Editorial: The youth have more to bring to a city than gentrification

A report published by the think tank “City Observatory,” on Oct. 19 illustrated the migration patterns of nature’s strangest animal — the young college graduate.

According to the report, more and more college students are choosing to live in urban centers. What is compelling about the report is how it shows that, yes, college graduates are moving to cities at a high rate, but not to the predictable locations, like New York City or Washington, D.C. In fact, cities such as Denver, Cleveland, Buffalo, Nashville, Pittsburgh and other traditionally smaller cities, have seen a surge in their population of residents who are between 25 to 34 years old in recent years.

In Pittsburgh, there’s been a 29 percent increase of college graduates aged 25 to 34 from 2000 to 2012. 

But, before you start listing all the negative effects — such as gentrification — of this trend, don’t ignore the macro benefits this migration of youth can bring to some of these former industrial cities.

After a tough recession and the outsourcing of industrial jobs, these smaller cities actually have a lot to gain from the influx of young people. Pittsburgh, for example, was experiencing “reverse gentrification” for decades before the recent influx of college grads, according to a study by Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland economist Daniel Hartley.

According to Hartley’s study, Pittsburgh experienced “the inward contraction of higher-income neighborhoods, as the areas bordering those neighborhoods become low-income.” Consequently, Pittsburgh experienced “large population losses, declines in income in mid-tier neighborhoods, and little change in median home prices,” from the ‘70s until the early 2000s.

Now Pittsburgh is experiencing the opposite phenomenon, and we can see it in neighborhoods such as Lawrenceville and East Liberty. But is the gentrification happening now really as bad as the reverse gentrification that was happening before? Not on a macro scale, it seems.

As the number of younger people in Pittsburgh has increased, so too has the age of the former workforce. Baby boomers, of whom used to be the bulk of America’s working population, are reaching the age of retirement. Consequently, they are moving out of the city along with the jobs and skills they brought to the table.

Cities like Pittsburgh can use young talent to fill this void, and increase the amount of skilled workers available to companies that want business within the city, thus, attracting more investment.

Furthermore, according to Enrico Moretti, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of “The New Geography of Jobs,” young college graduates bring more than just jobs pertaining to their field. In fact, for every college graduate who moves into the city, additional workers follow as demand grows for waiters and waitresses, carpenters, doctors and teachers. All these workers are necessary to fulfill the needs of the growing youth population — double that if they settle down there.

“It’s a type of growth that feeds on itself — the more young workers you have, the more companies are interested in locating their operations in that area, and the more young people are going to move there,” Moretti said.

Of course, we cannot ignore the other economic realities that come with a higher number of college graduates moving to the city — but maybe they’re just not as bad as one may originally think.