> no evidence whatsoever is provided for it. Could it be that the New York Times writers are projecting their slavish political devotion onto the rest of us?
It is important to note this is in the opinion section. This is written by a professor at MIT, not anyone on the NYTimes staff. ( https://dusp.mit.edu/faculty/alan-berger )
> Once we're all married with school-age kids, we will choose to move out to the plain, boring suburbs just like the generations before us.
You provide no evidence for this, and the evidence is strong against you. Nearly everyone who wants to show "suburb preference" tries to show that "hey, when people turn 30-35, they still tend to move to the suburbs", which is no surprise. And the opinion article in the NYTimes even does this. That is "lifecycle change" and obviously will occur.
But the question is whether there has been generational change. Are a higher percentage of 35 year olds living in the city than there were 15 years ago? Are a higher percentage of families choosing to live in cities than 15 years ago? The answers to these questions is yes, indicating a generational change towards the city. You see new groups popping up pushing for better facilities for strollers. They have become common enough on public transit that Boston tried to ban them. That's an indication that people are no longer fleeing to the suburbs once they have kids.
I don't have a convenient graph for city vs. suburbs, but I do have one for the somewhat related homeownership[0]. What the graph shows is that yes, there is a lifecycle where more people own homes as they get older, but there is also a generational change where 2014's 42 year old is less likely to own a home than 2001's 42 year old. And the same for pretty much every age from 20-65.
It is important to note this is in the opinion section. This is written by a professor at MIT, not anyone on the NYTimes staff. ( https://dusp.mit.edu/faculty/alan-berger )
> Once we're all married with school-age kids, we will choose to move out to the plain, boring suburbs just like the generations before us.
You provide no evidence for this, and the evidence is strong against you. Nearly everyone who wants to show "suburb preference" tries to show that "hey, when people turn 30-35, they still tend to move to the suburbs", which is no surprise. And the opinion article in the NYTimes even does this. That is "lifecycle change" and obviously will occur.
But the question is whether there has been generational change. Are a higher percentage of 35 year olds living in the city than there were 15 years ago? Are a higher percentage of families choosing to live in cities than 15 years ago? The answers to these questions is yes, indicating a generational change towards the city. You see new groups popping up pushing for better facilities for strollers. They have become common enough on public transit that Boston tried to ban them. That's an indication that people are no longer fleeing to the suburbs once they have kids.
I don't have a convenient graph for city vs. suburbs, but I do have one for the somewhat related homeownership[0]. What the graph shows is that yes, there is a lifecycle where more people own homes as they get older, but there is also a generational change where 2014's 42 year old is less likely to own a home than 2001's 42 year old. And the same for pretty much every age from 20-65.
[0] https://goo.gl/wp1eQu