A Decade of the Millennial Urban Exodus

Time magazine charts which American cities have reached "peak millennial."

1 minute read

January 2, 2018, 7:00 AM PST

By Elana Eden


Rich Suburban House

Andrew Guyton / Flickr

In recent years, data has suggested that millennials are increasingly departing the major cities they once flocked to. Now, Time  Magazine has analyzed a decade of Census data to determine just which cities are losing or poised to lose their millennial populations.

Time researchers drew on the "peak millennial" theory from USC Professor Dowell Myers, which projected that millennials would leave cities for the suburbs as they began to have children. David Johnson writes:

We found that while tech hubs like San Francisco and Seattle are still drawing young people, large East Coast cities, like New York and D.C., are fast approaching peak millennial, with plateauing populations of those born between 1980 and 1996. And then there are cities like Boston, which already appear to have reached their peak. Boston lost roughly 7,000 millennials in 2016, after a record high of 259,000 the previous year.

Planetizen has also covered where millennials are moving and where they are buying homes.

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