Here’s a new video that’s being released today over at The Wall Street Journal online.

The Wall Street Journal asked six experts to come up with lists of the “next youth magnet cities.” I was one of them. The top spot was a tie – D.C. and Seattle, followed by NYC, Portland (OR), Austin, San Jose, Denver, Raleigh-Durham, Dallas, Chicago, and Boston. You can see the list and read the full story here.

Below is what I sent to the Journal.

My Rankings
These are based on my own rankings of the best places for young, professional singles, aged 20-29 in Who’s Your City?, as well as other rankings and surveys and my reading of current trends. The data are from Kevin Stolarick, additional analysis by Charlotta Mellander, and research assistance by Patrick Adler, my colleagues at the Martin Prosperity Institute.

1) New York City
The country’s largest city was the top destination for recent graduates according to the career-cast survey noted below. The city’s size affords migrants an economic diversity that simply cannot exist in smaller places. It’s the place to be if you’re in finance, fashion, entertainment, publishing, or even indie music. Also unparalleled is the city’s mythic status, as a place to test one’s mettle against the best and the brightest. One of the top five on my own rankings of the best places for young, single, 20-29-year-olds.

2) Washington, D.C
The public sector is ascendant and, in the eyes of many, Barack Obama is America’s coolest boss. These factors will only bolster Washington, D.C., a city that is already a hotbed of young talent. 45.9 percent of Washington, D.C.’s workforce has a bachelor’s degree or more, and young people enjoy positions of influence on congressional staffs and at think tanks. And it is a center for media, journalism, and blogging as well as high-tech. D.C. is the top city in my own rankings of best places for young singles aged 20-29. If I was 23 or 24 again, it’s where I’d head.

3) San Francisco/ Silicon Valley
Still the world’s high-tech hot spot. One of the top five on my own rankings. Great quality of life, a large stock of smart, driven young people, and fantastic restaurants and outdoor activities.

4) Chicago
If management or industry is your thing, Chicago is the place to be. It’s the talent magnet for the midwest and beyond, drawing driven young people by the droves. It has great amenities, great nightlife, a spectacular waterfront, great restaurants, and it’s affordable.

5) Boulder/ Denver
Yes, it’s smaller than the others, but it packs a real punch. Boulder ranked No. 1 among all U.S. destinations on my own rankings of the best places for young singles 20-29. Now add in Denver and it has the size and scale to be a great place for young professionals. It has thriving, high-tech industries about the best outdoor recreation – from skiing to cycling – to be had anywhere.

6) L.A.
If you want a career in film, entertainment, fashion, or music, it’s the place to be. Sure, it’s crowded, pricey, and the traffic is horrible, but it has abundant sunshine, great temperatures, unbelievable beaches, and fantastic restaurants.

7) Boston
It’s always been a great “stay-over” town for the thousands of regional college grads. This year, it surpassed NYC as the No. 1 destination for Harvard grads. It’s the world center for management consulting with strong finance and high-tech industries. Not to mention a great place to stick around, work for awhile, and go back to grad school.

Seattle
A high-tech and lifestyle mecca in its own right with Amazon, Microsoft, and more. It’s also a center for cutting-edge retail with Starbucks, Costco, and REI. Quality of place by the boatloads.

9) Austin
What can you say about a place whose motto is “Keep Austin Weird”? It remains a high-tech player, with great quality of life that’s affordable. It’s the indie music capital of the universe with SXSW and Austin City Limits and a great array of local venues. Plus, with residents like Lance Armstrong, it’s a cyclist and outdoor enthusiast’s paradise.

10) Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill
Another great high-tech, university, smart city, which boasts a mild climate, highly educated population, great outdoor activities, and a great music scene.

Runners-Up/Honorable Mention:

• Madison, Wisconsin, and Ann Arbor, Michigan – Both great stay-over college towns that rank very high on my own rankings. College towns in general perform well in this demographic; they’ve coped reasonably well with the recession and are good places to stay or head, at least for a while
• Atlanta and Minneapolis: Regional talent magnets for the southeast and Great Lakes/Plains respectively.
• Outside the U.S.: London, Toronto, Shanghai, Sydney-Melbourne-Brisbane.

Key factors affecting location of young, college-educated singles
Even with signs that the worst of the Great Recession is over, young people are understandably worried about their economic future. This past May, the Wall Street Journal reported that some of the past decade’s “youth magnet” locations are losing their appeal as economic opportunities whither in cities like Phoenix, Seattle, Atlanta, Charlotte, Dallas, Las Vegas, and others which led the nation in attracting young college grads from 2005 to 2007. So where are young, educated, single people heading?

A recent survey lists the best places for college grads to launch their careers. New York City topped the list – despite the financial crisis – with eight in 10 survey respondents listing it as one of their top destinations. Second-place Washington, D.C. was named by 63 percent. Los Angeles, Boston, San Francisco, Chicago, Denver, Seattle, and San Diego round out the top 10. And, remember, this is a list of the places that are best to find a job, not to have fun, go to great restaurants or clubs, make friends, or get lots of dates.

The list is heavy on big cities, and it’s remarkably similar to a comprehensive list my research team and I developed for my book Who’s Your City? of the best places for college-educated 20- to 29-year-olds. It also put big cities such as San Francisco, Washington, Boston, Los Angeles, and New York on top. (D.C. jumped to the top of the list when we factored affordability and cost into the mix.) College towns also did well, with Madison, WI, topping the list for medium-size regions, and Boulder, CO, taking first place for small regions. Raleigh, N.C.; Ann Arbor, MI; and New Haven, CT also score well. To get at the factors that attract and keep Gen Y in certain places, my colleague Charlotta Mellander and I analyzed the results of a Gallup survey of some 28,000 Americans.

First off, young, educated people are considerably less attached to where they live and considerably more mobile than other Americans. About a quarter (26.5 percent) of them said they were extremely satisfied with the place they currently live, compared with nearly half (47.4 percent) of all Americans. Twenty-somethings are, on average, three or four times more likely to move than 40- or 50-somethings.

Jobs are clearly important. Gen Y members ranked the availability of jobs second when asked what would keep them in their current location and fourth in terms of their overall satisfaction with their community. But it’s more than just a job. Young people today are faced with dwindling corporate commitment; job tenure has grown far shorter and people switch jobs with much greater frequency. That means picking a location which not only offers a great job but a thick labor market with abundant career opportunity, as a hedge against economic uncertainty and the risk of layoff.

But the highest-ranked factor is the ability to meet people and make friends. Young, educated people intuitively understand what economic sociologists have documented: Vibrant social networks are key to landing jobs, moving forward in your career, and one’s broader personal happiness. They not only desire a thick labor market but what I have come to call a thick mating market where they can meet new people, go out on dates, and eventually find a life partner. What do you think is more important to happiness: Finding a great job or finding the right life partner?

Where older Americans see high-quality schools and safe streets as key, Gen Y understandably ranks the availability of outstanding colleges and universities higher. Many are likely to go back to graduate school and having great programs nearby is a big plus. When it comes to their overall community satisfaction, access to open space, being in an aesthetically beautiful city, and having access to vibrant nightlife are also quite important. Affordable housing, air, and water quality, and availability of religious institutions matter too but slightly less so.

My own assessment is that finding the right place to live is among the three most important decisions of your life. Moving is an expensive and time-consuming proposition; mistakes can be costly to fix or undo.

More than 75 million American households own their own homes, according to the new American Housing Survey (h/t: Kevin Stolarick). About a third of these own their homes free and clear, and a whopping 64 million have equity in their homes, while 40 million have homes that are worth more than what is owed on their mortgages.

That doesn’t mean we’re out of the woods yet. Some 12 million households, or 16 percent, owe more than their homes are worth, according to data from Economy.com reported in the Wall Street Journal. The trouble in the housing market is a recent development, fueled by the bubble and lax lending standards of the mid 2000s. Among people who bought within the past five years, nearly 30 percent are under water, the Journal reports.

Prices are coming down fast regionally, falling back to 2003 levels in San Diego and Boston, and to 2004 levels in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Fort Lauderdale, and Minneapolis, the Wall Street Journal reports. But in many regions they still have a long way to go. The graphic below, from the Journal, shows the amount housing prices have fallen already and the overall price change required to bring them back into line with historical levels of affordability. The story also notes that prices in close-in neighborhoods in “super-star” cities have held up best. Click here for more interactive graphics.

The manufacturing sector is declining at a near record place. As Mark Thoma points out, this occurred prior to the meltdown; what could be next is truly scary. The Wall Street Journal’s Real Time Economics Blog reports:

For months and months, the widest-followed index of manufacturing activity, produced by the Institute for Supply Management, has wavered within a narrow range, showing essentially slight growth in the sector as other industries tanked. Then, along came September. The ISM manufacturing report released this morning showed a stunning decline in several key components as the overall index last month dropped by more than six points to 43.5, its lowest reading since October 2001. … New orders plunged by nearly ten points, the employment index sank by about eight points, and production overall dropped by a whopping 11 points last month, as all measures receded deeper into contraction. Export orders, a source of strength for the sector over the past year, dropped by five points. Inventory gauges also tanked, a sign that manufacturers are paring back… even though the enormously important holiday shopping season is fast approaching.

What do you think the geographic impacts of this will be?

In recent years, a generation of young people, called
the millennials, born between the late 1970s and mid-1990s, has
combined with baby boomers to rekindle demand for urban living. Today,
the subprime-mortgage crisis and $4-a-gallon gasoline are delivering
further gut punches by blighting remote subdivisions nationwide and
rendering long commutes untenable for middle-class Americans.

Just as low interest rates and aggressive mortgage
financing accelerated expansion of the suburban fringe to the point of
oversupply, “the spike in gasoline prices, layered with demographic
changes, may accelerate the trend toward closer-in living,” said Arthur
C. Nelson, director of Virginia Tech’s Metropolitan Institute in
Alexandria, Va. “All these things are piling up, and there are
fundamental changes occurring in demand for housing in most parts of
the country.”

Christopher Leinberger, a visiting fellow at the
Brookings Institution and a developer of walkable areas that combine
housing and commercial space, describes the structural shift as the
“beginning of the end of sprawl.” …

Even families who sought the suburbs or were priced
out of cities now have an economic imperative to find their way back
closer to town. Transportation is the second-biggest household expense,
after housing, and suburban families face a relatively greater gas
burden. At the same time, distant suburbs, or exurbs, where housing
growth was predicated on cheap gas, have experienced the biggest
declines in home values in the past year, according to a May report by
CEOs for Cities, a nonprofit group of public- and private-sector
officials that seeks to promote urban areas. “The gas-price spike
popped the housing bubble,” said Joe Cortright, the report’s author.

The full story is here. I still think it time costs and congestion that play the biggest role.  What do you think the geography of metropolitan America will look like in say 2025?

six months of cellphone-company data to track the
seemingly random movements of 100,000 anonymous European mobile-phone users. By
analyzing more than 16 million records of call date, time and position, the
researchers distilled these diverse travel routines into a mathematical pattern,
like those previously observed among some predators.

The paper published in Nature is here.