One reason this group is staying in cities might be that they can't afford to leave, according to William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. Millennials often don’t have enough money saved up to consider buying a house somewhere else—let alone covering the moving costs to get there or possibly suffering a pay cut or taking on a less thrilling job.

This isn’t how it used to be. In previous decades, cities like New York and Los Angeles attracted twentysomethings with educational or professional opportunities, and then those twentysomethings would migrate to places where they could settle down with a family and buy a spacious house after a few years in the city. This geographic dispersal of highly-skilled workers, the norm for decades, meant that the gains of states with stronger economies could be spread to those with weaker ones.

It's easy to assume that Millennials love cities simply because so many of them live there, but it looks like a majority of them, after a stint in a city, still yearn for the same thing their parents pursued: a single-family home in a suburban neighborhood. A survey by the National Association of Home Builders released last week called on about 1,500 people born after 1977. Sixty-six percent of those respondents said they wanted to live in the suburbs, versus the 10 percent who wanted to live in a city.

Where Do Millennials Want to Live?

National Association of Home Builders

That survey has a major caveat: It only covered people who had purchased a home within the past three years or intended to in the next three, so the results could be exaggerated (not to mention the fact that the poll was conducted by a bunch of people who’d very much like it if more homes were built). But this isn’t an isolated finding. In the summer of 2013, the Demand Institute, a nonprofit think tank, posed a similar question to about 1,000 Millennials, aged 18 to 29. Nearly half said they’d like to have their next home be in the suburbs, while 38 percent preferred cities.

It appears that what many Millennials want when picking out a place to raise a family isn’t a city per se, but rather the perks that are traditionally associated with living in a city: restaurants, shops, and grocery stores within walking distance, easy access to public transportation. In other words, they might want suburbs that are more city-like than the ones they grew up in. Some suburbs are like that—it’s just that young people can’t afford to move there and still advance professionally. Until the recovery reaches them, many of them will keep living in big metro areas, whether they truly prefer to or not.

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