Cover Story
The new 'cool' cities for Millennials
Millennials, searching for urban ‘authenticity,’ are settling in cities that were often shunned in the past, such as Baltimore, Cleveland, St. Louis, and Detroit.
By Stephanie Hanes, Correspondent
Christian Science Monitor
FEBRUARY 1, 2015
BALTIMORE — When Clara Gustafson, a recent graduate of Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., told her friends that she was moving to Baltimore, a lot of them looked at the 24-year-old as if she were crazy. “You’re going to live in The Wire!” the Portland, Ore., native remembers them saying – a reference to the HBO series focused on the illegal drug trade, set in her soon-to-be hometown. “I didn’t know what to expect,” she says.
But Ms. Gustafson had snagged a prestigious fellowship with a new organization called Venture for America, which matches talented young people with start-up companies in cities such as Detroit, Cincinnati, and Providence, R.I. – cities that are not traditional magnets for college graduates. And she was thrilled when she got a job offer from a cybersecurity start-up called ZeroFOX, based in one of Baltimore’s downtown neighborhoods. So she packed up and moved to the town that boosters call Charm City, and that others have dubbed Bodymore, Murderland.
But rather than being a pioneer, Gustafson quickly realized that she had moved to a city that is full of other young professionals – and attracting more every month. There is a vibrant bar and restaurant scene, social sports leagues through which hundreds of young people get together to play kickball and other games, even a monthly bike ride – sponsored by a group working to make Baltimore less car dependent – in which participants dress up in costume and ride through the city.
Add to this some great downtown architecture, a relatively low cost of living, and a slew of new, innovative businesses that promise young workers the immediate chance to make a difference, and Baltimore, she realized, had become surprisingly “in” to her demographic. “There are a ton of young people,” she says.
While the traditional urban magnets for college graduates – San Francisco, New York, Boston, Seattle – still attract the largest number of degree-holding Millennials, the “hottest” cities are elsewhere. These are places such as Cleveland, where 20-somethings are snapping up downtown apartments as soon as they hit the market; St. Louis, which has seen a 138 percent increase in the percentage of educated 25-to-34-year-olds living in close-in urban neighborhoods between 2000 and 2012; and Nashville, which saw a 37 percent increase between 2007 and 2013 of those people born between 1977 and 1992, according to a report by the housing research group RealtyTrac. (See related story.) Even Detroit, long considered an urban dystopia, increased its Millennial population by nearly 7 percent between 2010 and 2013.
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