| It’s tough out there for a 25-year-old. Boston is in a many ways a wonderful city with a lot to recommend it – which may be why it has the highest concentration of Millennials of the 25 largest cities in the U.S.
The Boston Chamber of Commerce last week released a report containing that fact, among others. Produced in partnership with the Boston Foundation, the study also concluded that the top concerns for this population are affordable housing and economic mobility.
Millennials may be snowflakes, but they aren’t stupid and they know how to Google. It doesn’t take the sharpest denizen of the Internet to figure out that the costs of living, renting, commuting and purchasing a home are far higher here than they are almost anywhere else in the country.
They also know that’s the tradeoff one makes to live in a diverse, lively city teeming with opportunity. If they can make it here, they can make it anywhere.
But the report also notes that this generation faces unprecedented challenges “making it” here. People born in 1940 had a 92 percent likelihood of out-earning their parents over their lifetime; for people born in 1980, the oldest of the Millennials, that figure is only 50 percent.
And in a legacy from the city’s troubled past, those challenges are compounded for Millennials of color. Fully 43 percent of Boston’s Millennials in 2015 were minorities, the report found. According to the 2015 report “The Color of Wealth in Boston” from the Boston Federal Reserve, the median net worth of Boston’s white households was $247,500 in 2014, while the median net worth of the city’s black households was $8. $250,00 will buy you a house; $8 will buy you a latte.
According to the latest Housing Report Card from the City of Boston, half of the city’s renters pay more than 30 percent of their income for housing, which doesn’t leave a lot left over to save for down payments.
The Chamber of Commerce report notes in the introduction that it asks “seemingly simple questions that, in fact, require nuanced responses.” It concludes in the preface that today’s Millennials are “very aware of – and concerned about – the lack of economic mobility that so many people face. They are also persistently optimistic about Greater Boston’s future.”
Optimistic and energetic, they are worried about their financial futures and those of their peers. However, like the flower children of the 1960s, they are not content sit idly while the worries of the world happen to them, nor are they looking to their elders to fix these problems. Part of the report’s mission is to use these results to further engage Millennials as they seek to address inequality in Boston and beyond; a wise move, and one in which we wish them the best of luck.
In the end, that boundless sense of optimism may be the defining historical characteristic of the Millennial generation. In the face of unprecedented challenges, an extraordinarily expensive cost of living, and no real guarantee that that world will be a better place tomorrow than it was yesterday, the Millennials rise.
