Small Cities Around Country Attracting Millennials
COLUMBUS — Tyler and Alissa Hodge, two of the hundreds of young professionals who have moved here in recent years, noticed that despite the influx there was not a single city-style coffee shop downtown.
So the couple opened one in May, with sofas, baked goods and local micro-roaster beans, adding a play area as a nod to the family-friendly culture of this southern Indiana city and their own three children.
“The 18- to 35-year-olds expect something like that, but they just didn’t have it,” said Tyler Hodge, 32, who used crowdfunding to help finance the shop. The same tactic was used for a rock climbing gym opened in September by a group of young engineers who, like Hodge, spend their weekdays working at Cummins Inc., the diesel engine company that is the city’s largest employer.
“There’s not that much to do here for the young people,” said Juan Valencia, a 25-year-old Colombian immigrant who is one of the founders of the climbing gym. “We think this will help.”
Before the gym opened, aficionados had to drive an hour north to Indianapolis or south to Louisville, Kentucky, for an indoor climbing wall.
As the economy improves and millennials move around the country in search of jobs, some are finding themselves far from the youth culture they learned to expect from city life in other parts of the country. But the tradeoff can be a less burdensome cost of living, a more tightknit community, and a chance to make new towns their own.
A Stateline analysis of census data showed the Columbus metro area at the top of a list of cities that have attracted young, educated people from out of state, yet are still relatively affordable.
There are other areas whose young, educated populations are growing nearly as fast as some of the most famous youth magnets like Silicon Valley; Austin, Texas; and Nashville, Tenn. — but with more affordable housing. They include Midland, Mich.; Bloomington, Ill.; Idaho Falls, Idaho; Sioux Falls, S.D.; and Bismarck, N.D.; Morgantown, W. Va.; Cedar Rapids, Iowa; Blacksburg, Va.; and Rochester, Minn.
In Columbus, the number of people ages 25 to 34 with a college degree has increased 62 percent since 2010, yet less than 20 percent of a typical household’s income goes to housing.
Cummins has been on a hiring spree, and other young people have gravitated to the city’s small town feel.
This Columbus has some buzz, if not as much as the Ohio city of the same name. A new movie, “Columbus,” has drawn fresh attention to the city’s quirky modernist architecture, which Cummins has supported, through a foundation, by subsidizing the design of public buildings by world class architects for 60 years. Columbus is also the hometown of Vice President Mike Pence.
Source: HuffPost