High Density Urban Downtown May Not Be Supported by Actual Trends.

To all COLA LO Members,


Jack Bogdanskis blog cites new data that may refute the premise that boomers are moving to high density mass transit urban areas like the Pearl, South Waterfront, and Lake Oswego with Foothills-Streetcar.   The blog provides data from a new study that essentially says Boomers are working longer and living in suburban areas or low density cities.   

The details can be found in Biggest Boomer Towns

What does this say about the proposed investment in Streetcar and Foothills?   Is this model valid or viable given the actual data presented by the study.   

We leave it up to members, contacts and friends to make their own conclusions.....

Comments form Jack Bogs blog can be found below:

The boomers are coming -- not

Here's an interesting study. It shows that by and large, the boomers aren't retiring to downtown condo towers. They're staying in the suburbs, or moving to sprawl in the southern half of the country:

An analysis of those who were 55 to 65 in 2000 and 65 to 75 in 2010 reveals an even stronger anti-urban bias, with an over 12% drop in city dwellers. Since these folks are far less likely to have kids at home and more properly retired, this cohort’s behavior suggests that aging boomers are if anything less likely to move to the cities in the next decade. Indeed, if boomers do move, notes Sandi Rosenbloom, a noted expert on retirement trends and professor of Planning and Civil Engineering at the University of Arizona, they tend to move to less dense and more affordable regions. The top cities for aging boomers largely parallel those that appealed to the “young and restless” in our earlier survey. The top ten on our list are all affordable, generally low-density Sun Belt metros.

It appears that the density dreams of the Portlandia planning cabal are not going to be fulfilled by an influx of blue-hairs to our rainy, gray city any time soon. You have to wonder who the heck is going to ride that eastside streetcar.

Read more: http://bojack.org/#ixzz1VDrdHBrj