Philadelphia Inquirer | 12/26/2004 | Designing for Generation Y

Philadelphia Inquirer | 12/26/2004 | Designing for Generation Y: "Designing for Generation Y

By Alan J. Heavens

Inquirer Real Estate Writer


The housing industry continues to put its hopes for the future - and a lot of its money - into people under 30.
The reason is obvious:
Why continue to build houses that sell now but don't have a prayer of capturing the market 10 or 20 years down the road? Why not have the people who will be buying those houses design them, and then just pull the houses off the shelf and drop them on the foundations when the time comes?
This culture's obsession with what youth thinks, justified or not, dates from the late 1960s. In a speech to the Counselors of Real Estate in February 2000, Theodore Roszak observed: 'We created the impression that youth was where it's at, that the industrial society gets younger rather than older, and that we would stay young forever.'
Once the media and marketing people latched on to the young demographic, they decided it would be with us forever, said Roszak, whose 1968 book, The Making of a Counterculture, brought to light the conflicts between youth and technocratic society.
These days, the real estate industry is focusing on Generation Y, the group born between 1979 and 1994 - which, with 73 million members, is second in size only to the 85-million-strong baby-boom generation.
'We are very research-oriented, and we will spend the time to scrutinize companies to make sure we are getting the best value for our money,' Gen Y student Paul Bonilla of Washington told a panel at the Urban Land Institute's November meeting in New York. 'We will spend extra for what we feel is right and of high value.'
'We are not scared to learn new things, and we are very tolerant of different groups,' New York grad"