What College Towns Can Teach Us About The Future Of Where

They're dense, walkable, and high-amenity. The demand for that kind of town far exceeds the supply -- which is a lesson we need to learn and act on.

Well, no sooner did I post this than the Wall Street Journal posted a story about how college towns are dead. I think the answer is that some are and some aren’t — and I’ll address that in another post later this week.

I spent the weekend in Athens, Georgia, which a lot of folks say is the best college town in the country. The purpose was a family wedding and the town was fairly empty, since the college kids were all gone (except the law students, who were having their graduation).

But the whole experience reminded me that we can learn a lot about citybuilding and placemaking from college towns – which is why they are so popular these days. Not just Athens, but Madison, Anne Arbor, Ithaca, Chapel Hill, North Adams, and so on.

Downtown Athens, Georgia

There are a lot of reasons why people love college towns – and why retirees in particular are moving to them. (Even AARP has begun to recommend which college towns to retire in, but there are an endless number of books and web sites that tell you how to retire to a college town.)

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The Built Magic Of A College Town

Much of the appeal derives simply from cultural things to do – plays, concerts, and other activities. But a lot of it has to do with the built characteristics of college towns. Specifically:

— Many college towns are smaller cities that have a lot more culture and sophistication than other cities their size. (Some college towns are bigger of course, especially if double as state capitals, like Austin and Columbus.)

— Because so many of them date back to the 19^th Century, they tend to have great downtowns and older neighborhoods – or, as urban planners tend to say, great “bones”. They’re usually pretty walkable.

—And because there’s such a huge built-in market during the school year, they tend to support a lot more retail and restaurants (in walkable locations) than most smaller cities. Yes, sometimes these are geared toward college kids: bars and pizza joints open late at night, cheap coffee shops, and so forth. But to a surprising degree, they support nice restaurants and other amenities than you usually find only in larger cities. The bottom line is there’s a lot of spending money sloshing around.

North Adams, Massachusetts, the thriving college town outside struggling Rust Belt-ish Springfield.

Even in college towns that are not otherwise prosperous, you often see a bubble near the college. One stark example is South Bend – an struggling Indiana Rust Belt city of 100,000 people (they talk constantly about the closing of the Studebaker plant 62 years ago) that happens to be the home of Notre Dame. Near the university, new condos are going for close to $1 million (often purchased by alums for their kids or for football weekends.) Twelve blocks away, run-down single-family homes cost $60,000.

Partly, of course, the college-town phenomenon is driven, like the persistence of so many other walkable places, by the desire to be close to a really compelling location (in this case the university). Even so, it’s partly because – as I have often said – the demand for walkable communities far exceeds the supply, and college towns have a plentiful supply of walkable places.

The College Town Without A College

In fact, one thing I have noticed is the rise of what you might call “the college town without a college” – the town that has walkability and attracts a college-type population even without a full-scale college. I noticed this in the 25 years I lived in Ventura (which of course has another compelling destination people want to be close to, which is the Pacific Ocean and in particular great surf spots.)

In my years there, Ventura was a very diverse place politically and culturally, with hard-core liberal environmentalists living alongside hard-core conservative evangelicals. With a walkable downtown and older neighborhoods with good housing stock nearby (and the fact that it’s a county seat – not quite a state capital but a similar idea), the once-working-class Ventura tended to draw educated folks with disposal income, who sought out restaurants, theater, and so forth. And it wasn’t surprising that when Cal State Channel Islands opened up 15 miles away (after a huge fight over whether it should be in Ventura), many students began to live in or at least hang out in downtown Ventura.

Downtown Bend, the classic college town without a college.

I see something similar in Bend, Oregon, where my daughter and her family now live. Bend has grown rapidly from a working-class town in the Oregon’s lumber belt to an upper-middle-class college town without a college (except for Oregon State University-Cascadia) that has a lot of urban amenities. Of course, it too has a compelling outdoor environment nearby (including Mt. Batchelor). But you see the same phenomenon as you see in Ventura and elsewhere – people (in this case affluent young families) seeking a college-town-type environment with natural beauty flocking to a small city in a pretty remote location. (It’s not surprising that my own daughter and her family moved from Berkeley during COVID.)

I know, I know – this whole post is about affluent people seeking out high-amenity places. But that’s part of my point: The demand for nice, walkable places far exceeds the supply. People interested in those places will seek them out and the affluent folks will price out everybody else. So in order to shape the Future Of Where, we simply have to create more walkable places or improve the ones that already exist. That’s help meet the demand and take the pressure off of towns where ordinary folks live. And we can learn a lot from college towns about how to do that.