Cities bet on millennials but forgot families need housing.

21 hours ago7 min read6 comments

The great urban migration of millennials, a celebrated demographic shift that saw young professionals flock to cities for high-paying jobs and vibrant nightlife, has revealed a profound and costly miscalculation. Cities, seduced by the 'creative class' theory, bet everything on attracting this educated workforce but forgot one essential truth: people grow up.As millennials now enter their 30s and 40s, they are starting families, and the urban landscapes they once embraced are pushing them out. The very housing policies that successfully catered to singles and childless couples—an endless construction of studios and one-bedroom apartments—have created a hostile environment for family life.The consequence is a silent exodus. According to data from the Economic Innovation Group, large urban counties lost roughly 8 percent of their under-5 population between 2020 and 2024, a stark indicator that the foundation of our cities is crumbling.In New York City, the flight of families with young children became a central political issue, propelling Zohran Mamdani to the mayor's office on a platform of affordability. This is not merely a housing crisis; it is a failure of foresight that strikes at the heart of a city's long-term economic and social vitality.When families leave, they take with them their highest earning potential, their consumer spending, and the next generation of workers. The departure of these households during their peak productive years hollows out the urban core, leaving behind a polarized landscape of lower-income residents and a wealthy elite in luxury housing, with a vanishing middle class.The problem is deeply rooted in policy and prejudice. Exclusionary zoning, historically used to keep out Black and low-income families, persists under new guises, with affluent, politically engaged homeowners wielding outsized influence to block the duplexes, townhouses, and smaller apartment buildings that offer a middle ground.As Mildred Warner, a professor of city and regional planning at Cornell University, astutely notes, 'class and race matter in America. ' The resistance is not just to density, but to certain kinds of families.Furthermore, a perverse financial incentive exists at the local level. Children, while representing a city's future, are treated as a budgetary burden.With state and local governments bearing the bulk of K-12 education costs, welcoming school-age children is often seen as a direct hit to municipal coffers, while the enormous long-term economic benefit of educating the future workforce is ignored. Warner's research highlights how politicians frequently restrict family housing precisely because they don't want to pay for the schools, a tragically short-sighted view that ignores the increasing importance of human capital as a critical economic development strategy.The solutions require a fundamental rethinking of urban priorities, moving beyond mere deregulation. While ending parking minimums and allowing single-stair buildings are crucial technical fixes to make family-sized apartments cheaper to build, they must be paired with substantial public investment in schools, child care, parks, and transit.The growing 'abundance' movement, which focuses on removing regulatory barriers, must embrace the reality that family-friendly cities require proactive government spending, not just the absence of rules. The demographic clock is ticking.With Gen Z being a smaller generation and remote work diminishing the pressure to live in expensive urban centers, cities cannot rely on a fresh influx of young singles to replace the families they are losing. The cities that recognize that their survival depends on retaining people through all stages of life—that see families not as a burden but as the bedrock of a sustainable community—will be the ones that thrive. For local leaders, the choice is clear: challenge the status quo, invest in the future, and make the hard political choices to welcome families, or watch their cities slowly decline.

#urban planning

#millennial families

#housing crisis

#creative class theory

#zoning reform

#family-sized apartments

#featured