money Gen Z: Best places for young adults to live in 2019
Once projected as the generation to permanently alter the fabric of adulthood and upend time-honored American hallmarks, millennials are now pushing middle age and hitting all the conventional milestones previous generations have before: marriage, children and homeownership.
So the spotlight of societal fascination has now shifted to the up-and-comers: Generation Z, those born from 1996 to 2010.
As the oldest members of Gen Z are set to graduate college and enter the workforce, the world is trying to figure out what makes this cohort of digital natives tick, including where they will choose to spend their young adult years.
A recent study from Nestpick attempts to forecast where this ever-evolving generation will plant roots first, using factors and values determined to be closely held by Gen Z.
Worldwide cities were categorized and ranked according to digital connectivity, affordability, socially liberal principles, opportunities for recreation, friendliness to entrepreneurship, and abundance of co-working spaces, among other factors.
There’s one hitch to the list of cities, though, says Jason Dorsey, president of The Center for Generational Kinetics, a consulting firm. While Gen Z aspires to live in nexuses of diversity, commerce and technology, those wants are often associated with high costs of living.
“The challenges for many of the cities is they're extremely expensive,” Dorsey says. “When it comes to Gen Z’s financial frugality, their ideas and desires to live in these cities will come crashing into reality when it comes time to pay the rent.”
Young Americans who came of age during the Great Recession are acutely aware of the long-term struggles brought on by credit card debt and inflated student loans and mortgages, Dorsey says. High rent is a direct violation of Gen Z’s unofficial financial code.
“Taking a job in a city where you're not able to really support yourself does not seem to be the decision that they want to make,” Dorsey says.
Projected to outnumber millennials in terms of population, Gen Z accounts for nearly a third of the world’s 7.7 billion people born since 2001, according to a Bloomberg analysis using United Nations data. Based on their collective size, Gen Z has the ability to shift the global population and the way we all work, live and play.
Here’s where these young adults should land, according to Nestpick’s analysis.
Top 25 cities for Gen Z
1 - London, England
2 - Stockholm, Sweden
3 - Los Angeles, California
4 - Toronto, Canada
5 - New York, New York
6 - Berlin, Germany
7 - Munich, Germany
8 - San Francisco, California
9 - Amsterdam, Netherlands
10 - Vancouver, Canada
11 - Paris, France
12 - Manchester, England
13 - Copenhagen, Denmark
14 - Helsinki, Finland
15 - Montreal, Canada
16 - Gothenburg, Sweden
17 - Frankfurt, Germany
18 - Malmo, Sweden
19 - Brussels, Belgium
20 - Seattle, Washington
21 - Boston, Massachusetts
22 - Edinburgh, Scotland
23 - Melbourne, Australia
24 - Sydney, Australia
25 - Hamburg, Germany
Stephanie is a writer for Yahoo Finance. Follow her on Twitter @SJAsymkos.
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