Cities bet on millennials but forgot to build family housing

1 day ago7 min read5 comments

The great urban migration of millennials, celebrated by city planners and local leaders as an economic renaissance, has revealed a profound structural flaw in our metropolitan centers. Drawn by vibrant restaurants, dynamic nightlife, and high-paying jobs, this generation flocked to cities in droves during the 2000s and 2010s, their presence validating the 'creative class' theory that attracting educated workers would fuel perpetual growth.Real estate developers responded with a singular vision, constructing forests of apartment buildings filled with studios and one-bedrooms designed for singles, roommates, and childless couples. It was a strategy that worked brilliantly—until it didn't.As millennials now enter their 30s and 40s and begin forming families, they are confronting a harsh reality: the cities that so eagerly courted them as young professionals never built the housing necessary to keep them as parents. Across the nation, large urban counties lost roughly 8 percent of their under-5 population between 2020 and 2024, a staggering exodus that reveals a catastrophic failure of long-term urban planning.In New York City, families with children under 6 have left at twice the rate of everyone else, a trend so severe it became central to incoming mayor Zohran Mamdani’s winning affordability campaign. This isn't merely a demographic shift; it's a systemic unraveling.When families depart, cities lose far more than tax revenue; they hemorrhage their highest earners, most consistent spenders, and the next generation of workers. The economic consequences are dire, compounded by the fact that Gen Z is a smaller generation and the rise of remote work means there's less pressure for them to inhabit expensive urban centers.The creative class theory wasn't wholly wrong, but it catastrophically missed a fundamental truth: cities need to retain people through their peak earning years, which happen to coincide with when they have children. Several intersecting forces have conspired against family-friendly development.Homeowners, increasingly older and past their child-rearing years, often wield outsized political influence to oppose changing zoning laws, fearing that increased density could compromise their property values or quality of life. The result is a landscape overwhelmingly zoned for single-family housing, leaving little room for the duplexes, townhouses, and smaller apartment buildings that offer young families an affordable middle ground.As Mildred Warner, a professor of city and regional planning at Cornell University, astutely observes, 'I’m sorry, but class and race matter in America. ' Her comment underscores how exclusionary zoning has historically been used to keep out Black and low-income families, a legacy that continues to shape our urban fabric.The professional culture within planning itself is also culpable. Michael Huling, a senior county planner in Clark County, Nevada, traces the issue back to the 1960s and 1970s, an era of mass suburban flight that cemented a development culture treating families as a suburban concern, not an urban one.'A lot of those anachronistic development patterns and development priorities are still lingering today and we're still stuck with them,' he laments. Deeper still lies a perverse economic incentive.Children don't pay taxes, but they do absorb substantial government services, particularly education. With state and local governments bearing the bulk of K-12 education costs, cities often view school spending as a direct burden on local budgets, ignoring the enormous economic benefit of educating the future workforce nearby.Warner's research finds that many politicians restrict family housing precisely because they don't want to pay for the schools those children would attend, a tragically short-sighted approach that ignores the increasing importance of human capital investment as a critical economic development strategy. Robert Verbruggen of the Manhattan Institute puts it bluntly: 'Kids don’t pay for themselves while they’re still kids.They pay for themselves later when they grow up and get jobs. ' His advice for mayors is pragmatic: welcome families now, and you cultivate a built-in fan base for the next generation.The consequences of this failure are compounding. When people in their early-to-mid-30s leave, they take their mentorship skills and institutional knowledge with them, leaving cities with a polarized population of lower-income residents and very wealthy residents in luxury housing, but fewer of the middle and upper-middle class families that stabilize communities.Once families depart, cities are left with fewer vocal advocates pushing for better schools, parks, and transit, creating a vicious cycle that makes urban areas even less attractive to the next generation of parents. The crisis even extends to the most intimate of decisions.Research from the Institute for Family Studies found that housing costs limit childbearing goals more than any other factor, including child care costs and student debt. Another study estimated that rising housing costs since 1990 have led to 11 percent fewer children being born.Some within the real estate industry are beginning to recognize the need for change. Bobby Fijan, a developer who started the American Housing Corporation to build family-sized row homes, is among the most vocal critics of his industry's inertia.In a study with IFS senior fellow Lyman Stone, they found that layouts like the 'one bedroom plus a den'—a flexible space usable as an office or nursery—are highly preferred, even by those without children. This suggests that with minimal adjustments, developers could create units that appeal to a broader market and keep tenants longer.Yet Warner remains skeptical of such halfway measures, arguing for a return to building actual two- and three-bedroom units. The solution will require more than just tweaking floor plans; it demands a fundamental rethinking of urban priorities, challenging homeowners who benefit from the status quo, and making public investments in schools, transit, and child care that may not pay off for years.The cities that figure out how to keep their families will be the ones that thrive. For local leaders watching parents flee and school enrollments drop, these are the defining fights of our urban future.

#urban planning

#millennial families

#housing shortage

#creative class theory

#zoning reform

#featured

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