Here’s how the media is getting the story on cities & millennials wrong

[xchrom]

http://grist.org/cities/the-media-loves-to-talk-about-millennials-cities-heres-what-theyre-getting-wrong/

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***SNIP

But fundamentally, there are two problems with the Times story: It overstates the suburbs’ problems, and it misses one of the main causes of the shift toward cities.

First of all, it’s important to put this urbanization in context. Between the 1950s and the late 20th century, all the cities mentioned in the Times article lost population. White flight and suburban sprawl were rampant in those decades. Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia lost over one-quarter of their populations; Baltimore more than one-third.

New York, one of the first cities to experience gentrification on a mass scale, started to see its population decline reverse in the 1980s. But that’s not because more people were actually moving to New York than leaving it, just that the net out-migration was low enough to be outweighed by natural population growth from births. New York has only actually started to gain more migrants than it loses in the last three years, and most of New York’s in-migration is from outside the U.S.

Even where gentrifiers are moving in at a pace sufficient to reverse outmigration, they’re barely making in a dent in reversing the tide. D.C., for example, has become wealthier in the last decade, but its population has increased only slightly and it remains far below its mid-century peak. When you adjust for the fact that the U.S. population has more than doubled since 1950, cities account for a much lower share.

[KurtNYC]

1. gentrification tends to drop the local population because

the financial more-secure have smaller families. Also many townhomes that were broken up into many apartments get reunified into one home so a house that had 8 units and maybe 12 tenants goes down to one unit and 2 residents.