Ten years ago, the Metro Atlanta Chamber proudly bragged on Atlanta as “the hot place to be if you’re young and restless,” defined as someone 25-34 with a bachelor’s degree or better. We were attracting lots of well-educated young people — “the most coveted demographic in the nation,” according to the Chamber — and doing so at a higher rate than almost anybody.
But somewhere along the line, things went sideways.
Oh, younger, college-educated people flock to close-in urban areas in larger numbers than ever. Houston saw a 50 percent increase in the number of well-educated young adults between 2000 and 2012. In Nashville, it’s 48 percent; in Portland, it’s 36 percent.
But Atlanta? Between 2000 and 2012, the number of young, college-educated people living here grew by just 2.8 percent. In fact, of the 51 metro areas with a population of a million or more, the only places that did worse were Detroit, which lost 10 percent of its young college-educated population, and Cleveland, where that demographic grew by just 0.9 percent.
Those familiar with intown Atlanta — an explosion of bars, apartments, restaurants and condos — may find those Census-derived numbers hard to believe. But according to economist Joe Cortright, almost all of metro Atlanta’s increase in young, college-educated professionals has been concentrated within the region’s inner urban core. Outside that inner core, there was no growth of this cohort whatsoever.
So what happened? In focus groups commissioned a decade ago by the Metro Chamber, young, college-educated Atlantans warned of two major shortcomings: The lack of a vibrant, 24-hour downtown; and traffic and the lack of transit.
“The traffic complaint was expected, but the complaint about transit in Atlanta was somewhat surprising,” consultants reported. “Transit seems to be viewed by young adults as a basic building block of the kinds of communities they seek.”
The fact that all of the metro region’s growth among college-educated young people has occurred in town, where transit and other urban amenities are most readily available, would seem to confirm that finding. The market is changing, the world is changing. We are not.
Admittedly, there’s a certain chicken-or-egg quality to this debate. Did smart young people stop flocking to Atlanta because opportunity disappeared, or did opportunity disappear because smart young people stopped flocking to Atlanta? I don’t know, but from 2000-2012, much smaller markets such as Buffalo (14,796) and Pittsburgh (28,083) saw a much larger increase in the number of college-educated young people than metro Atlanta (7,308).
In Atlanta, we have a state leadership that is more likely to treat concepts such as transit, density and sidewalks as some UN-inspired Agenda 21 socialist conspiracy rather than as the new template for economic vitality. We have a balkanized system of local government that makes it impossible to take action on a regional basis. And on the whole, we treat investments in our quality of life, transportation, health care and education — the very core of life — as nuisances to be minimized rather than opportunities to be seized.
So smart young people with a choice about where to make their lives are increasingly looking elsewhere. We are yesterday’s news.
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