ATLANTA, Nov. 24 — Some cities will do anything they can think of to keep young people from fleeing to a hipper town.
In Lansing, Mich., partiers can ease from bar to bar on the new
Entertainment Express trolley, part of the state’s Cool Cities
Initiative. In Portland, Ore., employees at an advertising firm can
watch indie rock concerts at lunch and play “bump,” an abbreviated form
of basketball, every afternoon.
And in Memphis, employers pay for recruits to be matched with hip
young professionals in a sort of corporate Big Brothers program. A new
biosciences research park is under construction — not in the suburbs,
but downtown, just blocks from the nightlife of Beale Street.
These measures reflect a hard demographic reality: Baby boomers are
retiring and the number of young adults is declining. By 2012, the work
force will be losing more than two workers for every one it gains.
Cities have long competed over job growth, struggling to revive
their downtowns and improve their image. But the latest population
trends have forced them to fight for college-educated 25- to
34-year-olds, a demographic group increasingly viewed as the key to an
economic future.
Mobile but not flighty, fresh but technologically savvy, “the young
and restless,” as demographers call them, are at their most desirable
age, particularly because their chances of relocating drop
precipitously when they turn 35. Cities that do not attract them now
will be hurting in a decade.
Read the rest of today’s New York Times front page story here (most e-mailed story at the Times today).
