“There is a vibrant bar and restaurant scene, social sports
leagues through which hundreds of young people get together to play kickball
and other games, even a monthly bike ride – sponsored by a group working to
make [the city] less car dependent – in which participants dress up in costume
and ride through the city.”
I thought I was reading about St. Louis and wanted to look
up this monthly cycling event that sounded like the Naked Bike Ride but more
frequent. The city in question is not Portland, either, but rather Baltimore.
In a profile of “The New ‘Cool’ Cities for Millennials,” The Christian Science
Monitor uses Baltimore as the example of a series of infamously rundown, increasingly vibrant
and even hip urban centers that increasingly draw the urban Millennial generation. Cleveland.
Detroit. Nashville. St. Louis. Mid-sized cities with cheap rent, storied
histories, and surprising economic opportunities for a generation pummeled by
the Great Recession but still searching for places to make their mark.
And although New York, San Francisco, and other metropolises
draw the lion’s share of young, educated adults, these other, often overlooked
cities are beginning to see rapid increases in these populations. Even as St.
Louis has continued a six-decade population death spiral, the number of
25-to-34-year-olds with a college degree near the urban core has more
than doubled, rising 138% from 2000 to 2010, the largest such surge in the
country. Although this relative increase obscures absolute changes, St. Louis
attracted more than half the demographic increase Seattle did over this same
period (4,227 versus 8,209). St. Louis and other struggling cities have far to
go, but they are going, and changing faster than many would have anticipated
just a few years ago.
In St. Louis, Downtown, Midtown and other central corridor
neighborhoods were the only ones to gain residents from 2000 to 2010, when the
city overall saw an 8% drop in population, perhaps a bellwether of a turning
tide in the exodus from the city center. These neighborhoods include startup
incubators like T-REX and Cortex, revitalized loft apartments, and
convenient public transit.
And St. Louis is the fastest-growing
city for new technology jobs. ArchGrants,
founded in 2011, provides non-equity funding to tech startups—as long as they
remain in or move to St. Louis. LaunchCode,
which rapidly trains new programmers and places them at area businesses, was
recently lauded
by President Obama for its successes and is expanding nationally. Tech may
not be sufficient to power the city’s economy, but St. Louis’ low cost of
living and access to capital make it a top place for starting other businesses as
well.
Although demographers cannot untangle the economic causes
from the cultural behind the Millennial move toward cities, The Christian Science Monitor and other
sources
have identified a self-reported interest in dense, walkable, community-oriented
neighborhoods over suburban sprawl among the young. The people profiled in the
CSM piece—employees at tech startups and nonprofits—claimed Baltimore as a city
where they could have an impact, where a vibrant urban lifestyle coincided with
a small enough community to feel absorbed, not “carried along”.
St. Louis offers the same opportunities to contribute to a
quirky, very much in progress revitalization of the city. Upstart politicians can
win by a mere 90 votes against an entrenched incumbent; individuals can ensure that local
representatives listen to their constituents about critical bike infrastructure
projects; shuttered corner businesses can
be reopened to create a new community space; a brand
new brewery can be self-funded.
As a full-time graduate student, I can still find a way to
contribute to outreach to the community gardening scene in St. Louis where
other cities, San Francisco for example, might have those kinds of niches saturated
by individuals who can commit more fully to single projects. In many areas of
this city, there is both a need and room for interested individuals and small
groups to get their hands dirty in making their communities better—the results
are obvious, the actions of individuals visible.
Demographers quibble
over whether the Millennial move toward cities is stable, or whether family
life, schools, and age will push us back out to the suburbs in the next decade
or two. Time will tell. But it may be that the economic forces that favor urban
centers only reinforce an intentional return to lively, dense cities. And that
St. Louis, Baltimore, Cleveland or Detroit offer the more civic-minded—and more
financially constrained—of our generation an opportunity to help forge the
cities we will inhabit for decades to come.
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