Millennial generation shunning the suburbs for city life

They want the bustle. They want the convenience. They want the diversity.

In short, they want the city and not the suburbs – even after their children start school.

In a trend that is starting to chip away at the bedrock of suburban North Jersey, a surge of families with young children is gravitating toward New York City, reversing a path worn by generations before them.

Recently released demographic data shows the number of married couples with school-age children rose 10 to 20 percent across middle- and upper-income neighborhoods of New York City just in the first half of this decade, accelerating a trend that began in the mid-2000s. Similar increases were found in urban areas of Hudson County in New Jersey.

At the same time, the number of such families continued to dip across much of Bergen, Passaic, Morris and other suburban counties in New Jersey and New York, according to an analysis of the data by The Record and NorthJersey.com.

While towns closer to the city — and with shorter commutes — have largely escaped the trend, some of the region's more upscale communities, especially those with longer commutes to jobs in Manhattan, have been hit the hardest.

Across the river, families are putting down roots from Riverdale in the Bronx to the Upper West Side of Manhattan to Park Slope in Brooklyn, where baby carriages have become as common as taxis.

"It's totally different from where I grew up," said Malya Levin, who spent her teen years in the city of Passaic and now squeezes into a two-room Park Slope apartment with her husband and toddler. “It’s really night and day, in terms of the diversity of people, the things to do, the lifestyle, the culture, everything.”

Assessing the impact of the changes can be difficult because demographic shifts unfold over many years and mix with other factors to shape and reshape communities.

But as newly minted urban dwellers settle in, their decisions are starting to pose challenges for suburban communities in the form of declining school enrollments, stagnant home values and elevated office vacancies that experts say are connected to the trend.

"The suburbs are at a serious crossroads,” said New York University sociologist Mitchell Moss, former director of the school’s Urban Research Center. “The family of the future is not the same as the family of the past and young people are no longer living conventional lifestyles. Kids that grew up in the suburbs want to experience a different life and that has made cities attractive again. This is a major, major challenge for the suburbs.”

Communities that adapt will thrive, while those that ignore it “do so at their own peril,” said Rutgers University demographer James Hughes. “This is not a trend likely to go away any time soon.”

The analysis by The Record and NorthJersey.com of population, school, housing and economic data maintained by the U.S. Census Bureau, the state of New Jersey and other sources found that:

Neighborhoods of Manhattan, Brooklyn and Hudson County with median household incomes above $75,000 saw the number of married couples with children rise from about 80,000 in the second half of the 2000s to about 90,000 in the first half of the current decade.

The number of children less than 10 years old in those neighborhoods increased from an estimated 112,000 to 126,000, an increase reflected in public and private K-4 school enrollment.

Suburban communities feeling some of the biggest decreases in those numbers include Harrington Park, Hillsdale, Mahwah, Old Tappan, Paramus and Park Ridge in Bergen County and Hawthorne and Wayne in Passaic County. All saw dips of more than 5 percent.

Home prices in all but a handful of Bergen and Passaic municipalities are languishing five to 25 percent behind where they were before the real estate boom of the 2000s collapsed. In Manhattan and Brooklyn, they have raced past prior highs. Even price increases in the Bronx, long a symbol of urban decay, have outpaced suburban gains.

Office vacancy rates in Bergen, Passaic, Morris, Westchester and other suburban counties are at least 1½ times higher than the 9- to 11-percent rates of Manhattan and Brooklyn as corporations follow young talent. In the most severe examples, Morris County's rate was 28 percent and northern Westchester County’s was 40 percent in the first quarter of 2017, according to Cushman & Wakefield, a major commercial real estate broker.

Change in number of married couples with school-age children

Suburbs starting to feel the effects

Beyond the data are tales like that of a children's clothing store owner in Ridgewood who said he would move to Manhattan if he could afford the rent; a longstanding day care center that closed in Upper Saddle River because of declining enrollment; and a moving company that stopped storing trucks in Newark two years ago.

"We just don’t see those moves (to the suburbs) that we used to," said David Giampietro, chief operating office of the New York City-based Flatrate Moving.

There are even signs that parents are choosing to stay in urban areas as their children hit middle and high school. In one example, at the Dwight Englewood School in Bergen County, a spokeswoman, Liz Tausner, said a growing number of students in upper grades were taking buses the school provides to and from New York City.

For sure, suburbia does continue to thrive, holding great allure as a place to have a home in a safe neighborhood with open spaces and quality schools.

But for people like the Levins, suburbia and its trappings hold little appeal.

The 33-year-old lawyer for an elder abuse shelter lives with her husband, William, and their 20-month-old son, Sammy, in an apartment so small it takes just 10 steps to walk clear across the hardwood floor. The space, on the fourth floor of a building without an elevator, is so tight she sometimes retreats to the bathroom to make work calls.

Still, she says it’s an easy choice to make because her neighborhood has so much of what her suburban hometown lacked: rows of historic brownstones, a coffee shop where she can get Sumatran brews, a huge park two blocks away and a community where she’s just as likely to meet an artist from China as she is a mom returning home from yoga class.

The half-hour commute to work on the subway makes the choice even easier, she says.

“I don’t see it as a compromise at all," says Levin, who lives two blocks from Prospect Park. "It’s a no-brainer to me.”

Three blocks away from the Levins, Heidi Fischer says she loves many of the same things.

Fischer and her husband Simon, pay $2,100 a month for a four-room apartment with a master bedroom partitioned out of the living room. It has no door.

The one actual bedroom – 6 ½ feet by 8 ½ feet – is shared by their 11-year-old son, Billy, and 22-month-old daughter Olive.

On school days, Fischer uses her cellphone to monitor Billy's progress on a New York City bus back and forth from school, but says safety is not a big concern. In fact, she said, she'd feel less safe in the suburbs when Billy got old enough to drive.

"I kind of like that my son is not going to be needing to drive in seven years," said Fischer, a native of Princeton Junction, who teaches English to immigrants at a community college in Manhattan. "I'm hoping that he won't feel trapped like I was growing up in a place where I always needed a ride to go anywhere."

Some municipal and school leaders in North Jersey have taken note, approving new school programs or developments aimed at attracting young families.

Harrington Park, for example, has added a pre-school program. And a number of towns are seeking to redevelop their downtowns to better suit young families.

In Fair Lawn, Morristown and Park Ridge, that could mean higher-density, upscale housing near train stations. And new shopping options.

“We realized that you have to change,” said Fair Lawn Mayor John Cosgrove. “Change or be left behind.”

Other towns continue relying on traditional ways. Wayne, for example, shelved a plan to redevelop eight sites with luxury multi-family housing in 2013 after residents railed against it, saying it would change the town’s character.

Wayne has declining enrollments in the early grades of its school system and fewer young families are moving to town.

But Mayor Chris Vergano withdrew his support for the redevelopment plan and has since said that he has heard of enough young families moving to town to reduce his concern about the trend to “minimal.”

Towns ignore shift at their own peril

Experts warn that suburban communities ignoring the shifts face a set of potentially escalating problems.

Fewer families mean fewer shoppers in local stores and fewer workers in offices, which could lead to commercial areas declining and tax bases eroding. That could shift the cost of operating schools and local government to a smaller number of taxpayers, experts say.

“It erodes the tax base because as there is less demand, commercial property values decline,” said Jeffrey Otteau, president of the Otteau Group, a Monmouth County real estate analysis firm. “As values decline, that creates gaps in municipal and school budgets, which can only be filled by residential taxpayers. The threat cannot be overstated.”

Experts further note that the changes come at an especially challenging time when the state faces some of the weakest income growth in the country, some of the highest property taxes, low bond ratings and a troubled commuter transit system.

"Right the, now the glass is still half full," said Otteau. "We are not at crisis levels." But, he added that if the current trend continues, "the wealth and vibrancy and prosperity will dissipate. It's a slow bleed, like death by a thousand cuts."

The changing patterns taking hold follow decades in which families fled New York City for the suburbs of Long Island, Westchester County and New Jersey. Rising crime, declining services and decaying housing were common refrains. Increasing urban racial diversity also played a role for some.

As suburbia sprawled, millions of square feet of office parks sprang up in New Jersey. The state become the nation's most densely populated state and one of its wealthiest.

But in the early 2000s, violent crime rates were plummeting in New York City (the annual number of murders has dropped 85 percent since 1990) and recovery from the 9/11 terrorist attack was underway. Urban job growth surged while the New Jersey economy stalled.

The trend picked up after the recession of the late 2000s, as a growing number of young adults with children were repelled by high suburban home prices, longer commutes and the burden of maintaining large homes and lawns.

Tolerance - or desire - among the current generation for greater ethnic diversity furthered the trend, experts say.

“The city is not at all what I expected,” said Ashley Rigby, who moved from the suburbs of Hartford, Conn., to New York City in 2006, got married in 2010 and stayed.

Rigby, a sales manager for a furniture company, and her husband, Jeff, a computer programmer, live on the border of the Crown Heights and Prospect Heights sections of Brooklyn with their two children, ages 3 and 5.

“Before I moved here it just seemed like such a chaotic place," she said. "Living here has made me much more empathetic to different kinds of people."

The changes are reverberating for people who work in businesses, from retail to day care to real estate, that have long catered to people moving to suburbia.

In Ridgewood, Little Skye children's clothing store owner Paul Bordieri said business "has been OK," but he added that Manhattan would be an ideal place to operate if he could afford the rent.

Paul Zweben, a New York real estate agent, says he sees a growing number of parents, including himself, looking to stay in the city to avoid the commute and have more time for their children.

“I have a busy job,” said Zweben, an Essex County native. “Why would I add 10 hours or more to commute time each week when I can get up, go the gym, and be in the office in 12 minutes?”

Giampetro, of Flatrate Moving Co., said the number of customers headed to suburbia had declined enough in the last few years that a garage housing half a dozen moving vans in Newark was converted to storage. Beyond Montclair and Maplewood in Essex County, he said his company now does fewer moves to New Jersey.

In Bergen County, the YWCA is looking to relocate its day care operation to Hackensack, Englewood or nearby communities. Once there, it can serve areas closer to New York City where the number of young parents is still growing, said Helen Archontou, chief executive officer.

"That's 100 percent where our business strategy has shifted to," she said. In Upper Saddle River, "we just didn't have the population to keep the program going."