By Bill Beggs Jr.
The wünderkind are coming!
The wünderkind are coming!
Great! Now, what the heck do we do?
Make sure they don’t leave.
Joe Cortright, who heads up Impresa Inc., a Portland, Ore.-based consulting firm, refers to the 25- to 34-year-old demographic as “The Young and the Restless.” These young men and women are at their peak earning—and spending—power, so metropolitan regions would do well to woo them. More important: They’re young. They need excitement. They need to know that possibilities for living and working are varied. And plentiful.
Plus, since this age group isn’t likely to stay in a job too long, these people need to know that another step in their careers is just at the tips of their toes.
“Pursuing a dream career? Find somewhere to start, and build the career there,” says Cortright. The corporate move every few years to another city is as antiquated as crank windows on the company car.
Since the young women of today are better educated than their male counterparts, two people—not just one “breadwinner”—have to agree where they need to be to start their careers. There’s no guarantee that a job as a software engineer is going to be there in five years, Cortright points out. So, career-builders want to start out where there are white-collar jobs aplenty.
“It’s not so much where you work as where your network is,” Cortright points out.
Quality of life issues also are critical. The three things at the top of the must-haves list for this group, says Carol Coletta, president of CEOs for Cities. (CEOs for Cities is a national network of mayors, corporate CEOs, university presidents, foundation officials and business and civic leaders that act as an idea lab for cities.) Schools, safety and space—schools being the first subject on any would-be pioneer’s wish list. City-dwellers don’t throw up their hands: “You don’t need to fix the entire system,” Coletta says. Opportunities both public and private abound for urbanites, who’ve developed an enviable savvy in this and other aspects of their lives.
But, since many of the so-called Young and Restless are concentrating more on career than family creation, schools are a non-issue at this stage in their lives. Space is as available to them and accessible as most suburban residents: In St. Louis, one need go no further than Forest Park, larger than Central Park in New York City. Cultural institutions and museums are concentrated closer to the downtown core than they are most any suburban mall.
And safety? In the city, there are “eyes on the street,” as Coletta says.
But perception is reality, she notes. To make matters seem worse, just add the word “urban”—urban crime and urban poverty sound much worse than just plain old crime and poverty, she points out.
Statistics bear out the importance of the city, as Coletta pointed out in a speech she gave recently in Flint, Mich. The well being of cities and their suburbs is not mutually exclusive.
“Cities and the metro areas they anchor generate 80 percent of our nation’s employment, 80-plus percent of our GNP and produce 86 percent of our tax revenue. They also incubate new businesses, connect people, ideas, money and markets and house most of our great universities,” Coletta said. “Their ports and airports connect us to the world. They are our centers of culture.”
The key to economic growth is not the manufacturing model of a few decades ago, notes Cortright. One need only look to the downtown Loft District along Washington Avenue and environs to see former factory, warehouse and office space metamorphosing into new residences and boutiques.
The marketplace, as plenty of pundits have put it, is of ideas.
“A central and recurring aspect of this changing economy is the role that knowledge creation plays in driving economic success,” says Cortright. “The ability to create economically valuable new ideas, not simply to access information, seems to explain the difference between workers, businesses and communities that are flourishing, and those that are floundering.”
As the Baby Boomers move off the economic scene and into retirement, Generations X and Y are replacing them. And they’re not putting in their 35 or so years at Procter & Gamble or IBM, getting the gold watch at retirement, plugging in a pension and pulling up stakes for Florida.
By the same token, the kid with the earring, tattoos and goatee isn’t doing all his work on a laptop at home or at Starbucks when the need for a mocha latte arises. Generally, workers still need to go to work somewhere. Maybe later, when they’ve built their cred, they can work from the den in Aspen.
“People still need to brainstorm better ways to do things,” Cortright notes. “There’s an assumption that they need interaction to get the job done.”
Cortright did an exhaustive study of up-and-coming and been-there-awhile urban areas that are magnets for the new influx of well-educated, highly motivated knowledge workers. Charlotte is one. The metropolis in western North Carolina doesn’t “make” anything, like furniture, or “grow” anything, like tobacco, but a national financial-services mecca, buys and sells money.
Cortright’s town, Portland—home of “beer, bikes and Birkenstocks”—is another, along with Austin, Texas, Denver, and Atlanta.
Unfortunately, as Coletta points out, cities haven’t been on Washington, D.C.’s radar screen for years. So civic leaders need to pull up their own bootstraps.
According to CEOs For Cities, the areas in most urgent need of fresh thinking are:
» Developing, maximizing, attracting
and retaining talent
» Fostering innovation and
entrepreneurship
» Fostering connections that link
people with ideas to talent, capital
and markets; cities to regions;
and regions to the global economy
» Capitalizing on local differences
and distinctiveness to build local
economic opportunity
But, sooner or later, many if not most of the Young and Restless settle down. How do you keep them closer to the region’s central city?
You create a family-friendly city. Few, if any, have an attraction like the City Museum, which just took ownership of the world’s largest (yes, according to the experts who publish “Guinness World Records”) No. 2 pencil and was dubbed last year by Project for Public Spaces as one of the 10 Best Public Spaces in the world. Then, there’s The Zoo, better than most in the world. An art museum, science center, and symphony both second to none. But, of course, we’d take up at least 50 more pages to even scratch the surface.
“How do you keep those people engaged in cities?” asks Cortright, rhetorically in his recent work, “City Vitals.”
Carol Coletta has a few of the answers right at hand.
“Early adopters—parents who do raise their children in cities—see them as a learning lab,” she emphasizes. “With all the museums and cultural opportunities—they see all this as enrichment for learning.” More to follow in upcoming issues of Commerce.
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