There was this article in the WSJ yesterday about Boomers and their future, entitled "Suburban Idyll"...the photo accompanying the article was of a husband and wife in their backyard, he in a lounge and she all decked out in barbeque chef attire, wielding a fork and manning the grill. The caption for the photo read, "The good life." Yeah.
I don't know about you, but lately I've been feeling intense pressure to want to move back to the city (we lived in Lincoln Park, Streeterville and the Gold Coast before children). All these fabulous new condos, along with some clients who were much younger than I, have had me feeling like I should want to live there, close to culture, great food, public transportation and the lakefront. Actually the shopping on Oak Street is pretty amazing. So, feeling a sense of malaise, a grass-is-always-greener effect set in and I tried to find a place to go that I liked better than where I am. Struggling, I found while the New City is very shiny, it is crowded. While there are some great restaurants, there are many average ones, too, and the Clybourne Avenue Corridor looks like a horizontally challenged Schaumburg on steroids. But many trend-predictors (especially those that work for downtown developers) have said I should be yearning to flee my oversized home in the boring suburbs to get down downtown. Am I missing something?
Now comes Joel Kotkin, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and author of "The City: A Global History". According to him, and to studies by the Mortgage Bankers Association, the Research Institute for Housing America and the Praxis Strategy Group, reports of Boomers migrating "back to the city" or "back to nature" or anywhere, for that matter, are greatly exaggerated. Most Boomers retire in place. Of all suburbanites over age 50 who move, most (80%) move to another suburban home, almost 8 times the number that bought in the inner city. More than half of city-dwellers who moved headed out to suburbia. Only 2% cross state lines every year.
Surveys indicate that affluent boomer homeowners want neighborhoods that are safe and close to outdoor recreation, close to family, friends and institutions and organizations that hold us together and have shaped our identities (more on the identity thing later, I've been meaning to rant about how homes shape their inhabitants and vice versa). This is good news for us on the North Shore...while we've been convinced of the attractiveness of our communities, this research predicts that the allure will hold, and that local new developments featuring smaller homes and convenience to shopping will not be the ghost towns some anti-growth factions have feared. They will allow us to stay close to our children, who, hopefully have been raised right to be able to afford the larger homes they grew up in.
Life is good! Let's fire up the grill, invite over a few friends and celebrate our good fortune at living already where we want to be.
