Here’s where millennials are moving

As much as the term may seem overused, “millennials” certainly aren’t going anywhere.

A new report by the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program, The Millennial Generation: A Demographic Bridge to America’s Diverse Future, examines how this generation, poised to become ever more consequential on economic, cultural, and governmental levels, is changing—and where it’s settling across the country.

This sizable demographic—which the report defines as being born between 1981 and 1997—now make up a quarter of the country’s population, 30 percent of the voting age population, and nearly two-fifths of the working-age population, giving credence to those mayors, developers, and business leaders trying to be more millennial-friendly.

The Brookings Institution looked at the group through many lenses, including homeownership rates, education, and poverty. Analysis of U.S Census data shows an increasingly diverse generation: 55.8 percent are white and nearly 30 percent are what the authors called “new minorities,” namely Latinx, Asian, and those identifying as two or more races. Thirty of the 100 largest metro areas are now minority white, including Miami (25 percent) and Houston (32 percent).

Census data revealed where they are, and aren’t, moving to and living in across the country, which some see as a type of proxy for a city’s economic health. Overall, the millennial population increased 4.7 percent nationally between 2010 and 2015, but it grew in uneven ways geographically.

These divergent growth patterns reflect a numbers of factors, including housing costs and economic growth, and can be seen a reflection of both the concentration of opportunity in big cities, as well as a general population shift towards the south and west. Here are some of the breakdowns found in the Brookings report.