Young people are migrating from rural areas to urban areas in search of better employment opportunities and culture. Well-paying agricultural and manufacturing jobs are harder to find, and once young people go to urban areas for higher education they are less likely to return to rural areas.

Urban areas make it easier to get by without a car. While much urban growth has happened in sprawling areas that are not transit friendly, many downtowns are seeing revitalization. Most of the single people I know fresh out of college are gravitating toward downtowns, partly due to night life, even if they commute to suburbs to work in office parks. Suburbs are dull places for single people to live.

Many businesses now see suburban single-use-zoning office parks as obsolete. The "creative class" they seek to recruit wants to live and work in a dynamic, thriving environment and doesn't want to spend an hour or more stuck in their car every day just to get to work and back. Some office parks are losing business to downtowns, which are now seeing lower office vacancy rates than the suburbs. Even Research Triangle Park in NC, single-use zoning by state law since the 1950s, is looking to create mixed use zoning and a more attractive lifestyle in order to compete with the revitalized downtowns.