The millennials’ urban revolution

Unlike their suburban parents, these millennials — Americans who reached adulthood around the year 2000 — love cities. In fact, they’ve fled to the cities to escape their suburban helicopter parents.

But unlike previous urban dwellers, millennials prefer working with their peers in computer clusters to working 9-to-5 for a multinational corporation. They’d rather socialize in parks, street festivals, outdoor restaurants, and beer gardens than watch a giant flat-screen TV in the privacy of their home recreation center. They like streets cluttered with cozy shops instead of giant, sterile chain outlets. They prefer walking, biking, or mass transit to driving a car. They want authentic food from a farmers’ market, not processed hoagies at a Wawa. They distrust government and big business alike. They couldn’t care less about long-term financial security, dressing for success, or street crime.

“Philly millennials have a political agenda,” their leading booster, the Inquirer’s architecture critic Inga Saffron, tweeted, “and it's a pro-bike, tech-friendly, amenity-centric one.”

I know what you’re thinking: Can these pests be stopped? And who will speak up for the voiceless victims threatened by the millennials’ relentless stampede? For example:

Gated communities downtown?

Automobiles: Thanks to millennials, cars are being elbowed aside by bicycle lanes downtown. High-rise apartments are being constructed without provision for parking spaces. Drivers who operate SUVs, hit pedestrians, or make right-hand turns from the middle lane increasingly feel themselves outnumbered and defenseless. As Jesus (or was it Francis of Assisi?) reminded us, the true test of a humane society is how it treats its automobiles.

Empty nesters: Like the millennials, they’ve migrated downtown from the suburbs, albeit for very different reasons: They’re tired of mowing grass, mopping up their flooded basements, and driving miles from the Main Line every time they want a taste of culture or an exciting meal. Now they fill seats at Philadelphia’s theaters and orchestras, pay taxes, and pump millions into the local economy. All they want in exchange is the equivalent of a suburban gated community with two-car garages, located three blocks from the Avenue of the Arts. Is that too much to ask?

Gas station owners and parking lot operators: At least since World War II, these entrepreneurs have flourished by providing a useful public service. Much like Southern slave owners before 1861, they’ve scrupulously adhered to society’s rules, only to find that those rules are changing. Consequently, their livelihoods are in jeopardy. Who will pay the cost of public relief for these indigents, now threatened with poverty through no fault of their own?

Film directors’ quandary

Fancy restaurants: Equally endangered by the millennial invasion are prestigious dining establishments that offer comfortable seats, spacious tables, white tablecloths, dress codes, piano bars, soft opera sound tracks, celebrity photos on the walls, and officious headwaiters and sommeliers in tuxedoes who say things like, “We're fully booked” or “Satisfactory wiz monsieur?” Again, some form of tax subsidy may be necessary to preserve these vital institutions.

Third-world tyrants and oligarchs: From Dubai to Riyadh to Caracas to Moscow, dictators rely on the high price of oil to stay in power. The high price of oil depends on high demand. But bike-riding millennials will destroy that model. Without a first-class military budget, how will Vladimir Putin restore Mother Russia’s former empire? Through friendly persuasion?

U.S. presidents: In every democracy, the leader needs some external threat to rally public opinion behind him or her. War provides a convenient tool to galvanize public support and silence dissent (vide George Bush Senior and Junior). By contrast, presidents who seem reluctant to wage war (say, Carter and Obama) invite dissension. But in a world without oil tyrants to fight wars against, how will presidents govern effectively?

Movie producers and directors: Car chases and battle scenes cover a multitude of sins in moviemaking. If there are no more wars over oil, and if everybody’s riding bikes, most movie producers and directors will have to find other lines of work. (Or they’ll have to contrive imaginary wars. In the 1981 comedy Stripes, Bill Murray and Harold Ramis quit their boring jobs, joined the peacetime army for a bit of fun, and wound up invading Czechoslovakia.)

Now, the good news

Is there no silver lining to this millennial cloud? I thought you’d never ask.

First, millennials don’t produce children or at least not very many. So as millennials take over America’s cities, the public schools’ perennial financial problems will largely evaporate by themselves.

Second, millennials loathe government and politics, and consequently they don’t vote. Memo to Philadelphia‘s Democratic boss, Congressman Bob Brady (age 69), and potential Democratic mayors Ed Rendell (age 70) and Lynne Abraham (age 73): Millennials or no millennials, your candidacies are safe for the foreseeable future.