Memo to Downtown Philadelphia: Stop Courting Young Singles and Focus on Timothy Busfield Types
Yesterday the Wall Street Journal ran a commentary piece by Joel Kotkin, “The Rise of Family-Friendly Cities,” that examined big cities’ attempts to lure young up-and-comers to their areas. The piece suggests that flirting with the MySpace generation is only a temporary fix, and that once all these bike-riding greasebags with wizard-sleeves marry off and start raising families, it’s back to the ‘burbs for them.
Center City District president Paul Levy is quoted extensively in the story, saying essentially that marketing ploys targeting hipsters (and empty-nesters) were a nice idea — but they didn’t ultimately work: “The evidence thus suggests that the obsession with luring singles to cities is misplaced. Instead, the emphasis should be on retaining young people as they grow up, marry, start families and continue to raise them.” Basically, it seems Levy is looking to attract the characters of thirtysomething.
Reached this afternoon, Levy told the Daily Examiner that the way he was quoted in the story made it seem like he was the “or” in the either/or continuum it presented. It’s not that he wants the city to stop attracting smart, educated 25-year-olds, he said, but that he wants to keep them. Forever. “Citywide, we’re doing terribly at retaining that demographic,” he said. But he wasn’t actually suggesting that the city shift its marketing priorities to a different audience? “No, not at all,” he said before abruptly hanging up.
It’s a shame. It would’ve been fun to see the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corporation spend millions of dollars building up uwishuhadabigga401k.com As it is, don’t expect Patricia Heaton to start guest bartending at a new Tria opening anytime soon.
PHOTO: 32lounge.com
The Rise of Family-Friendly Cities [WSJ]
November 28th, 2007 at 4:01 pm
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December 6th, 2007 at 12:34 pm
In his opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal, The Rise of Family-Friendly Cities, Joel Kotkin sets up an either/or set of economic development and lifestyle choices that simply doesn’t exist.
Where, exactly, does Kotkin think these married couples he extols come from?
Hint: The median age of first marriage among all U.S. women is now 26, older for college-educated women. A typical young women today spends at least five years after college, usually pursuing a career, before a first marriage. By the time she’s in her late 20s or early 30s she — and her partner–have typically put down roots in a particular metropolitan area.
The reason Raleigh and Charlotte score so well in gaining families is that they are the biggest gainers of younger, well-educated adults, particularly singles.
It is plainly a lot easier to hang on to the young adults who live in your city rather than recruiting them from other places. That’s why cities should pay particular attention to young singles when they are at their most mobile and also build on their family friendliness as a way of retaining these talented and energetic people.
But does being family friendly require a fundamentally different set of urban attributes? Not really.
Schools certainly move up on the priority list. But in a national survey of college-educated 25 to 34 year-olds for CEOs for Cities, we found that the top five attributes they seek in cities are these: clean and attractive; opportunity to live the life I want to lead; safe; green; and availability of the type of housing I want at an affordable price. That sounds pretty family-friendly to me.
And does anyone really believe that one loses one’s taste for latte when one starts pushing a stroller?
We can do a lot more to advance the discussion about the kind of community attributes that we all value ˜ singles and married couples alike ˜ without creating phony and divisive distinctions.
Family-friendly cities are not terribly different from other cities. Ask business and civic leaders around the nation what‚s driving their concern about whether their city appeals to young people, and they will first tell you they are needed for the labor force. But what really worries many of them hits much closer to home. They worry their own kids won’t return after college. Being family-friendly has a lot of surprising dimensions.