Young people love cities. Perhaps this is true for most generations, but the current generation of American young people, including highly educated ones, appear to be especially fond of city centers. According to a recently published report by City Observatory, a new think tank, the number of college-educated people ages 25 to 34 living within 3 miles of city centers has surged – up 37 percent since 2000.
That’s remarkable along a number of dimensions, including by virtue of the fact that total population of these neighborhoods has actually shrunk in many instances over the past decade plus. Young people are flocking to metropolitan areas in general. Between 2000 and 2012, the population of college graduates ages 25 to 34 rose 50 percent in Houston and my nearly 50 percent in Nashville and Denver.
If one looks at America’s 51 largest metropolitan areas, the population of young college graduates is up by about 25 percent on average, including by 32 percent in the Baltimore area and 36 percent in the Washington metropolitan area. According to economist Enrico Moretti, who is at the University of California, Berkeley, for every college graduate who takes a job in an innovation industry, 5 additional jobs are eventually created in that city.
