The living-in-the basement generation: how young adults are faring in America's twenty-five biggest metro areas.

• Author: Florida, Richard
• Position: OPPORTUNITY IN AMERICA

With housing prices and job numbers rising, many commentators have begun to talk about the "recovery," with the "crisis" relegated to the past. But a crisis certainly remains, according to new research by the Social Science Research Council's Measure of America project, for our nation's 5.8 million "disconnected youth"--the one in seven Americans between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four who are neither working nor enrolled in school. This cohort, whose numbers were stable for a decade, surged by 800,000 after the Great Recession and includes not only children from poor and minority families but significant numbers of white, middleclass youth as well.

The consequences are dire for these young Americans. They're not only more likely to have a hard time in the job market; researchers have found that disconnection has scarring effects on health and happiness that endure throughout a lifetime. Unemployed, uneducated youth are at greater risk for criminality and incarceration, and they often go on to become unreliable spouses and improvident parents.

The costs to society are also considerable. The direct support expenses and lost tax revenues associated with disengaged young people cost U.S. taxpayers $93 billion in 2011 alone--a bill that will only compound as the years progress.

But youth disconnection differs substantially across the country. The table on page 49, based on data from the Measure of America report, shows the shares of disconnected youth for America's twenty-five largest metro areas. Eight of the ten areas with the highest levels of disconnected youth are in the Sun Belt, including Charlotte, Atlanta, Tampa, Phoenix, and Riverside-San Bernardino in Southern California. These cities' economies were focused on suburban sprawl and thus were especially hard hit by the housing collapse. But that isn't the only, or even the biggest, reason for their high levels of youth disconnection.

There is a dose connection between youth disconnection and education levels or human capital, according to the study. Sun Belt metro areas have fewer highly educated adults and have tended historically to attract people with relatively lower levels

of education. In contrast, the metro areas with the highest percentage of college-educated adults--places like Boston, Washington, D.C., Denver, and San Francisco--have smaller shares of disconnected youth.

This positive association between low human capita] and youth disconnection stems from several...