Cities scramble to keep millennials
Generation looks for more space to raise children
Cities and close-in suburbs looking to the future see a troubling trend: The millennials who rejuvenated their downtowns over the past decade are growing older and beginning to leave.
The oldest are hitting their mid-30s, with many starting to couple up and have children. Meanwhile, the sleek high-rise apartment buildings built for them as single young professionals are no longer practical or affordable as they seek to buy homes with more space and privacy.
“There’s been this huge wave of people in cities all over the country. Then they grow up. Then what?,” said Yolanda Cole, who owns a District of Columbia architectural firm and chairs ULI Washington, part of the Urban Land Institute, a research organization dedicated to responsible land use.
In an effort to retain these residents, some urban planners, developers and architects are reviving the kinds of homes that might be more familiar to millennials’ great-grandparents: duplexes, triplexes, bungalows, rowhouses with multiple units, and small buildings with four to six apartments or condos.
It’s the kind of housing that fell out of fashion after World War II, when young families and others fled cities for the houses, driveways and ample yards of the burgeoning suburbs. Planners and architects refer to it as the “missing middle.” It hits the middle in scale — larger than a typical detached single-family home but smaller than a mid- or high-rise — and typically serves people with middle-class incomes.
Daniel Parolek, an architect based in Berkeley, Calif., who coined the term in 2010, said the need for more missing middle housing is hardly limited to millennials. But as they grow older, he said, questions have been raised about how cities will continue to evolve if many of the generation are priced out once they want to put down roots.
“In particular with this generation, that played an important role in revitalizing cities,” Mr. Parolek said, “I think keeping them in cities is a major conversation.”
Washington residents Matthew Horn, 32, and his wife, Ana Bilbao Horn, 32, are struggling to stay in the city now that they want to buy.
They love their neighborhood near Union Market in the District of Columbia, Mr. Horn said, but their one-bedroom apartment feels tight now that their 6-month-old daughter sleeps in a crib just off the living room.
Rowhouses with at least two bedrooms are either “extreme fixer-uppers” or out of their price range. Mr. Horn, an architect, said being able to buy a home in a safe neighborhood and with a small yard for his daughter feels impossible.
“Right now I’m having to come to terms with having to move out of the city,” he said. “I’m realizing the things I want to provide for her, we won’t be able to afford in D.C.”
In the District, about 35 percent of the housing stock — mostly rowhouses and apartment buildings with two to four units — qualifies as missing middle, planners say. But many of the rowhouses have been carved up into smaller units, shrinking the supply of larger homes and sending prices soaring just as older millennials began seeking them out. Several years ago, in part to preserve larger homes for millennials trying to remain in the District, the city began limiting when rowhouses could be divided into more than three units.
“We’re starting to research where and how we can encourage more of the missing middle,” said Art Rodgers, senior housing planner for the District’s Office of Planning. “I think urban areas in general have to make tough choices between maximizing land capacity and maintaining this housing supply.”
Fred Selden, planning director for Fairfax County in the Northern Virginia suburbs, said he hasn’t seen an exodus of millennials from the county’s more urban areas. But he senses the uncertainty in his profession.
“You read the literature, and it’s all over the place,” Mr. Selden said. “We’re trying to figure out what will drive this younger generation. Will they follow the same patterns of their predecessors, or will they do something different?”
Cities from Des Moines, Iowa, to Atlanta, Ga., to Nashville, Tenn., are turning to the missing middle as a way to try to hold on to millennials as they age. Rather than requiring or subsidizing it as they typically do to produce more low-income housing, local governments are trying to encourage developers to build more missing middle housing by removing barriers in zoning laws and building codes.
Some cities have rezoned their single-family neighborhoods to allow duplexes, triplexes and other multi-unit structures that look like single-family homes from the outside, particularly in areas near transit lines. To allow more homes per lot, others are considering relaxing requirements on yard sizes and setbacks, the distance required between properties. Some are beginning to allow bungalows clustered around courtyards by changing long-standing requirements that front entrances be on a street.
“[Millennials] said ‘ We don’t want big yards, but we don’t want to be in a big apartment building. We want a duplex or a triplex or townhouse,’” said Lee Jones, a city planner in Nashville, which has made similar changes. “They want something close to work and coffee shops, but they don’t want to take care of a yard.”