Millennials are ditching pricey city living in favor of suburban life, and baby boomers continue to flock to Florida, as well as popular retirement counties around the country, according to new figures from the U.S. Census Bureau.
The millions of young people who descended upon cities during the last two decades are getting older and some of them are moving out to the suburbs to raise families and get away from sky high urban real estate prices, according to the census figures from July 2016 to July 2017.
Suburban areas surrounding major metros around the country grew by 1 percent last year, while the rates of growth in big cities has cooled to a national average of about 0.7 percent, which the Census attributes to the influx of immigrants, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The number of Americans moving to those suburban counties tripled over the last five years to 265,000 last year, according to the Census figures. Some investors are already on top of the trend, including pension funds and insurance companies looking for higher yields. Returns for garden-style apartments were 8 percent in the four quarters that ended last June, or roughly the same period as the census data. The return for urban high-rise apartments was 5.1 percent.
The populations of a few hundred counties the government defines as retirement destinations grew by 2 percent. That’s nearly three times the rate of overall national population growth, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The Bureau’s statistics show that established destinations including Naples, Florida are still popular with retirees, but new ones are cropping up around the country as well. Some surprising destinations? Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, Jackson, Wyoming, and Barry County, Michigan to name a few. In Coeur d’Alene, developers are building communities with single-story housing, snow-removal service, and easy-to-maintain yards to attract retirees, according to the Journal. [WSJ] – Dennis Lynch