Price says there are millennial enclaves in dense job centers.
DALLAS—Common wisdom these days says where there's an urban core, there will be millennials and Dallas-Fort Worth is no exception. Its downtown is teeming with millennials, at 51% of the immediate population, or more than 67,000, GlobeSt.com learns.
Millennials are a large and diverse group that cannot be painted with a single brush. In terms of preferred locations, they have shown they are willing to eschew the urban core for the suburbs if the ingredients are right.
“Most people would tell you that millennials are pretty much tethered to urban cores around the country,” said Walter Bialas, JLL director of research in Dallas. “However, Dallas is a good example of why that is not necessarily the case as we see them spreading out to be near the good jobs and the growing job opportunities.”
In addition to job proximity, they are looking for that elusive integration of a live, work, play and shop environment that feels authentic. DFW is home to more than 40 of Texas' 100-plus Fortune 1000 companies. These companies form a corporate infrastructure that helps anchor the region for both large and small companies in the urban core and the suburbs. So it's no coincidence that the three largest clusters of millennials are centered around DFW's concentrations of Fortune companies.
“Many millennials have relocated to DFW primarily for job opportunities, some of which are located in the suburbs,” said JLL managing director Jeff Price. “With so much employment based in dense job centers, we have seen the development of millennial enclaves.”
For instance, near Las Colinas, a diverse corporate suburb, there are 12 Fortune 1000 companies and a whopping 32,000 millennials, according to JLL's analysis of age and lifestyle. That compares to the 41,000 Gen-Xers that live in Las Colinas. Likewise in the greater Legacy/Frisco area, there are 23,000 millennials, or 13.1% of that area's population, and six Fortune 1000 companies.
“Each of these submarkets is evolving in their own unique ways, each with their own successes and challenges,” Price tells GlobeSt.com. “Some markets are seeing matching growth of the retail to keep up with the increased population, others are not. Areas like CityLine and Las Colinas are utilizing established mass transit systems, while areas like the Great Legacy-Frisco area are coordinating plans for the influx of traffic on the highway systems these new jobs will create.”
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Lisa Brown
Lisa Brown is an editor for the south and west regions of GlobeSt.com. She has 25-plus years of real estate experience, with a regional PR role at Grubb & Ellis and a national communications position at MMI. Brown also spent 10 years as executive director at NAIOP San Francisco Bay Area chapter, where she led the organization to achieving its first national award honors and recognition on Capitol Hill. She has written extensively on commercial real estate topics and edited numerous pieces on the subject.
