Suburbs grapple with cities to attract millennial generation

There’s a big question hanging out there.

It’s being discussed over coffee and pastries in chamber of commerce meeting rooms. It’s being explored in small-town city council offices and in suburban office parks. It’s weighing on the minds of political, business and civic leaders from Conroe to Clear Lake, from Pasadena to Pearland. What do millennials want? Do they want coffee shops with bike racks out front? Cheap ethnic restaurants within walking distance of their apartments? Running trails winding along streams? Workplaces where they can wear T-shirts and play Foosball during breaks?

Or, as more of them shift from their 20s to their 30s and start thinking about having kids, do they want a lifestyle that resembles that of their parents — an affordable single-family home in a safe suburb with good schools?

In Fort Bend County earlier this month, more than 250 business and community leaders and citizens discussed this topic during a conference organized by the Houston Business Journal. The paper reported that Jeff Wiley, head of the Fort Bend Economic Development Council, had expressed concern about the fast-growing county’s rising median age (it’s now 35, a bit below the national median).

“We’re always looking for millennial attraction points,” Wiley said.

It’s not hard to see why. Millennials, aged 19-34 this year, recently surpassed baby boomers as the nation’s largest living generation, 75 million strong. Most of their productive lives — economically, creatively, culturally — still lie ahead of them. They are essential to keeping communities vital and flourishing.

“Their dominance in the workplace is already evident and set to become more so as boomers exit the job market,” said Brian Bondy, the president of the Conroe-Lake Conroe Chamber of Commerce.

As suburban communities compete with cities and with one another for this coveted demographic, any discussion of strategy inevitably becomes entangled with a broader debate: Is the great American suburban

migration giving way to a new urban ascendancy? Or are suburbs and exurbs retaining their primacy?

Rejecting the narrative

Joel Kotkin, a writer who often praises the Houston area growth model, consistently pushes back against the narrative of Americans fleeing suburbs and flocking to urban cores. In a piece for the Los Angeles Daily News last April, Kotkin noted that the millennial population expanded by 61 percent in a suburban area known as the Inland Empire between 2000 and 2014, compared to 14 percent in Los Angeles County.

Others argue that millennials often live in the suburbs because that’s where their jobs or families happen to be, or where they can find affordable homes, rather than because the suburbs offer the lifestyle they prefer. “While it is a statistical fact that more Americans are still moving to the suburbs than to inner cities, it is a mistake to assume that means they all want to do so,” Ben Adler wrote at Grist.org last March.

Ali Hasanali, a 27-yearold attorney, was born and raised in Sugar Land, where he still lives. His law office is in Stafford, but he doesn’t hang out in Fort Bend County during his leisure hours.

“The biggest problem in the suburban counties is there are not a lot of good options for young adults to gather and meet each other,” Hasanali told me. “There’s not really a walking culture. Even though I live and work out here, I’ll go into the city after work to meet friends.”

Hasanali says friends who are a bit older, and starting families, may be looking for starter homes in Fort Bend County, but they struggle to find affordable houses that don’t require long commutes to their jobs.

Some friends who recently married, he said, intend to live in a townhouse in Midtown in Houston until their children are school age, then move back out to the suburbs and buy a single-family house.

No magic bullet

So, what’s the magic bullet for attracting and retaining millenials? There probably isn’t one, says Kyle Shelton, a program manager and fellow at Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research.

“I think you can over-prioritize millennials,” says Shelton. A strategy to develop neighborhoods with a broad mix of uses and amenities will appeal to young people and others, he says, and ultimately will be more sustainable than a single-minded focus on the 34-and-younger cohort.

In other words, a little something for everyone. It’s a reassuring idea for those of us who haven’t seen 34 in quite a while but aren’t quite ready for the rocking chair.