Long-time readers of this site will not be surprised. I argued in 2018 that Kansas City’s “creative‑class” investments—downtown luxury apartments, entertainment districts, and infrastructure built for young urbanites—did not amount to a sustainable strategy for long‑term growth and retention. I observed that many millennials preferred the suburbs: affordable housing, space, good schools, and stable services.

Booth’s column helps explain why. The urban‑core housing boom may have been good at attracting people in their 20s and early 30s. But when that cohort started families, cities lacked housing and civic infrastructure suitable for children and long‑term residence. As a result, the creative‑class gamble has begun to backfire. Cities may keep a veneer of vibrancy and high rents, but underneath many are losing the people who once anchored stable communities—workers, taxpayers, parents, consumers.

That matters for Missouri cities such as Kansas City (and for other mid-size urban areas nationwide). A city’s strength does not come only from bars, nightlife, or trendy apartments. It comes from stable families, long‑term homeownership or stable renting, good schools, reliable infrastructure, and civic engagement grounded in predictable community roots. The creative‑class theory always rested on uncertain assumptions about life‑cycle stability.

As I pointed out in 2018, and as current national trends affirm, there is no magic bullet to make downtown living the default for most families. A better path remains broad and neutral: keep taxes reasonable, maintain infrastructure, support quality schools, and enable stable, moderately priced housing—suburban or urban—that families actually want.

Creative‑class strategies may look shiny on paper and flashy in media. But when they fail to adapt to one of life’s key transitions—from young adult to parent—their long‑term contribution to stable growth may have been nothing more than a short‑lived boom.

The post New Observations Confirm Skepticism of Creative Class Urbanism appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

In the survey, millennials were defined as adults aged 18-34 and the surveyed group was a nationally representative sample. The survey found majority support for voucher opportunities (67 to 84 percent among racial and ethnic groups), described as government funding for private school tuition for low-income students. Charter schools also received majority support, from 54 to 67 percent among racial and ethnic groups. As the millennial generation will soon make up the largest population in the electorate, their preferences are important.

Let’s face it; choices permeate daily life at every turn. On items ranging from transportation (drive or rideshare?), eating (go out or app delivery?), and products (trusted brand or monthly subscription?), people are accustomed to making a choice. Millennials have grown up in an age where their preferences are the driving force of their choices. In any instance of choice, you must evaluate your needs and priorities and then find something, a good or a service, to fulfill those needs. In this way, choices regarding education are no different.

In the case of education, the needs of students may be safety, college preparation, community service, career training, individualized teaching, or many other characteristics. All are good things, but not every school can focus on everything. A system of educational freedom and school choice would allow parents to choose a school where their needs are most met. In order for students to flourish, families should be equipped to respond to their child’s educational needs with choice. Millennial support for school choice should be taken as a sign that they are serious about education serving students well.

As it turns out, millennials may be the best generation so far to ask, “does this option or that option best serve my needs?” This question doesn’t lose its importance outside the realm of restaurants and transportation but its relevance and importance actually increase when it comes to education—the stakes are much higher.

The post What Can Millennials Teach Us about School Choice? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

William Frey of the Brookings Institution just published a report entitled “How migration of millennials and seniors has shifted since the Great Recession,” and it has some promising numbers for Kansas City. In the report, Frey writes:

Another feature of young adult migration magnets is their location in the South and West “Sun Belt” region where all except three of the top 20 magnets are located. (Those three—Minneapolis-St. Paul, Columbus, and Kansas City—are among the most highly educated Midwest areas for millennials.)

…Today’s young adults, now encompassing those in the prime millennial ages, show a penchant for “educated places”—including Denver and Seattle—as well as more affordable areas like Minneapolis and Kansas City with pre-recession hot spots like Riverside, Phoenix, and Atlanta showing reduced appeal. 

Frey, as do most researchers, uses the term Kansas City broadly, to encompass an entire metropolitan statistical area (MSA). The Kansas City MSA stretches from Independence to Lawrence and includes 14 counties. Its population is 2.1 million, compared to the under 500,000 within the political boundaries of Kansas City, Missouri itself. Knowing whether a statistic describes a city or a metropolitan area is important, lest you conclude, as some would have you believe, that Kansas City gets 25 million visitors a year. It doesn’t.

It’s important to remember the Brookings Institution numbers on millennial migration speak to the broader MSA. Frey doesn’t report how much of the growth is taking place in downtown Kansas City, or how much is taking place in Olathe and Overland Park, two places recently listed as top destinations for millennials. Frey doesn’t report it because he doesn’t know it; I asked him.

As has happened before, it is possible that reports like this will be set upon by groups like the Downtown Council and the City of Kansas City as proof that the billions of dollars spent subsidizing wealthy developers in downtown Kansas City are bearing fruit. But until we know migration numbers within the MSAs, all that optimism is premature and skepticism is warranted.

Below: a map containg data from Frey’s analysis.

The post Some Promising Numbers About Millennials in Kansas City. Maybe. appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

In a word, no.

Despite wishful thinking (and some fuzzy math) from boosters like the Downtown Council, millennials nationwide are choosing to leave cities when they decide to buy a home. According to a study conducted for Ernst & Young, a plurality of millennials, 38 percent, live in the suburbs. According to CNBC,

Among millennial homeowners, the suburbs are the clear No. 1 choice: 41 percent of millennial owners opt for suburbs over cities, small towns or rural areas. That’s up from 36 percent in 2016, Cathy Koch, EY’s Americas Tax Policy Leader, tells CNBC Make It.

It’s not just that they’re settling down as they get older, either, Koch says. When looking at the very same age group today compared to two years ago, there’s an increase in the share of millennials living in the suburbs.

“It was a surprise to me to see this generation increasingly choosing suburban locations to buy homes,” Koch says, but the trend makes sense: “The ‘suburbs’ may very well be smaller cities close to larger urban areas — these still afford the richness of city living (including employment opportunities) at maybe lower home prices.”

The focus on Kansas City’s downtown has not yielded a return worthy of the investment. We’re not attracting millennials. Even the tourism numbers promulgated by the city’s tourism board are suspect. Certainly Kansas City is suffering the same fate of many cities through no fault of its own. But the degree to which that city leaders have focused on developing streetcars, convention hotels, and the airport—while seemingly ignoring a years’ long spike in homicides—demonstrates an unwillingness to face reality.

The post Millennials Are Buying in the Suburbs appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

We’ve argued this basic fact for years, and some of the better-known pipers have even changed their tune (but not without charging the townspeople nonetheless). According to a recent study published by SmartAsset based on Pew Research data, Kansas City, Missouri, is not in the top 25 destinations for millennials. Overland Park, Kansas, ranked 14th.

More noteworthy, SmartAsset previously released a study indicating that two Kansas City suburbs ranked in the top 25 places in the United States where millennials are buying homes. Olathe, KS ranked first (!) and Overland Park 11th in the entire country. Kansas City, Missouri—despite our entertainment district, Sprint Center, streetcar, and subsidized corporate headquarters and high-rise luxury apartment buildings—did not appear anywhere in the top 25.

None of this should be surprising. We know that millennials are looking for exactly what previous generations wanted: homes in the suburbs, cars, and good schools. Yet Kansas City leaders persist in telling us we’re a millennial magnet. We aren’t.

There is no shortcut to growing a city; no magical policy that can reverse national demographic trends. A better investment, as Show-Me Institute analysts have argued for years, is for government’s action to be broad and neutral: keep taxes low for everyone, maintain infrastructure, deliver necessary city services, and ensure quality education. Maybe those aren’t as appealing as shiny new construction projects, but they are more successful.

The post Millennials *Still* Prefer the Kansas City Suburbs appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

For starters, the report refers to “greater downtown” Kansas City, which extends as far south as 33rd Street and includes the campus of Penn Valley Community College, two miles away from the Sprint Center. That may be a defensible standard, but I’m guessing it doesn’t fit with most Kansas Citians’ understanding. The photo above is of the KC skyline from a point within the area considered “greater downtown.”

The Downtown Council also released a chart of downtown population growth with projections for future growth, and the outlook is decidedly positive. But if you examine the x axis, you’ll see that 1990 is as far from 2000 as 2019 is from 2020. This scale makes for a misleading presentation of the data.

We took the exact same data points and spaced them more evenly on a time series chart. What you see is largely flat growth from 1990 through 2016. Then the population projection lines rocket upward. The report concedes that this is “unprecedented growth,” but does little to explain exactly why the next few years will be so radically different than the past few decades.

Is it credible that between 2010 and 2020, “greater downtown” Kansas City will see a 46% population growth? For some context, researchers at the University of Virginia project that Kansas and Missouri are only supposed to see a population growth of 4 percent and 3 percent, respectively, in the same time period.

The Downtown Council offers questionable analysis when it discusses which generations choose to live downtown. The text of the report states:

At 41%, Greater Downtown Kansas City has the highest percent of millennials in our community. As you move farther away from downtown, the percentage drops to 26% for Kansas City, MO and 22% for the regional MSA.

The report goes on to tell us:

The data demonstrates that the living, location, and employment patterns of millennials is generally consistent across the country. They are choosing downtown for all their needs.

The report seems to say that because 41 percent of greater downtown residents are millennials that 41percent of millennials live in the greater downtown area. In fact, millennials are not “choosing downtown for all their needs.” Looking at the same 2016 ACS Census data and breaking it down by age group instead of by region, we learn that there are 548,588 millennials (aged 15 to 34) in the Kansas City MO-KS regional MSA. Just over 140,000 live in the city of Kansas City, MO, and according to the Downtown Council, 9,388 live in the “greater downtown.” This means that 74 percent of millennials reside in the region outside Kansas City, MO; 24 percent live inside Kansas City, MO but outside the greater downtown area; and 2 percent live downtown. In other words, downtown may have a large percentage of millennials, but among millennials themselves, only a tiny fraction live downtown.

Everyone wants Kansas City to do well, and promoting a city requires sound policy that rests on solid research. The “State of Downtown” report seems to provide neither. In fact, by presenting population projections wildly at odds with both recent history and state trends, and by overlooking where millennials chose to live, this report appears to deliver little more than mere boosterism.

The post The Downtown Council’s Fuzzy Math appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

[Highline Partners representative Brett] Posten says conventional wisdom says millennials want to live in lofts downtown, but most of the [Kansas City] millennials that Highline talked to said they eventually planned to move to the suburbs, just like their parents did. While they enjoyed touring pristine fitness centers with steaming saunas and heated pools, Posten says, millennials put a higher value on open floor plans, in-unit washers and dryers and secure, covered parking.

That’s because Kansas City millennials aren’t actually ditching their cars. Though many said they’d like public transportation to be more reliable, less than 5 percent are car-free.

This is welcome research and should be instructive to city leaders who lard development subsidies on high rise projects and downtown streetcars thinking they are building for the future. They aren’t.  In fact, the rush to develop in Kansas City may be based on research conducted elsewhere. The Kansas City Star quoted Posten as saying,

We think developers are making decisions based on reading about millennials in the national press. The demographic in Kansas City is distinctly different.

Therein lies the problem of economic development in Kansas City: trying too hard to be like other cities and often joining the race too late. Convention hotels, luxury high rises, airport terminals and streetcars are little more than municipal me-tooism, rather than reflecting on Kansas City’s own unique competitive advantages.

Instead of trying to predict future market demands and subsidizing them—in the same way every other city has done before us—Kansas City leaders should focus on delivering basic services effectively and efficiently.

The post What Kansas City Millennials Want appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Congress approved a sweeping $1.5 trillion tax bill on Wednesday that slashes rates for corporations, provides new breaks for private businesses and reorganizes the individual tax code.

The Senate passed the GOP bill early Wednesday morning and the House then voted on it for a second time to fix technical problems with the legislation, the final step before it’s sent to President Donald Trump for his signature.

According to the Tax Policy Center, 8 out of 10 Americans will see their taxes reduced under the finalized bill, including the vast majority of middle income earners. It also sounds like entitlement reform could be coming soon to pair any long-term revenue reductions from this tax relief with long-term spending reductions, as well. Entitlement reform should have happened with or without tax reform, obviously, but that the two issues are being talked about in the same breath now is a positive development for supporters of good, sustainable governance.

But let’s not forget one other big development in the tax reform bill: starting in 2019, the end of Obamacare’s mandate penalty/tax.

The individual mandate was included in ObamaCare in part to draw young and healthy people to sign up for insurance in the marketplaces as a way to offset the costs of older and sicker enrollees.

Still, not everyone agrees that the measure has worked as intended, with some saying the mandate hasn’t been as effective as originally thought to entice people to buy health insurance.

“Today, we’re turning Obamacare from a mandatory program into a voluntary program and providing additional tax relief for the millions and millions of Americans who have chosen and will choose not to buy a government-mandated product that for them provides not the value that they want,” Sen. John Barrasso (Wyo.), the No. 4 Senate Republican, told reporters on Tuesday.

To me as a Millennial, the functioning of Obamacare’s mandate was a particularly objectionable piece of that bill that used younger, generally poorer Americans to subsidize everyone else in the individual market. It’s why so many young people instead risked not getting the insurance at all, especially as the premiums on the plans available to them exploded year after year. 

In the end, while I’d like to have seen more from the bill—and frankly, more from this year, including a full repeal of Obamacare—the passage of the TCJA is a welcome win in what could otherwise have been a dicey year for supporters of free market reform. 

The post Tax Cuts And Jobs Act Passes appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Earlier this month a polling report released by EdChoice demonstrated that support for school choice policies is stronger among millennials than among older generations. When surveyed about charter schools, voucher programs, education savings accounts, and tax-credit scholarships, millennials’ support for these programs was the strongest of any age group. The table below breaks down generational support for four different school choice policies.

The margin of support for school choice grows even larger with millennial parents of school-age children. Over 70 percent of millennial parents support each of the four school choice programs.

It is not surprising that millennial parents support these policies so enthusiastically, considering that 61 percent of all millennial parents would choose a nontraditional public school for their child if they could.

Unfortunately, policy has not kept up with parental demand. Consider the following:

• 11 percent of parents would like to enroll their child in a charter school, but only 5 percent actually do so.
• 38 percent would like to enroll their children in private schools, but only 10 percent do so.
• 12 percent of families would like to homeschool their children, but only 3 percent of parents do so.

By contrast, even though traditional public schools are the first choice for only 30 percent of parents, 83 percent of parents send their children to public school.

Another interesting find in this report is the difference of opinion between white and nonwhite millennials. While both groups support school choice policies, nonwhite respondents held more favorable views of charter schools (69 percent compared to 60 percent of white millennials) and ESAs (65 percent versus 55 percent of whites). These results are especially relevant in light of the NAACP calling for a moratorium on charter school expansion recently, and the backlash from parents that followed.

Given that millennials are a growing portion of the adult population and make up most of the parents of school-age children, policymakers would be wise to listen to their opinions on education policy. Instead of limited educational opportunities, parents want to be empowered to provide their children with the best education possible through school choice. 

The post Millennials Love School Choice appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The city spends (or diverts) millions each year on streetcars, apartment buildings and luxury condos, and entertainment districts in a breathless effort to attract millennials. Initially there was some evidence to suggest this was working. Data from 2000 and 2012 showed that although city-wide Kansas City was not attracting those aged 25 to 34 on pace with national average, the downtown area was doing okay.

But that may be changing. A new report from CBRE Research, “2016 Scoring Tech Talent,” shows that from 2009 through 2014, Kansas City’s population of millennials ages 20 to 29 living downtown dropped 5.3%. St. Louis saw a drop of 3.5%; the national average was an increase of 3.1%. This is despite findings that Kansas City is very competitive on wage and rent obligations for tech firms, rents per square foot for offices and apartments, and the rent-to-wage ratio.

Add this to our recent finding that market values along the streetcar Transportation Development District are lower today than they were in 2012, and the city’s downtown policies aren’t looking so smart. What makes this worse is that the dollars being spent to lure millennials are coming at the cost of money to schools, libraries, basic services, and infrastructure.

The post Kansas City Losing Downtown Millennials appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

“…allow individuals to rent a home, apartment or even just a single bedroom for short-duration stays, usually just a few days at a time, using Web-based platforms that advertise to travelers.”

The most prominent example of this type of company is Airbnb. Much like ridesharing, short-term rental services are a prominent example of the “sharing economy,” where technology allows individuals (and not just well capitalized businesses) to make money renting out the things they already own. A major problem with the expansion of the sharing economy is local regulations, which straight-jacket industries into forms city officials and existing businesses are used to, and benefit from. The good news is that most of the cities the recent survey looked at, likely seeing an opportunity to encourage new business and attract more visitors, are making reforms to allow short-term rental services to operate easily.

                But not Kansas City. The city of fountains got an “F” for its regulations, because, as the report states:

“Kansas City has a tightly regulated short-term rental market that benefits special interests at consumers' expense. Both hosted and non-hosted stays are permissible only in commercial districts, such as a boarding house. No additional deductions are made for the city's legal framework, taxation, enforcement or licensing.”

The fact that Kansas City has made so little effort to reform its short-term rental regulations directly contradicts messaging from city officials about how they are all about attracting business and “millennials.” If creating growth and attracting young people is anything more than a rhetorical prop, city policy will have to actually create a welcoming environment for new types of services, services millennials demonstrably like to use.  Right now, it appears that city hall thinks handing out tax breaks to large companies is enough to qualify as business-friendly, and building a streetcar is the essence of cool. 

The post Kansas City Gets “F” Grade for Rental Regulations appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

We’ve talked before about how Saint Louis City’s attitudes toward non-city alternatives for the NGA expose local leadership’s fair-weather regionalism. After all, no matter what happens, NGA jobs are staying in the region and the area’s economy should remain unaffected. But in a bid to “redevelop” a part of North Saint Louis and keep the earnings tax revenue the NGA currently generates, Saint Louis City is preparing to pull out all the stops.

Saint Clair County is offering a low-cost, green field option on the north end of Scott Air Force base to the NGA, with the state of Illinois preparing to throw in $116 million in infrastructure improvements for the site. Saint Louis City’s original offer was a North City site at a cost $14 million, with $120 million in assistance from the state of Missouri. Now, Saint Louis will waive the $14-million cost, which was supposed to recoup the city’s expenses for preparing the site. Such costs will have to be pushed onto Missouri residents. Additionally, not to be outdone by Illinois’s infrastructure improvements, Saint Louis is throwing a MetroLink expansion into the deal as well. Strangely, Saint Louis has not put forward a solid plan for how it would fund a new billion-dollar-plus light rail line.

While city hall’s financial/infrastructure incentives may seem a little half-baked, they’re nothing compared to its rhetoric. Apparently, according to Saint Louis’s leadership, the city should get the NGA because millennials like to live and work downtown, among other lazy generalizations about an entire generation of Americans. One official stated that, “The days when talented young people wanted to commute 25, 35, 45 miles are over.” An interesting statement, because, since millennials have entered the workforce, the percentage of workers commuting longer than 25 minutes has regularly increased while the share of workers commuting less than 15 minutes has decreased:

This is just another example of how the generation dubbed “millennials” is, largely, much like the generations that preceded them in terms of living, working, and commuting. And city hall’s statements appear to be typical of local government officials using generational stereotypes to justify the types of policies they (not millennials themselves) have pursued for decades.

What’s more, even if millennials are everything that Saint Louis City leaders hope they are (and want to live downtown and take public transportation to work), the existing MetroLink already goes to Scott Airforce Base, where the NGA could be. Millennials could, if the Illinois site were chosen, live on Washington Avenue and ride the train to work. That certainly sounds easier than flattening a large section of North Saint Louis and spending billions to expand the MetroLink. Given the fact the city’s plan would turn dozens of families out of their homes, wouldn’t that be a fairer solution as well?

The post City’s “NGA for Millennials” Pitch Rings Hollow appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

On Thursday, American Public Media broadcast a story on NPR suggesting that millennials aren't that different from previous generations at all. 

The post Millennials Moving Out appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Nevermind.

Research featured in Business Insider tells us that millennials aren’t much different from their parents’ generation.

“They still want good restaurants, but now it’s also about space, affordability and being able to send their kids to a good public school,” said Paternite, 45, who added that about 70% of her business now comes from young families who are making the move from Brooklyn or Manhattan.

Millennials, typically defined as those born between 1981 and 1997, may be turning into their parents after all. A generation that’s been stereotyped as urban, single, and aghast at the idea of a car-based life in the suburbs is starting to age, prompting fund managers to bet on companies that should benefit if the US birth rate reverses a six-year slump.

Oh, and their supposed desire to get away from cars? Also false:

The generation once seen as shunning cars accounted for 27% of new auto sales in the US last year, up 9 percentage points from 2010, according to a recent study by JD Power and Associates.

The stereotype was probably never true, yet it has driven so much of the policymaking, rhetoric, and spending from City Hall. Readers of this blog see nothing new here. We’ve been debunking the millennial myth here and here and here.

In the meantime, the rest of the city—where people are actually living—has been neglected and left to dry up. Rather than chase mythical populations of the future, we need to fix the real problems that impact the quality of life for millennials—and everyone. This means streets, sewers, schools, crime, and we need to do so efficiently while keeping taxes low.

The post Millennials Prefer Suburbs . . . and Cars appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

However, while Kansas City has had some success revitalizing its downtown, the most recent transit data does not suggest any contemporaneous surge in transit usage.

As the chart above demonstrates, despite the fact that total employment has now exceeded prerecession levels in the Kansas City metropolitan area, Kansas City Area Transit Authority (KCATA) ridership has yet to recover. In fact, the most recent data shows total passenger trips are still fewer than they were before the recession by about 800,000 annual riders. Interestingly, transit passenger trips recovered relatively quickly until early 2012, since which time transit usage has actually fallen.

Proponents of transit expansion might argue that Kansas City simply has substandard public transportation options, and that the addition of bus rapid transit, light rail, and streetcars will greatly increase passenger trips. While some net new trips are likely given better service, KCATA’s recent experience should cast doubt on just how much needs to be done to attract new riders. KCATA opened new bus rapid transit lines, a.k.a. MAX routes, in 2005, 2011, and 2013. Since that time, increases in MAX ridership have been met with decreased use in regular bus passenger trips. It is possible to see MAX trips (which are generally longer) as more valuable than the lost bus trips, but there is no evidence that MAX drew significant new riders to KCATA; it is most likely the case that existing transit riders diverted to the better service.

The postrecession performance of KCATA is a bit of a puzzle, and I encourage anyone with reasonable explanations to give them in the comments. However, Kansas City’s employment growth and the increasing numbers of millennials living downtown has not spurred large transit passenger growth. Instead of pushing expensive rail transit plans, perhaps regional planners should ask how Kansas City, with no rail transit and some of the most highway miles per capita of any major city, was able to become to a millennial destination in the first place.

The post Kansas City Transit Ridership Showing Little Progress appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

If you only look at the close-in downtown neighborhoods, defined by the study as those “within 3 miles of the center of the central business district,” Kansas City saw an increase of 63 percent over the past 12 years. Compared to our peer cities, this is impressive. (See Table 1.) So supporters of using taxpayer dollars to subsidize development might argue their profligate spending is working.

But the data about cities as a whole is not so positive. Of those same cities, Kansas City as a whole ranked last in growth of this sought-after population. (See Table 2.) The average population increase for this demographic in all 51 cities was 25.2 percent. Kansas City came in below that.

City leaders have put their faith in an idea about urban millennials that may or may not be legitimate. In doing so they have diverted funds from projects and services throughout the city to build and maintain things downtown such as the streetcar and Power and Light District. But any subsequent population growth downtown is dwarfed by population stagnation elsewhere.

The argument over attracting urban dwellers is hotly contested. Regardless of who is right, Kansas City is not seeing much success, and economic development is more cannibalization than growth. Residents in the north, south, and east should be wary of sacrificing their own needs in favor of a downtown strategy that so far isn’t working.

The post Kansas City, Millennial Magnet? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The debate over what millennials want continues to rage in Kansas City and elsewhere. City leaders are spending gobs of taxpayer money on entertainment districts, streetcars, and subsidized housing in hopes that the so-called creative class will flock there. But the evidence to support such efforts is weak and growing weaker with time.

The New York Times published a column recently about where young college-educated people are choosing to live. The author wrote:

[A]s young people continue to spurn the suburbs for urban living, more of them are moving to the very heart of cities — even in economically troubled places like Buffalo and Cleveland. The number of college-educated people age 25 to 34 living within three miles of city centers has surged, up 37 percent since 2000, even as the total population of these neighborhoods has slightly shrunk.

Yet a Wall Street Journal piece, published just last week, reports:

A survey released Wednesday by the National Association of Home Builders, a trade group, suggested otherwise. The survey, based on responses from 1,506 people born since 1977, found that most want to live in single-family homes outside of the urban center, even if they now reside in the city.

A recent article in Business Insider suggests that the era of young professionals living in urban areas has peaked:

But a decade from now, the landscape will look very different. Millennials will pair up and have kids and want space. Cities, particularly the megacities like New York and Chicago, aren’t likely to become more affordable.

Demographics are destiny. That big bulge of younger millennials visible in the population pyramid is going to be hitting the prime age range for marriage and having kids in the next few years, and it’s likely that many of those new families will move out to the ‘burbs (or further!).

The true cost of revitalizing downtown may be more than the city can bear. Kansas City cannot afford to operate its own fountains and is cutting funds to public safety services. It cannot cover bad investments without taking money from the airport, it neglects the real urban core, and it relies on charity to meet basic city services. Kansas City needs to have a debate on these economic development assumptions, especially because there is so little money left to give away.

The post The Myth of the Urban Millennial appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Unfortunately, the most recent commuting data on the national and Missouri levels show no such nascent transformation. In fact, on the national level a higher percentage (73.6 percent) of commuters drove alone to work in 2013 than they did in 2010. Transit usage has shown some increase, but only from 7.9 percent to 8.1 percent of commuters. Given the increasing resources going to transit agencies nationally, along with high fuel prices and an anemic economic recovery, a 0.2 percent increase in commuting mode share for transit is unimpressive.

In Missouri, the story is much the same. At the state level, a slightly smaller percentage of commuters drove alone to work in 2013 than in 2010, but it only fell less than 0.1 percent (to 81.66 percent of commuters). Public transportation did increase its modal share, but only by 0.06 percent (from 1.56 percent to 1.62 percent of commuters). In Missouri as a whole and every major Missouri city other than Saint Louis, more commuters walk to work than use public transportation.

A longer time horizon makes the situation look even worse. Transit’s share of commutes in Missouri and its major cities has slowly decreased over the last few decades; a lower percentage use transit now than in 1990. Taking 2000 as our baseline year, the nadir of public transportation use in the United States as a whole, 1.49 percent of Missourians used transit for their commutes. After 13 years and well over a billion dollars of investments, transit’s share of commuters has remained essentially flat. The same is true of Kansas City and Saint Louis.

While total transit usage may be increasing in aggregate, in Missouri and virtually everywhere else in the country, driving alone is still the undisputed king of commuting. As for public transportation, Missouri spends more than $400 million per year on average on transit, but less than 2 percent of the population use it to get to work.

It may be time to reconsider both the idea that transit usage is sweeping America and that increasing resources to transit (without some serious rethinking of how the money is spent) will propel a transportation revolution.

The post Missouri Commuting Habits: Public Transportation on the Ascendency? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Smart Growth America promotes many common urban planning myths about demographic factors and magic millennials, with the main point being that people are abandoning cars and suburbs for cities and transit. But the facts are:

• Suburbs (and exurbs) are still growing faster than urban cores nationwide.
• Millennials are still driving and only using transit slightly more than past generations.
• Millennials are flocking to cities with high-performing economies regardless of their overall walkability or transit scores.

Like these myths, the idea that walkability drives wealth is likely a mirage, created by the metric for walkability itself. That’s because Smart Growth America gives higher walkability scores to areas where “…everyday destinations, such as home, work, school, stores, and restaurants, are within walking distance.”

That sounds reasonable, until one considers the type of areas that will not be considered walkable. One such type of area is suburbs like Ladue or Ballwin in Saint Louis County, with spread out single-family homes. But another is going to be poor inner city neighborhoods, such as areas in North Saint Louis. Despite the higher population densities, mixed housing stock, and narrow roads with ample sidewalks, the depressed economies and lack of safety in poorer areas mean fewer businesses, fewer restaurants, and fewer shops. Therefore, they have lower walkability scores. Use that definition of “walkable” nationally and one would erroneously conclude walkability means wealth because the definition of walkable precludes economically depressed areas.

North Saint Louis already has the infrastructure to allow residents to walk, bike, or take transit to nearby areas. It just does not have the wealth to attract enough shops, jobs, and restaurants into walking distance. The only way to fix that is to increase economic opportunity, or replace current residents with wealthier residents poached from the suburbs or other city neighborhoods. I’ll leave it to the reader to decide which route the city has taken with Washington Ave., the Northside Development Project, and Cortex in midtown.

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Contrary to the rhetoric, millennials are relatively immobile and have lower incomes than generations that preceded them. This most likely is an effect of the credit crunch and economic downturn, which has left many millennials without steady incomes to spend or credit to buy new housing.

Also contrary to rhetoric, millennials are not upending the dominance of the car in American travel. In 2000, 5.4 percent of workers ages 16-34 used public transportation for their commutes. In 2010, that number increased to 6.1 percent. That is an increase for sure, but a rather small one considering the expansion of transit systems in the 2000s and the wealth-reducing effects of the recession. The vast majority still drive. Most trends point to a “car light” preference among young people rather than a dramatic move to transit reliance.

When millennials do move, it appears to be for economic reasons, not whether a city is considered cool or has a streetcar. The list of top 20 millennial destinations (of which Kansas City is No. 14), contains some cities with lots of public transportation (Portland, Washington, D.C.), but also many cities that are derided for urban sprawl (Houston, Atlanta, etc.). While the transit correlation may be spurious, all of the cities popular with millennials are among the top performing metro areas in economic growth. The obvious conclusion is that millennials, like the generations that preceded them, chase economic opportunity, not transit. As a millennial who has moved to cities for jobs multiple times, my experience is that the number of sports teams or streetcar lines matters very little in the decision-making process.

If Kansas City planners really want to attract millennials, they will stop trying to make Kansas City cool and focus on creating more opportunity. The millennials will bring the cool with them. Instead, Kansas City officials use a millennial straw man as support for a fabulously wasteful streetcar and other large government projects. And if we believe an author at the Kansas City Star, the only problem is the city hasn’t approved streetcar expansion fast enough. When it comes to looking cool, Kansas City spares no expense. That is, of course, until those millennials buck the plan and want to rideshare with Lyft. Then it’s more important for the city to protect taxi companies than to look cool.

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