by P.D. Lesko

The Boomers on Ann Arbor City Council are fixated on turning the city into a mecca for Young Professionals. After all, 35,000 wanna-be YPs study at the University of Michigan, and if all of them would just stay put, in less than 10 years Ann Arbor could have a population to rival, well, Mexico City, or Grand Rapids, depending on whom you ask.

Concentrate Media, recently outed by the Ann Arbor Observer as a state of Michigan/business financed development propaganda pipeline, routinely posts pieces to its online magazine about the little (and big) public policy initiatives that the Baby Boomers who pay taxes could fund to make life better for the YPs who live here—not to mention the millions who would live here. The suggestions run along the lines of a bit more Soylent Green making, and a little less hand-wringing over threatened closure of the Burns Park Senior Center.

A2Politico recently interviewed the Director of the Michigan Municipal League, Dan Gilmartin, who is a Deacon in the Church of Urban Density. That church aims to attract YPs to rebuilt urban centers in the state. The Church of Urban Density predicts that within the next 50 years 92 percent of Americans will live in urban centers. Maybe we will, and maybe we won’t. It’s possible that the current trend whereby college-educated YPs throw all caution to the wind, take up residence on farms, grow organic food and compete to have the dirtiest fingernails will gain irreversible momentum.

Here’s the scoop about YPs and happiness: Fort Lauderdale, Boston, Chicago, Charlotte, and Los Angeles are high on the list of cities where YPers are happy as pigs in a poke. Who couldn’t be a happy YPer in Fort Lauderdale or LA for pity sake? Lots of the top spots on the list are near water, or boast climates that are the envy of anyone who has survived a Michigan winter. On the other hand, the city that tops the list doesn’t have a particularly spectacular climate, and the nearest water is an inland lake. Oh, and a small river runs along the edge of town.

Redmond, Washington snagged the number one spot on the Forbes list of cities with the happiest young professionals. Ann Arbor was nowhere to be found on the list.

What do you know about Redmond other than it’s the home of Microsoft? It’s a bit smaller than the “town” side of Ann Arbor (minus the University of Michigan students), 54,144 residents, and it’s known as the “bicycle capital of the Northwest.”

Bikes, however, are not the main form of transportation in Redmond. The majority of people who live there get around in cars. The city has about half the landmass of Ann Arbor, but with 1,000 acres of parkland, devotes about the same percentage of its city land to recreational areas owned by the public, and off the tax rolls. Redmond’s mayor and City Council members aren’t fixated on commuter trains, and the city doesn’t have a major university for a neighbor. There is no DDA to “manage” parking. There’s a parking coordinator. Redmond is a rather sleepy town. There aren’t trollies, and other such delusions of grandeur, and it rains frequently. Redmond has a population density of 2,848 people per square mile, while Ann Arbor has a population density that is 4,219 per square mile. Both cities host Zip Cars.

So how come Redmond, Washington is number one on the list of cities where YPs are the happiest and Ann Arbor didn’t finish within the top 100? Here’s an even more interesting result from the survey: Detroit is sitting pretty at number six on the list, higher up than Chicago (number 13), Minneapolis (number 10) and Boston (number 8). How was the list compiled? According to the piece published by Forbes:

Forbes list of the 20 happiest cities for young professionals is based on analysis from thousands of employee generated reviews between 2010 and 2011. Young professionals, defined by CareerBliss as employees with less than 10 years’ experience in a full-time position, were asked to rate eight factors that affect workplace happiness, including growth opportunities, compensation, benefits, work-life balance, career advancement, senior management, job security and whether they would recommend their employer others.

They valued each factor on a five-point scale, and also indicated how important it was to their overall happiness at work. The numbers were combined to find an average rating of overall employee happiness for each respondent, and then sorted by location to find which cities had the happiest workers.

The kinds of jobs that are available contribute significantly to the happiness of YPs, evidently, not awards, trains, bike paths, regional buses, or even opportunities for downtown living. Heidi Golledge is the CEO of CareerBliss. She told Forbes:

We have also seen a shift recently with young professionals who in the last few years have wanted to work at a company that has more than simply a money focus.  A company that has philanthropic aspirations and a good work life balance seems to be able to draw the best talent from the young professional candidate pool.

So it’s not only the quality and type of job available, but the heart and soul of the company that counts, as well. On June 17, 2011 Bloomberg’s BusinessWeek analyzed Republican Governor Rick Snyder’s “job creation” strategies. This comes from the June 2011 A2Politico piece about the BusinessWeek analysis:

“Over the past eight years Washtenaw County has lost about 8,000 jobs. Two U of M economists recently predicted that Washtenaw County could see job growth between 2011-2013 that would almost completely reverse this job loss. On the surface, this is welcome news—the kind of news politicos like to trumpet. However, as always, the devil is in the details. Those 8,000 jobs lost were, in part, high-paying jobs at Pfizer, for instance, as well as manufacturing jobs. According to the study released on March 10, 2011, almost 50 percent of the jobs lost over the past eight years are predicted to be replaced with jobs that pay $45,000 or less. In short, the unemployed in Ann Arbor will choose from among opportunities that are lower-paying; the U of M researchers predicted thousands of the jobs created will pay $38,000 or less. The study’s authors write:

“Washtenaw County’s unemployment rate came in at 8.6 percent for both 2009 and 2010, uncomfortably high despite being lower than the U.S. rate and much lower than the Michigan rate.  Much of the discontent among residents over economic conditions is focused on the unemployment situation.  We anticipate that healthy job growth over the forecast period will trigger a systematic reduction in the jobless rate, falling to 7.2 percent in 2011, 7 percent in 2012, and 6.7 percent in 2013, as shown in figure 11.  The return of additional job seekers to the labor market by 2011, drawn into the labor force by improving job opportunities, acts as a counterweight and keeps the jobless rate from falling as much as it otherwise would.”

According to U.S. Federal Reserve Bank officials, Ann Arbor has one of lowest unemployment rates in the state at 7.8 percent, better than the state average of 10.9 percent, but up from 7 percent just a few months ago. So again, why aren’t YPs who work here as happy as or happier than the ones who work in Redmond, Washington? For that matter, why are YPs happier working in Detroit than in Ann Arbor?

Could it be that the majority of types of jobs available in our town and county don’t offer the kinds of growth opportunities, compensation, benefits, work-life balance, career advancement, and job security YPs want and need in order to justify staying or moving here? Should we even care? I think so. The current political Group Think seems to be this: Give the people what they don’t want, and pay for it all by cutting funding for police, fire, parks, neglecting roads, bridges, pools—programs, services and infrastructure that attract people who own businesses to a city.

The only thing that kept Detroit from the top spot on the list were low scores in the job security department. That’s about Michigan’s economy, of course. Ann Arbor, on the other hand, has a long, long way to go, evidently, in its economic development scene before the YPs we have give the city and its employers high marks.