[majormajor]

> Younger people then moved back in (causing superficial gentrification) because they couldn't live in the actual richer areas because those had all blocked new housing (actual gentrification.)

You're overlooking the qualitative motives for (somewhat incorrect) purely financial aspects. Younger people continued to move to denser parts of cities for at least a solid decade after in-city rents surpassed suburban ones. A large demographic group got married and started having kids much later than previous ones (this part traces pretty well back to economic factors, though!) so was looking for very different things in housing. As those factors started to change, they started following similar suburbanization patterns, and WFH accelerated that dramatically.

"Friends" is probably the clearest pop culture recording of this, showing the draw of living in the city for single 20-somethings in the 90s, and then the eventual appeal of the burbs for the later married w/ kids stage. Even in the 90s part of it, none of them were there because NYC was the cheap option.

[ghaff]

Manhattan was something of an outlier. Even in not so great in a lot of ways 1980s Manhattan, a lot of people moved to "the city." This was especially true in finance. (Contra my comment about classmates not living in Boston proper, many lived in Manhattan proper. Of course, one difference is that the jobs were actually in Manhattan. )

But NYC has always had a singular appeal. And there was long a certain snobbery(?) about living in Manhattan specifically.

[majormajor]

If we drop NYC we lose the easy TV show example, but I would still maintain that nobody young was moving to places like Midtown Atlanta or downtown Austin in the early 2000s just because they were priced out of the suburbs. Places were already "pay for the privilege of living somewhere denser and walkable" by that point.

[ghaff]

>nobody young was moving to places like Midtown Atlanta or downtown Austin in the early 2000s just because they were priced out of the suburbs.

Sure. But my point was that, in the aggregate, they weren't. Maybe by the early 2000s, there were more jobs there, their parents lived there, their friends were starting to be there, etc. So, yes, at some point especially college-educated young professionals started to pay an urban premium for the lifestyle. We'll see to what degree that continues.

[majormajor]

> Sure. But my point was that, in the aggregate, they weren't. Maybe by the early 2000s, there were more jobs there, their parents lived there, their friends were starting to be there, etc. So, yes, at some point especially college-educated young professionals started to pay an urban premium for the lifestyle. We'll see to what degree that continues.

I actually agree with `astrange that by the early 2000s, if not a tad earlier[0], millennials were moving in-town (though not because their parents lived there! the opposite, if anything!), but I completely disagree on the "why" - their claim was that it was because it was cheaper because suburbs had zoning that caused them to get too expensive. My claim is that it was a lifestyle thing, not a "forced out" thing.

[0] I can't speak firsthand to earlier, but there were a lot of new or newly-redone apartment buildings by the early 2000s, suggesting that the trend had been going for several years already.

[astrange]

I think the cities weren't interesting until the first wave got there, though obviously this doesn't apply to everywhere.

But also, the cities aren't naturally cities and the suburbs aren't naturally suburbs - they're suburbs because of restrictive zoning, and that's what caused them to be more expensive to starter homeowners and less appealing to young people.

[ghaff]

Oh, definitely lifestyle. And, yeah, much more because of friends than family. I'm pretty sure even in the late 80s, it wouldn't have been cheaper for me to live in (a decent area of) Cambridge than the suburb I lived in.