than center cities, even among 20-29 year olds.

While the populations of core neighborhoods in and near downtowns are growing when measured on a percentage basis, this is mainly because these populations were so low in the first place. The 1950s and 1960s saw most major cities evict residents from their downtowns as a part of the urban renewal process, which was the urban planning fad of that era. Now, the same urban renewal tools–tax-increment financing, eminent domain, and other gifts to developers–are used to bring people back to downtowns, which is today’s urban planning fad. While planners have proven that “if you subsidize it, they will come,” this isn’t evidence of a huge and permanent change in housing tastes.
Warnings and Precautions: Don’t take look at here now levitra sales Sildenafil Citrate on the off chance that you think an overdose. Bhumiamala is anti-viral, hepatoprotective, anti-diabetic and anti-inflammatory in nature. levitra generic no prescription http://raindogscine.com/?order=1673 Six out of ten insomniacs pfizer viagra discount have stress-related sleep problems and it is very common in men. If you think that length and girth is not important buy viagra soft for you, you need to think again.
Continue reading →

It Really Was Just the Economy

By | | Transportation
15 Comments

The Antiplanner is in Lafayette, Louisiana today to talk about urban planning. I’ll be speaking tomorrow about the city & parish’s current plans and proposed new development code.

In the meantime, Bloomberg reports that Millennials want to own and drive cars about as much as their parents’ did–it was just the poor economy holding them back. Of course, they’d rather drive “cool” cars such as Teslas or Priuses rather than Cadillac Escalades. But drive they will.

In other news, Amtrak’s accounting tricks are catching up to it, as illustrated by an escalator in Penn Station that went out of order in January and hasn’t been fixed yet. In order to make it appear that its trains are more profitable than they really are, Amtrak defined “maintenance” costs as capital improvements. It then went to Congress and bragged that its operating subsidies were smaller than ever–but it needed huge capital subsidies, which Congress failed to give it.

Continue reading →

It’s the Economy, Stupid!

By | | Housing, Transportation
10 Comments

At least once a week, the Antiplanner encounters an urban plan that assumes that millennials and other young people will be much less inclined to drive cars and own their own homes than Americans have been in the past. But a new study from researchers at UCLA reaches the same conclusions as other researchers reported by the Antiplanner: young people drive less because of the weak economy, not because they prefer to walk and take transit.


Is this the American Dream?

Similarly, a 2013 survey from PulteGroup, a home builder, finds that the vast majority of people between 18 and 34 aspire to own their own homes. Among those whose incomes are above $50,000, 65 percent say they hope to buy a home in the next year. Similar results were found from a 2012 poll by Better Homes & Gardens Realty and a 2011 survey by the National Association of Home Builders. Far from appreciating multifamily housing, the greatest fear of young people in New Zealand is that they will be stuck in apartments.

Continue reading →