Anecdotally, millennials like living in urban cores, until they have children and move out to the suburbs to find more space. However, new research finds that "power couples," are flocking to, or remaining in, urban cores too, says CityLab's Richard Florida.
Florida writes:
Among researchers, “power couples” refers to a broader phenomenon of well-educated, high-earning pairs, typically defined as couples where both partners hold a college degree. Power couples are associated with the concept of assortative mating, which describes how people of similar backgrounds—and especially those who are better educated and higher-earning—tend to partner with and marry one another.
A new study tracked the location of power couples from 2008 to 2014, when the back-to-the-city movement kicked into high gear. The study sheds important new light on the geography of power couples by comparing three kinds of couples: full power couples, in which both spouses have a college degree; couples where only one spouse has a college degree; and couples where neither spouse has a college degree. (The study looks at native-born, male–female married couples only.) Costa and Kahn used even more detailed data on these couples from the Census’s American Community Survey (ACS), covering more than 300 metros for the period 2008 to 2014.
Not surprisingly, full power couples are significantly more likely to live in large, highly educated cities or metro areas than other types of couples. More than 40 percent (42 percent) of these couples are found in large cities, compared to about 30 percent of couples where just the husband (32 percent) or just the wife (31 percent) graduated from college. Only a quarter of couples where neither spouse graduated college lived in large, highly educated cities.
On the flip side, just 2 percent of full power couples lived in the smallest, least-educated cities or metro areas—reflective of the increased geographic sorting and inequality we see across America.
