Generational Data: Who's Spending, Buying, Renting, & Driving Growth

Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast. In this episode, we get to listen as Adam Witty interviews Chris Porter. Now, Chris Porter is somebody who does analysis on demographics, specifically on what demographic groups are advancing, transforming, or halting the shifts that happen inside of the market as we see it today. This is extremely interesting. This was recorded back in 2020, and you can see these shifts happening today. So as you listen, pay attention and say which of these have actually occurred and which of them are beginning to take place here very, very soon. Let's listen in.

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Well, hello, Magnetic Marketing Diamond members. This is CEO Adam Witty, and this is the Diamond Call with author Chris Porter. Author of Big Shifts Ahead. So, let us talk about your book, Big Shifts Ahead. I loved the book when I read it. Number one, I love charts and I love graphs and I love pictures. And all of my friends would tease me and say, yeah, of course, Adam always loves picture books because they're easier for him to read. And Big Shift Ahead has a lot of really great charts and graphs that I think really visualize the words that are on the page. One of my favorite things in the book was how you and John essentially classified every generation of Americans beginning at 1930. And you summed up, okay, here's how many people are alive today that were born in that decade. And then you talk about like what was the big thing. So like, you know, you call the generation of the 1930s the savers and the '40s was the achievers and so on down the line. I was hoping maybe you could just start by helping us understand kind of these generations that you break down by decades and maybe just walk us through kind of the big societal shift that that that generation in that decade was really most known for?

Yeah, I'd be glad to. And I'm going to take a step back even further and just talk about sort of why we did that. And if anyone has read the book, they've probably heard this before, but we get a lot of questions. We are consultants to the homebuilding industry and residential real estate in general. And we get a lot of questions about— everyone's excited about the millennials and how this is going to be the saving grace for the housing industry as there's so many of them. Coming into the market and they're at an age where they are starting to think about buying homes and forming their own households. And what we were finding was that despite the fact we have all this data at our fingertips now, people are still making a lot of decisions based on their gut or based on what's worked in the past or what they've seen success with in the past. And we said, you know what, the world has really changed. We need to get more granular on this data. We also need to do a better job of understanding understanding what data is good data and what data is not so good data. It used to be the challenge was you didn't have enough data. Now there's so much data that it's hard to make sense of it all. And so, as we try to help clarify the conversation for our clients about what we think the boomers are doing and what we think the millennials are doing, I mean, a lot of their decisions are being based on, well, my parents are boomers and this is what they're doing, so all boomers must be doing this. What my kids are doing and they're millennials, so all millennials must be doing this. And we said you just can't think that way because the example that I always like to give is somebody born in 1980, somebody born in 2000 could both be considered millennials depending on which definition you're going to use. And that's another part of this challenge is that everybody's got a different definition of what a millennial is. Everybody's got a different definition of what Gen X is.. And somebody born in 1980 and somebody born in 2000 have very different life experiences. And we said we can't just categorize them all into one group and talk about millennials as a whole. We know people are still going to do that. But we said let's put a finer point in that conversation to help break these down more granularly. And that will allow us to really see who are the groups that are really advancing these demographic shifts. Who are the groups that are halting demographic shifts? Who are the groups that are transforming demographic shifts. Because as you said, demographics is destiny. I mean, consumer demand, whether it's houses or whether it's toothpaste, ultimately comes down to some of these demographic underpinnings. And so we said, you know, there's an easy way to do this. And it's just look at the decade that people were born in. It's a nice 10-year group. As an analyst, I can look at 10-year groupings and compare one against the other. I think one of the questions we always get is, well, who's bigger? Is it the boomers or the millennials? Again, it really comes down to how you define each one of those groups. So, we said let's create this framework where we're looking at it based on the decade born. Everybody knows what year they were born in, and hopefully can figure out what decade they were born in. And there were two criteria we had as we were defining these generations. One was that we wanted to give them a nickname that really symbolized a shift that they led our society towards. This same shift may have been exemplified by prior generations. And it may be exemplified by subsequent generations as well. But we wanted to come up with a name that really described something that we thought defined that particular generation, something they moved our society towards. And the other thing was it had to be a positive connotation as well. We didn't want to come up with the slacker generation or the The Foreclosure Generation. Those are some of the names that we tossed around. We said, no, we really want to have something that people would be proud of as they're describing their own generation. And so it's been really helpful in our analysis just to think about how to look at this more granularly and understand what were the reasons that a particular decade-born generation exhibited one of these shifts. So, I'll go through a quick run-through of the generations. We did start with the 1930s group. And in fact, I've got some more up-to-date data than what's in the book. And one of the challenges with putting a book in print that's so data-driven is that a few years into the path of publishing, some of the data is out of date. But as we look at the 1930s group, this was the group we called the savers. There's about 9 million of them today in 2020. And this is a group that grew up during the Great Depression. They learned the value of a dollar and really from a very young age because they had to. They were forced to because of the conditions in which the economy was when they were born. And so we've seen this group really learn the value of saving dollars. They also really benefited from great economies during their working lives. I mean, they saw higher GDP growth during their working years than any generation has seen since. There's about 9 million of them today. You know, they are largely— I mean, they're all basically all retired at this point. But it's a group that really led us toward more of a saving mindset. And I think we're actually seeing that sort of come full circle with now the group we call the Connectors born in the 1990s. We think they have a similar mindset again because of the the economy in which this younger generation also grew up in, in the wake of the Great Recession. Next up, we've got the 1940s group. And this is really the beginning of the baby boom. So the first half of this generation was born prior to the boom. The second half started the baby boom. And there's about 23 million of them alive today in 2020. We call them the Achievers. And the reason we call them the Achievers is that all of a sudden, this sudden influx of new people, a surge in the number of people in the country as a result of this generation led them to greater accomplishment in their life, led them to greater achievement, more competitiveness. And part of that was just due to the fact that when they were going to college, there were more people fighting for the same number of spots in college. When they graduated, it was more people fighting for jobs in the economy. And so we think that sort of competitive spirit that was bred as a result of that led them to great achievement in their lives. I'll go to the 1950s group next. We call them the innovators. And you think about some of the people born in this generation, we use Bill Gates and Steve Jobs as examples of this. But they really— they grew up during the space race. They're fascinated by technology and science and really started more companies. We saw greater entrepreneurship among this generation than we have seen in any generation since. And that's hard to think about, hard to comprehend, but it really is true. Huge entrepreneurship with this generation, really creating companies that have helped us to become more efficient and helped us become more productive. And so we said, you know, they were great innovating. And again, subsequent generations have also been good at innovating. We thought this was really the generation that kind of kicked off that shift. Next up, we got the 1960s group. We called them the Equalers. And this was a generation we kind of struggled with the— came up with the name for them because there were so many different things that we could focus on. But one thing we found with this generation was it was the first generation for which more women graduated from college than men. This is the group that saw greater education equality. And we go back to like 1970, I think we use this example in the book, but 58% of college degrees were going to men back in 1970. Today, it's 58% of college degrees are going to women. And so that's been a dramatic shift in our economy. And that 50/50 split really was achieved by this group when they graduated from college in the 1990s, or excuse me, 1980s. There's about 43 million of them alive today. And that is really the tail end of the baby boom. And then we start moving into Gen X as part of that, the later years in the 1960s. The heart of Gen X is really born in the 1970s, and that's the Achievers. They were— excuse me, that was the Balancers. You know, it was a bust, a baby bust during the 1970s, really as a result of the the widespread use of the birth control pill in the 1960s. As it became more available, we saw this baby bust in the '70s. And so there were fewer of them born in the US. But one thing that's been really interesting with this group is that the foreign-born population has really helped to level off the population a little bit. So fewer of the 1970s balancers in the US today, but The fact that 1 in 4 of them was born outside the US has really helped to bring that population up. We call them the balancers because we said they work hard, and I think this generation has kind of gotten a bad rap as being, like I said, a slacker generation or they don't work hard. But what they're doing is they're working hard with finding balance in their life. We think they still find success both at work and at home. They saw what their parents went through. Their parents were workaholics. They saw high divorce rates amongst their parents' generation. A lot of these kids grew up going home and being a latchkey kid at the end of the day, watching TV until mom and dad came home from work. And they said, you know, that's not what I want for my own kids. So we do think that they work hard. They work hard at finding good balance in their lives. Next up, we kind of, in the 1980s, we see birth start to pick up again. And that's the group we call today the sharers. It's about 44 million of them today. And they are a group that really defined the sharing economy. When we think about all the goods and services that are now rented instead of owned, and you think about Airbnbs, you think about Uber, those are companies invented or created by people weren't in the 1980s. They are used to— basically, as a result of the economy that they graduated into, they were more highly educated, but they also had all that student debt to go along with that. And they said, gosh, we just can't afford to own some of these things right now. How can we be innovative and share more things? And so you did see a lot of those companies arise out of this generation, and I think they've just been very savvy and innovative in the ways that they've thought about how they change sort of that perspective on the economy. We are now much more of a sharing-type economy. Next up is the big wave, the 46 million 1990s-born connectors. We call them the connectors because they really grew up with the internet. They've been connected to technology their entire lives. It's hard to imagine them without phones and internet access at their fingertips at all times. It's also made them more connected to the world at large. And I always use this example that, you know, I think about my parents writing to pen pals in other countries back in the 1950s. It might take months for a letter to get back and forth from one country to the other. Now it can be done in a matter of seconds. And so, with a text message. And so the world is much smaller to this group. They are more globally connected. And this is the group that is forming the most households today. As we think about, you know, they graduated from high school, from college, they are out forming households and buying homes and really kind of the economic engine of our country. They're the entry level into every single sort of purchase right now. And so the fact that there's so many of them has been a real boon to our economy. We've also seen, This group, though, foregoes some of the ownership or some of that rentership we were talking about or the sharing we were talking about just a few minutes ago. And so that's also changed the way that our other economy is run as well. And then next up, we've got the 2000s group. There's about 42 million born in this group. And I know that sounds less than the group born in the 1990s, but it's going to get bigger with immigration. So as we think about people tend to move to the US in their 20s and their 30s. As this group ages into their 20s and 30s, we do think they're going to get much bigger than the 42 million of them today. We call them the globals really because like the connectors, they are so globally connected. They're more globally aware. We think that previous generations and a lot of that has been enabled by technology. But it's a group that we don't know a lot about yet as adults because they're still— I mean, the oldest of them is only 20 this year. But we're going to learn more about them over the course of the next decade. And I think there are some things we can say just about their youth, that they are well connected to technology. That is going to give us some information about how they might behave as adults. And then last up, and this isn't in the book, but now that we're done with the 2010s, we do have a group of about 40 million people who are children, really, who were born in the 2010s. In the US today. Again, that group will also get bigger through immigration. You'd think I'd have a name for them because I've got 3 of them at home myself, but we haven't yet come up with a name for them. That's on my list of things to do here in the next year. That's kind of our overview. That's our overview, and that's why it's a little bit long-winded, but it's a little bit of a history lesson that explains just sort of how our economy, how our world has shifted as a result of these different generations. And the shifts that they've led us towards.

So, John, this is awesome. I mean, you broke down each decade of what makes up the U.S. population. You mentioned, you know, in most cases from, you know, let's call it the '60s on, you know, we're somewhere in the low 40 million is the size of that population. You mentioned that that some of the latter generations, that they will get bigger because of immigration. Overall, like, if you look at the U.S. population, what it is today, and as you guys forecast that out, let's say over the next 20 years, how much does the U.S. population grow over the next 20 years? And then compare that to other countries in the world.

Yeah. I mean, we are going to be growing at a slower rate of population growth. And part of that is just we have, you know, 327 million people in the US. Every year, we add 2 million people net. I mean, it's a smaller and smaller rate every year. But we're seeing, you know, growth in the US under 1%. And I do think that we're going to see probably a slower rate of growth here in the US. I, you know, I think— We talk about this in the book, but really over the last decade, a third of our net population growth in the US has been fueled by immigration. And that's the net growth, so, you know, births minus deaths, and then you include immigration in there as well. We're going to see more deaths in the US just as a bigger number of people start to pass away. We're seeing birth rates that are flat. Really declining for younger age women and slowly rising for older women. So births overall have been pretty flat. A third of the population growth, according to census estimates, was driven by the foreign-born population. They were projecting another third to be driven by immigration going forward. I do think we've seen that tail off here in the last few years. And so as we're going through and constantly updating our forecasts, I'm accounting for slower immigration into our country. And I, you know, I'd be curious to find out how or think about how even this crisis that we're going through right now would affect immigration. I mean, certainly we've closed our borders to travelers largely, and I wonder what's going to happen in terms of immigration going forward. But Yeah, I think we're just in a period of time where we're just growing at a slower rate. And that's, again, more deaths, flat to fewer births, and I think slower immigration.

And I think you're going to probably talk about this, but obviously, you know, as more women have college degrees, as more women work, that's going to, number one, probably have some women say, I don't want to have kids. Or it's going to say, yeah, I'm not ready to have kids now. And so instead of having children at 25 and maybe you have 3 kids, you have your first child at 32 and now you're only having 2 kids. Is that kind of the right line of thinking?

Exactly right. And what's interesting is, you know, we saw the widespread availability of birth control in the early 1960s. We saw what that impact that had on birth rates there in the 1970s. The birth control pill really was a technological change, right? Science had created this pill that allowed women to have more control over when they have kids and how many they have. On the other side of the equation now, we see technology helping women to have more kids. We see the rise in the number of women having children past the age of 40, and a lot of that helped by technology like IVF. So it's interesting how that has kind of swung on the other side now as well, where technology is actually, you know, helping people have more kids. But you're right, I think having later in life is impacting probably the number of kids that they're having.

So you mentioned the 4-5-6, which is kind of the lens at which you look at big trends. So, you mentioned the 4 big influences. I'm going to have you go through them again. But take us through the 4-5-6 rule that you guys use to kind of predict demographically what's going to happen.

Right. So, we thought about all the things that would impact demographic shifts. And at the end of the day, we came down to sort of a classification system where we said, you know, we can group these into 4 big categories of demographic influencers. We call them the 4 big influencers. And that was government policy, economic conditions, technological shifts, or technological advancements, and societal shifts. And the exercise that we go through when we think about some sort of new piece of government policy or some economic change is how is that affecting different consumers in different ways? And not even necessarily consumers, we can think about children, I guess, who are consumers not just of products, maybe they're consumers of media or consumers of food. But we think about, you know, the way that a government policy impacts a kid is much different than it impacts somebody who's in retirement. So we said we think there are 5 main life stages that we can think about. It's your childhood, your early career, your family formation years, later career, and then retirement. And if you just think about like how— and I'll use the Great Recession as an example here because I think there may be some parallels to what we'll see coming out of this coronavirus episode. Certainly, the economy is being affected. But as we look back at the Great Recession, you know, it affected somebody differently in their childhood years. I mean, the group born in the 1990s was in their childhood years during the Great Recession. We kind of say, you know, they learned the meaning of the word staycation, right, because mom and dad were not doing big expensive vacations during a really tough time for most households. So they learned, we think, the value of a dollar as a result of that. And that kind of hearkens back to that 1930s group who were probably their grandparents or maybe even great-grandparents. They learned the value of a dollar, I think, and that is going to impact how they ultimately spend their money going forward. The group that was in their early careers, we talked about this, that in the mid-2000s, late 2000s, we had this more people graduating from college than ever before. This is the group born in the 1980s, more of them college-educated. And you think about the amount of student debt that's out there. They had to take on a lot of debt in order to finance that education. And that's an investment that they're making. They're investing in their education now with the hopes that it's going to pay off. Long-term down the road. But what we saw was as a result of the economy during the Great Recession, more of these 1980s sharers were taking jobs in areas that really didn't totally utilize their college degree that they had just paid for. And so they found that it was kind of a delayed start to their adult life. And we've seen a lot of these adulting milestones delayed for this generation. Now, that's something that's been going on for decades. We've actually seen the age at which people are having kids and getting married and it's all— it's been delayed for decades, but it was really magnified, I think, under the lens of the Great Recession. The groups that were in their family formation years, that's my peers and born in the 1970s, that was a group that was heavily impacted by foreclosure. Because during the Great Recession, they bought their homes at the peak of the market because they needed to, you know, meet the needs of their growing family. And they probably overpaid. They probably took out a loan that maybe they shouldn't have taken out. But we saw more foreclosures amongst the 1970s group during the Great Recession than any other generation. And that was really because they just were buying at an inopportune time for and then couldn't really handle the state of the economy afterwards. We see more of that generation living in single-family homes that they're renting today. So we've seen ownership for that group really change. The groups that were in their late career and retirement years during the Great Recession, you know, they found themselves working longer than they thought they would have to really because their 401(k)s had gotten demolished and they couldn't necessarily count on the retirement savings that they had saved up for all those years. So they found themselves working longer than they thought. And those, up until a couple weeks ago, had largely recovered and their portfolios were doing well. But they also just have longer retirement that they have to finance. I mean, people are living longer. And so, like I said, more of them working later. And if they were counting on fixed income, to help them through their retirement, and they were not getting much return on their fixed income investments as a result of rates dropping so low in the wake of the recession. So you can see how each group was impacted differently. And ultimately, as we get to this, that was the 5 main life stages. As we get to those 6 key consumer questions of who, what, where, when, why, and how they're purchasing, you can see how each group would be impacted differently. And so You know, we just encourage people— it's a good— we think it's a helpful lens through which to view any kind of shift in the government, the economy, technology, and society. Ultimately, that will impact demographics, but also impact those consumer spending patterns as well.

So, Chris, this is the part that I'm most excited about, which is the opportunity. So we have a bunch of ambitious entrepreneurs and business owners that are our Diamond members that are looking for opportunity that they can take advantage of in their business. So understanding demographics, understanding societal shifts, you know, helps you as an entrepreneur know where consumer tastes, consumer preferences are kind of going. In the book, you talk about 4 big demographic areas. In fact, you say they're the 4 biggest. Of course, the book was written in 2000, I believe in '17. So, there may even be some new trends demographically that create opportunity as well. But I'd love for you to talk about these 4 in detail and maybe any other trends that you guys are seeing since the publication of the book.

Yeah, I'd be glad to. So yeah, we identified these four big demographic opportunities. I think we published the book in late 2016. You know, the research was based on data through 2015 at that point. So you're right, there is some new information that has come out and hopefully is helpful in helping to decipher some of these opportunities. I'll start off with women. I mean, I talked about earlier how women now earn 58% of college degrees. We found a statistic, and this is probably a couple of years old at this point, but in 38% of married-couple households, the woman is earning more than their spouse. And, you know, as we talk about having children later and later, we've actually seen a little bit of a shift upwards in women staying at home to raise kids. And that was— our CEO always kind of puts in the perspective of, you know, after 9/11, it really did kind of force us as a society to reevaluate our priorities. And we saw some shifts of people saying, you know, I want to stay more at home, my kids to be out in the workforce, and we'll make that work as a family. So, we did see a bit of a— a little bit of an uptick in women staying home to take care of their kids, but we've also seen an uptick in the number of men staying at home to take care of their kids as well. Something that's happened in the last couple of years— actually, I think it just happened earlier this year. We're talking about 58% of college degrees. We just reached the point where women are now exactly 50% of the workforce today. And that was a data point released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. So, you know, the world has changed from decades ago. And again, it's been a gradual shift. We do see more in terms of the quality of numbers, volumes of workers today in the economy. And that really does impact where people are living and what they're consuming. I mean, one of the examples that we always use because we are thinking about homebuilding and where people are going to be buying homes, and if you've got a dual-income household, Both parents don't want to be an hour's commute from where the kids are going to school. I mean, for, you know, if one of the kids happens to get sick, the parents don't want to both have to be driving an hour from where the kid's school is to have to go and pick them up. And so, you know, we do think that is impacting people's choices about where they live. They want to live closer to the job centers so they're not having those long, long commutes. By 2025, and again, this is a couple years old, but our estimate was we have about 78 million working women in the economy. And that's a dramatic increase from where we were 20, 30 years ago for sure. The next big opportunity we saw was immigrants. About 14% of our population today was born outside the US. And as I mentioned earlier, about 23% of my generation, the group born in the 1970s who are in their 40s today. I mean, we've got 44 million immigrants living in the US in 2015. That was at the time expected to go to about 52 million by 2025. It's— I'm going to take that number down a bit. I don't have a projection at this point, but I do think that number will probably come down a bit. But it's a changing immigrant as well. It's not somebody who was coming here with no money. We've seen more immigrants coming over on a plane with suitcases of cash. Now, a lot of that was coming from China, but really they saw a good— the US is a great investment in situations where maybe their country was in a state of unrest or there were just some questions about how safe their money would be there. We do see they saw some opportunity in the US to— and that's always sort of been a— US has always been looked at as the American dream. That's where you can make to make things happen, but we see more and more immigrants coming over and looking at the US as sort of a safe harbor for their money. Retirees, this is one that you can with pretty good accuracy predict how this is going to play out just based on the aging in place of our country, but we're expecting 18 more million people, 38% more people age 65+ in 2025 than in 2015. And, you know, you can't just necessarily look at the 65 population as one group anymore. We certainly— and I'll use an example from the homebuilding side. They're not necessarily buying their last home at 65. We've seen examples of people, you know, buying a part-time home. They've got two homes at 55. They move there permanently to Florida or to Arizona at 65, and they purchase a home then. And then maybe they decide to downsize 10 years later into an even smaller home. So I think it's important to think about ways to stratify the retiree generation and realizing that, you know, more of them are working past the age of 65 than we've seen in a long, long time. And they're wanting to stay active. They want to stay engaged. We've talked about the fact that, you know, for them, for the retirees, the golf course is not necessarily the retirement amenity they're looking for anymore. Some are, but really, the amenity for them is they want to be near their kids and their grandkids. I think we've got some strong family bonds between today's retirees and their children. And we're looking at different ways that we can capitalize on that. How do we make that family connection even tighter. Certainly, that's being done in neighborhoods and in homes even, and in the floor plans of homes. But even from a broader perspective, how do we think about that in terms of goods and services? I think all different ways to segment that retiree population. And then next up is the young adult generation. We mentioned that, you know, those born in the late '80s, early 1990s is the biggest group of young Americans today. They tend to live more urban in their youth, but they tend to also go more suburban as they age into their 30s. They start having kids and having families. They do want to— that suburban lifestyle that they had when they were growing up. And we'll talk about that in just a few minutes when we talk about some of the big shifts in living preferences if we have a chance to get to that. But there is just this massive wave of young adults who are currently forming households and will be continuing to form households over the next few years. I mean, the next 10 years, next 20 years. And it's not just about buying homes, but I mean, as they move out and they start renting at first, and there's an economic engine that goes along with that. They're out buying furnishings for their home. They're buying entertainment. They're buying subscriptions. You know, getting takeout food. So, the formation of a new household has so much more to— as a driver of the economy than just a rent or a mortgage payment.

My eyes kind of popped out of my head when you said 78 million working women by 2025. You said we're already at 50/50 right now. Like that's a lot of working women, which is probably a lot of working mothers. It seems to me that there is an opportunity there if you're an innovative entrepreneur. You also mentioned, which was kind of another number that like popped out of my head, like 66 million Americans age 65 or greater. And then you said, you know, hey, they don't— They don't want to play golf as much as they used to. They want to be active. They want to be near their kids. They want to be near their grandkids. Like, again, seems to me like opportunity for entrepreneurs. So I really love that portion of it because, you know, as you're going through this, I'm taking notes and thinking, okay, you know, well, there's probably an opportunity to create a product or service that serves them or serves them. So, you know, this is where to me it can get real fun.

Yeah. And I'll bring it back to— I mean, again, I keep referring to the homebuilding industry, but we've seen a rise in multigenerational living. So, you know, with the cost of childcare being what it is today, and if you've got more working women, grandparents are coming in and helping out with kids. I mean, they're being chauffeurs to drive them to soccer. In a number of instances, we've seen builders who are creating floor plans with that separate lock-off area where the, you know, maybe the grandma lives. She's got her own bedroom, she's got her own bathroom, she's got a little living space, which is really important, by the way. It's not enough just to give, you know, a bedroom and a bathroom, but you think about wanting to have guests over to entertain, you think about wanting to have a place to show off your collections and your things you've accumulated over the years. It's more than just a bedroom and a bathroom. But these houses, the floor plans are great. They've got their own separate entrance. In some cases, I've seen an attached garage stall. So we are seeing this rise in multigenerational living partially as a result of— excuse me— this growing number of retirees and this growing number of of working women.

You mentioned the shifts in living preferences. I want you to talk about that for a minute because I think that also will spur our listeners to think about the opportunities that these shifts create. Yeah.

So, the last part of our book is largely more housing-focused because that's really who we started writing the book for was with housing executives, but we realized, gosh, this has much broader implications for more businesses other than just housing. So, there are a couple of things that are going to be a little bit housing-centric, but I think maybe your listeners can also take away a lot from this as well. The 3 big shifts in living preferences, first was rentals. We do think that whether it's homes or whether it's, you know, cars or, It's a multitude of things. Owning has declined in importance. What's important to a 30-year-old today in terms of ownership is not the same as it was to a 30-year-old generations ago. We've seen homeownership decline to the lowest rate as a result of the Great Recession. According to census reports, it's coming back up, but I have some issues with some of those data. I think maybe it is coming up a bit, but We're not going back to 68%, 69% homeownership in our country anytime soon. And really, I think that's just a result of people saying, you know, I want the— and you certainly hear this about the millennial generation, about the experience economy. You know, I want to experience something right now. I can delay ownership of something till later. I'd rather spend my money, my resources, my time on the experience today. And that comes along with a lot of those— delays in adulthood that we've seen, the delaying of getting married, having kids, buying a home. Part of that driven by, you know, more people getting educated and going to college. That's naturally delaying things. But we also just see that as being delayed as well. So we are not seeing homeownership come back at the same rates by age as we have seen in prior generations. And I think we're probably headed for a time in life where that that's going to be the case going forward. I think we're probably going to see less car ownership. And certainly if we get to the point where we've got driverless vehicles, that may change that even more. But people are saying, you know, I don't need to deal with the monthly payment on the car and the gas and the insurance and the maintenance. I can pay Uber to take me where I need to go. And so we are seeing— I mean, it's a great statistic. And I think we have it in the book as well. The number of people in their 20s who have a driver's license has been declining for quite a while. And so I think that all comes back to that sort of rental mindset, more of that sharing economy. Next up is the South. And we really are— we've seen this going on for decades, but more of a movement to the South, the affordable Sunshine State. You know, we expect California, the Northeast, the Midwest to grow more slowly. And we're moving towards the lower half of the US where it's generally more affordable, where they've created some very business-friendly environments trying to lure businesses. I mean, you think about the number of auto manufacturers who have moved operations or some part of their operations from the Midwest down to the South. And so I do think that it's impacted by state tax and growth policies, but we are expecting the South to continue to gain share of the overall household population in the US. And then last up was this concept of suburban. And this ties back to the rental lifestyle that we talked about just a few minutes ago. But one of the things that we really saw in recent decades is cities, big cities investing in their downtowns and having great success with that. And I think of San Diego as an example. And they put a lot of investment into downtown, and it really— and I think a lot of suburbs, big cities were having, it's like, "Hey, we want that as well." And so you're seeing more investment in small suburban downtowns. And so we coined this term, we call it "surban," the idea of bringing urban conveniences to traditionally suburban environments. The idea is that it's got a mix of of restaurants, of retail, of office, of residences. So whether it's owned homes or it's apartments, but the idea that you've got sort of a walkable lifestyle where everything is all in one place. You might not need a car during the week to get to work and shopping and that sort of thing, but you might want a car on the weekends if you wanted to get out of town. We do think that the group that was born in the 1980s, the sharers, they tend to live more urban in their 20s. And as they age into their 30s and their 40s, they start moving more suburban. They're demanding in the suburbs some of these conveniences that they had in the city in their 20s. And so, I think that is driving part of that shift to more of this more affordable suburban lifestyle, more affordable than urban. We've got a lot of these conveniences.

This is all just so fascinating to me. I, you know, one of the stats that I thought was incredible was the southern region in your book, you said, is where 42% of the population lives. So, so more than half live in the northern portion of the United States. However, 62% of household growth is in the South. So again, if you're an entrepreneur, you know, and you have a business that directly is in home services or, you know, is serving, you know, people in a brick-and-mortar store format, something of that nature, it certainly seems like if you put your store in Charleston, South Carolina versus in Albany, New York, you've got an incoming tide in Charleston, and you might have an outgoing tide in Albany.

You know, one of the— it's funny, one of the metrics that we use for this is there's not great information on migration patterns in the US, but we sort of look outside the box. What are some ways we can maybe get some different reads on how migration is occurring? And one of the ways we do this is we look at U-Haul rates. And so we say, okay, what does it cost for me to rent a truck from Albany to Charleston? And then what would it cost for me to rent the same truck going from Charleston back to Albany? Well, it's a heck of a lot cheaper to rent it from Charleston to Albany because nobody's going that way. There's not much demand moving from Charleston to Albany, but you probably see higher rates going from Albany to Charleston. So, it's just kind of one of those out-of-the-box metrics that we're looking at to help us indicate or gauge where these migration patterns are going.

And it seems like— With migration, you know, it really still is in many ways the Big Four, maybe now becoming more the Big Two. And when I say Big Two, I mean Texas and Florida.

Oh, yeah. I mean, you think about all the people living in the Midwest and the Northeast who are just tired of those long, cold winters. And my parents are a perfect example of that. They live in Michigan, and I thought for sure They've had it after the last couple winters in Michigan. We thought they were going south, and they decided ultimately not to, but I think they're going to be making that move at some point down the road. And then Texas has just been, I mean, off the charts in terms of growth. Austin is 2 to 3— I mean, it's actually probably 3 times the size that it was in 1990. It's pretty amazing.

And on top of that, this was another stat that I found fascinating. 48% of the immigrant population is California, Texas, Florida, New York.

Yeah, and they're just such big states and they have a lot to attract the immigrant population. So, yeah.

That is wild. Okay, so a couple quick questions and then we're going to— Stephanie, in just a minute, we're going to turn it over if any of our callers have any questions for Chris. So this I thought was kind of fascinating. Student debt is the number one cited reason why people don't own homes. So my question for you, Mr. Demographer, you're a predictor. Have we seen an inflection point where the number of graduates each year will go down? Or do you believe that the number of people that go to college will keep going up? And student debt will keep piling up.

You know, so I think we're at $1.6 trillion in student loan debt outstanding today. And the interesting thing is that is not all owed by people in their 20s. I mean, about a third of it is owed by people in their 20s, another third owed by people in their 30s, and another third owed by people 40 and 40+. But some of that may be their kids' student loan debt that they're stuck with. But it's something that follows you for a long time. And I just, I think that is, that industry or that sector of our economy is ripe for destruction. And actually, I mean, this will be a really interesting test. As we see more and more kids, college students, having to leave campus and do remote learning, I just, I think the virtual classroom is probably going to gain some ground out of this whole coronavirus crisis. People are saying, "I don't have the money to spend on tuition and room and board. If I can do some of this online—" I think that's the way we were going anyway, but I wonder if that'll be more accelerated by this whole crisis.

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