Neighborhoods

I opened the mailer and threw it away. The return address was “Planning Department, Town of Carrboro”. As a city planning student, I thought I would have been more intrigued. But the notice was for a zoning change in a neighborhood I knew nothing about, despite the fact I live just across the train tracks in a North Greensboro Street apartment.

I live with 7 housemates. When I tell that to people, sometimes their mouths go agape.

“Seven?!” they’ll wonder or say aloud in surprised disbelief.

“Yeah, seven, and I like it that way.”

Last week, you might have read a Gizmodo article about how millennials will live in cities unlike anything we've ever seen before. If you haven't read it yet, I highly encourage you to, because, unlike so many articles in the media today, this one does an excellent job of capturing the nuances of why we are seeing certain behavioral patterns among millennials when it comes to where we live.

The critical takeaway from this article is one that has major implications for us in Chapel Hill/Carrboro: Millennials are choosing to live in urban neighborhoods, but not necessarily in urban downtowns.

This behavioral pattern shows that what millennials value is not the big city life itself, but having easy access to amenities like walkability and public transit. For suburbs around the country, this means attracting the next generation of Americans requires urbanizing to provide these kind of amenities.