Boomers, Millennials Trigger Geographic Shifts

Trulia, San Francisco, says as baby boomers enter their golden years and Millennials move up in the workforce, a great geographic demographic shift is taking place in the U.S., with clear preferences as to where they and others go to live.

The Trulia analysis (https://www.trulia.com/research/where-are-the-oldest-and-youngest-places-in-america/) of the top 100 U.S. metro areas shows, not surprisingly, that Florida and other Sun Belt cities are attracting the oldest residents. Hot, single-industry areas such as suburban Washington, D.C., San Francisco and Seattle attract working-age people; while areas with higher birth rates, such as Utah and Colorado, have younger populations.

Key findings:

–Counties with the highest proportion of working-age people are in metros where one industry reigns supreme. For example, Arlington and Alexandria, Va., both near government-dominated Washington, D.C., are the top two counties with populations skewed toward working age–respectively, 70.5% and 69.7% of residents are between 20 and 64. Tech powerhouse San Francisco County, which consists entirely of the city of San Francisco, comes in third, with 69.7% of residents of working age. This compares to the national working-age average of 59.2%.

“These counties experience high housing demand from people in their wage-earning prime and, not surprisingly, have home values well above the national median: $672,700 in Arlington and a whopping $1,359,000 in San Francisco, compared with $217,300 nationally,” wrote Trulia Housing Data Analyst Alexandra Lee.

San Francisco is also the county with the lowest share of kids in the nation: just 15.0% of the population is 19 or younger compared with the national average of 25.2%. Other kid-scarce counties are either quite old, like Sarasota County, Fla., or are expensive areas with large working populations, such as Manhattan.

–Counties that skew oldest in the nation–Sarasota County, Fla., Mathews County, Va., and Flagler County, Fla.–are all coastal areas with balmy weather. Trulia said one in three people in these places are 65 or older: 36.1% in Sarasota, 30.8% in Mathews and 30.1% in Flagler. Retirees can also get some beachy bargains here–home values are near the national median, at $252,400 in Sarasota and $219,300 in Flagler.

–Tooele County, Utah has the largest proportion of youngsters in the nation at 35.9%. “Utah is the state with the highest birth rate in the nation, and, in Tooele, it’s showing,” Lee said.

–Some counties have experienced an outsized age shift in the past seven years. Compared with their 2010 age makeup, Hudspeth County, Tex., Teller County, Colo., and Park County, Colo. have seen the biggest net swings in age proportions. All three have gained share of elderly and lost share of young people.