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College-Educated Young May Be Squeezing Connecticut's Urban Housing

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Hartford, Connecticut.
Joe Cortright, economist, and founder of think tank City Observatory.
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Joe Cortright, economist, and founder of think tank City Observatory.
Joe Cortright said the young, well-educated population has increased by 36 percent within the close-in neighborhoods over ten years.

The number of college-educated people aged 25 to 34 moving to U.S. city centers has surged, up 37 percent since 2000, even while those cities’ populations have shrunk slightly, according to a report from economist Joe Cortright at City Observatory, a think tank based in Portland, Oregon.

The Hartford metro area saw a 25 percent increase of educated young adults living within three miles of its city center between 2000 and 2010, according to the think tank.

In the report, called “The Young and Restless and the Nation’s Cities,” Cortright said that more young people are moving to the heart of cities, including cities that we usually think of as economically troubled, like Buffalo, Cleveland, and Hartford.

About 42 percent of the Hartford metro area's 25- to 34-year-olds have four-year degrees, up 6.7 percent from 2000. At about 7,000 in number, they represent just five percent of the metro area's adult population -- relatively modest figures, but showing signs of a shift.

Some of the cities in Cortright's report are losing their overall population, but gaining college graduates in their 20s and 30s. Many of the young people in the study are choosing where to live first, and a place to work second.

A New York Times report on the data noted that “young and restless” is a pretty apt term:

Even as Americans all over have become less likely to move, young, college-educated people continue to move at a high clip – about a million cross state lines each year, and these so-called young and the restless don’t tend to settle down until their mid-30s. Where they end up provides a map of the cities that have a chance to be the economic powerhouses of the future.

On WNPR’s Where We Live, Cortright said he wanted to identify where well-educated young adults are settling down within urban regions. “We looked at what we called close-in neighborhoods,” he said, “neighborhoods within three miles of the city center of the central business district. We found that well-educated young adults are growing twice as fast inside that circle as outside that circle.”

Cortright said the young, well-educated population nationwide has increased by 36 percent within the close-in neighborhoods over ten years, “which we take as a really strong indication of the growing preference that young adults have for urban living.” He said the three-mile radius gives economists a standard for viewing demographic patterns, and generally includes the core of urban areas.

The strongest growth in well-educated young populations has taken place in cities like San Francisco and Austin. Downtown St. Louis has also seen a rapid growth of the demographic, while it’s weak on other measures of activity.

Cortright said there are few common themes that might explain where the young, well-educated set is moving. In interviews, he hears “the New Urbanist bullet points,” he said. “People are increasingly interested in the amenities that you find in close-in, urban neighborhoods: that they’re dense; that they’re diverse; that they have interest in commercial and cultural activities; that they’re walkable, bikeable; and often times have good transit service. It’s that mix of sort of urban amenities that seems to be particularly powerful.”

Credit Judy Sirota Rosenthal / New Haven International Festival of Arts and Ideas
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New Haven International Festival of Arts and Ideas
New Haven's International Festival of Arts and Ideas.

Credit Chion Wolf / WNPR
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WNPR
Diana Deng, policy and communications analyst at Partnership for Strong Communities.

Hartford and New Haven both have among the lowest residential vacancy rates of cities in the country, according to Diana Deng, policy and communications analyst at the Partnership for Strong Communities. Hartford is ranked sixth in the nation for lowest vacancy rates, she said, and New Haven is actually ranked first.

“It outranks New York,” Deng said. “If you look at the vacancy rate, and also the median age in those two cities, it follows those trends. In Hartford, it’s around 29. In New Haven, the median age is around 30.” Connecticut’s median age statewide is 39.

For Deng, one important way to address the demographic shift is to invest more in transit, which helps to make housing more affordable while there is a pinch in the state’s urban centers. “When you look at the housing costs,” she said, “people pay around average – 30 percent. But once you add in [auto] transportation, that’s another 19 percent. So your entire housing and transportation cost is over half your income. But once you take out the car, and you have transit, your transportation cost drops nine percent. It’s okay for you to pay a little bit more for housing, because you have transit that you can rely on.”

Cortright said that college-educated young people are choosing where to live, before having a job, by a two-to-one margin. “We know that a significant fraction – something on the order of 20 or 30 percent of the people – report that they had moved to a city because they wanted to live there, and without a job,” he said. “We think that’s a change from previous generations.”

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