Young people are moving back to big cities, defying the predictions prevalent in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic that urban areas will no longer be in demand. Recent data from RentCafe, an affiliate of real estate data firm Yardi Matrix, shows that Gen Z, or Zoomer, renters—people under the age of 25—are filling out a massive number of apartment leasing applications in traditional gateway cities, including New York. Huh. , San Francisco, Philadelphia and Boston.
Overall, the number of rental applications from the Gen Z generation grew by 21 percent between 2020 and 2021, compared to only 10 percent for all generations of renters during the same period. In the following gallery, we look at RentCafe data for which cities saw the largest increase in the number of apartment rental applications from Gen Z members last year.
