Boomers leaving the cities

Beck Diefenbach for Reuters

From Joel Kotkin on New Geography:

...Our number-crunching shows that rather than flocking into cities, there were roughly a million fewer boomers in 2010 within a five-mile radius of the centers of the nation’s 51 largest metro areas compared to a decade earlier...more expensive, denser cities like New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Jose, Calif., saw the worst boomer flight, suffering double-digit percentage losses. Ultimately, some downtown places might be a “wonderland,” as The New York Times puts it, for a small group of highly affluent residents. But for most they are outrageously expensive...Cities need to understand that, for the most part, their appeal remains primarily to young, largely single people, students and couples before they have children; cities’ real challenge, and opportunity, lies in trying to keep more of this youthful cohort in the city as they age and expand their households...