Young workers answer calls of opportunity outside state; Experts say cities must build exciting, amenityfilled environments to attract young workers.
BYLINE: By Ken McCall and Ben Sutherly Staff Writers
Mark Anthony Bauser, 30, still thinks of Ohio as home, but its "steady decline economically" played a role in his move to Phoenix three years ago.
Maria Demosthenous, 30, moved in 2004 to Chicago, where her future husband, Greg Behbehani, took a medical residency at the University of Chicago and she took a post-graduate fellowship in child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of Illinois-Chicago.
And when Rusty Shuffelton, 26, landed a computer forensics job fresh out of college, he - like many people his age - found that opportunity outside Ohio.
All three of these young people are part of the age group, from 20 to 34, coveted by everyone from business owners to city planners to television network advertisers.
And they're all examples of the tens of thousands of young people who left the state between 1995 and 2005. The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that during those 10 years, Ohio had a net loss of 103,952 people who were born from 1971 to 1985.
The stories of Bauser, Demosthenous and Shuffelton illustrate the theories of demographic experts who have studied youth migration: Young people go first for the jobs and then for the fun.
"I would've stayed if I could have found a decent enough job to hold me there," said Bauser, a Springfield native who now works in tech support at the University of Phoenix, one of the world's largest online universities. "I've always had good things to say about Ohio, except the economic decline."
By contrast, he said, "It's a booming economy out here."
But it's not only about the economy for Bauser, who graduated from Northwestern High School in rural Clark County and then from Columbus State University. He doesn't miss Ohio's cold winters, and he's found plenty to do in Phoenix besides work.
"There's a lot more selection here," he said over his cell phone while hiking Camelback Mountain, which looms over Phoenix. "It's a huge metro area. ... Hiking trails, jet ski rentals at the lakes, all-terrain vehicle rentals for the mountainous trails, snow and water skiing, sky diving, rock climbing, the list goes on forever."
Demosthenous, who graduated from Alter High School and the University of Dayton, said she and her husband chose Chicago partly because it offered the high-powered medical programs they were looking for. But that wasn't all.
"Part of the draw to Chicago is it's a big city," she said. "It's the right time (of life) to live in a big city with a lot of culture and a lot of art and a lot of fun things."
And they're not alone up there, either.
"We have a lot of friends in Chicago that are from UD," Demosthenous said. "And that makes a difference, too."
Shuffelton, who graduated from Fort Loramie High School in Shelby County, and then from Miami University, found work in Washington, D.C., with General Dynamics, a Department of Defense contractor. He now examines digital crime evidence for Deloitte. Again, work isn't the whole story. "The dating pool is amazing," Shuffelton said of the abundance of young, college-educated women in D.C. "Everyone's kind of brainy, and it's OK to be brainy in this town." When he was growing up in Fort Loramie, Shuffelton said he knew he wasn't going to stick around. "I kind of wanted to get out and go someplace else. It's a great place to raise kids, ... but it's not the right place for me."
Shuffelton said his brother Dan, 24, also moved out of state - to Los Angeles to try to break into acting - after graduating from Miami University. His sister Meghan, a 22-yearold senior at Miami, is studying broadcast journalism and "will probably go wherever she can get a job."
Increasingly in recent decades, those places have been big cities close to the coasts, said Myron Levine, professor of urban studies at Wright State University.
"The older industrial centers of the country are losing out as our society has become more post-industrial and informationbased," said Levine, who is coauthor of Urban Politics: Power in Metropolitan America, a standard textbook for students of urban policy.
States near the coasts, on the other hand, have been benefiting from "global connections to an international community" that lead to foreign investment, he said.
"So we've been in an age of bi-coastal Atlantic and Pacific growth, while the large heartland of the country has been losing out," Levine said. "And what's happening is young people are for the most part moving out to where the jobs are."
Levine said employment is the biggest driver of migration, because young people have to believe they can "make it there."
"I think a lot of this would be cured if all of us in the Midwest would be able to figure out a way to truly diversify our economy and get good quality, wellpaying jobs."
But Midwestern cities face a dilemma, he said.
To get good businesses, a region needs to offer a good work force. But to get a good work force, regions have to have the money to build a "high-quality, high-amenity environment," which is difficult without good businesses to provide the tax base.
Richard Florida, an author, social theorist and professor of public policy at George Mason University, says in an article in the October Atlantic Monthly that many young people need to go to centers of creativity.
In the article "Where the Brains Are," Florida argues that young, college-educated folks are clustering in a handful of superstar cities that he calls "means metros," leaving the rest of the country behind.
"Some of the reasons for it are essentially aesthetic - many of the means metros are beautiful, energizing, and fun to live in. But there is another reason, rooted in economics: increasingly, the most talented and ambitious people need to live in a means metro in order to realize their full economic potential."
The migration of young people tracked by a Dayton Daily News analysis of Census estimates from 1995 to 2005, appears to bear out the ideas of Levine, Florida and others.
The states that gained more than 15 percent of young people born from 1971 and 1985 were, with the exception of Colorado, clustered on coasts or in the Southwest.
Some of the gains in those states were fueled by immigration. Foreign immigrants tend to be younger, demographers say, and many fall into this age group. So big gains of young people by states like Texas, Arizona, Nevada and Florida are at least partly due to immigration from other countries.
But for states losing young people, demographers say, the main reason is state-to-state migration. Eleven of those 17 states are in the northern heartland of America.
Two notable exceptions are Illinois and Minnesota, both of which have major metropolitan areas - Chicago and Minneapolis - that are growing and have reputations as exciting cultural centers.
When it comes to ideas for creating that excitement in Ohio and the rest of the Midwest, easy answers are hard to come by.
Experts and government officials often speak of diversifying Ohio's economy and creating more high-tech jobs. But such a transformation is not so easy to pull off.
"If I had to give one piece of advice, it's not just simply to focus on tax cuts as a way of luring business," Levine said. "You need to build up this sense of a high-quality, high-amenity environment. A quality workforce isn't going to come to a city that they perceive as boring or dying, even if that perception is not quite true."
Mark Salling, a researcher at Cleveland State University's Maxine Goodman Levin College of Urban Affairs, said there is some evidence that people come back to Ohio after they've gotten their degree and some work experience.
There is no hard data, he said, but it's true for a number of friends and colleagues.
"We have a joke that the hospitals in this area are all in cahoots," Salling said. "They implant something in babies that are born and then they can call them back. They're programmed to come back when they're in middle age."
It may not take that long for Demosthenous and her husband. She said they are already considering coming back to Ohio.
"Once we're trained and we've started a family, you start to look for different things," she said. "You start to look at being close to your family. ... I think if you sit back, it looks pretty good to raise children and establish a family in Ohio."
Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2393 or kmccall@DaytonDailyNews.com.