Walkability from the Other End of the Age Spectrum Too!

 Last week I looked at the importance of walk-ability for senior citizens. Here's yet another blogpost from the SMART GROWTH America blog feed that looks at why the millennials value walk-ability as well:

Why Young Adults are Returning to the City

The final four paragraphs really hit home with me:

This generation looked around their home towns and saw something missing. They found that something in neglected historic urban centers. After 2000, when the Millennials began to leave home, cities had hit bottom and were on the way up. Crime had peaked in the early 1990s and was dramatically falling off in many cities.

 

Moreover, the Echo Boomers went to college. Millennials are the most educated generation in history. As Christopher Leinberger has reported, Washington DC has the most educated populace in the nation, and the highest demand for walkable urban centers. The higher the education level, the greater the demand for urban living, he says.

 

Millennials grew up in far suburbs in the 1980s and 1990s, and then lived in walkable college neighborhoods for four years. Along with a taste for urban living, they also had acquired the highest levels of student debt in history, which puts a damper on their appetite for car and house loans.

 

But the biggest incentive may be their peers. They want to go to walkable places, because that’s where their friends are. The tide has shifted and it’s carrying 80 million people inward. This generation doesn’t want to go back to the ‘burbs.

Robert Steuteville is editor and publisher of Better! Cities & Towns. This article appears in the August print issue.

The two points I highlighted above are very pertinent. University Heights has the highest level of education attainment in Johnson County, we are seeing more younger citizens move into our town, and with them come a greater desire for walkable amenities. I was struck at last Tuesday's Farmer's Market how many young people where present and how many of them stayed beyond shopping to socialize and have dinner. It seemed to me that many had walked or biked to the market.