Tell the grownup kids: Yes, you can come home again

THOMPSON E-mail: Click here

This is the time of year when all the young people come home.

Those who left Tampa to go to college, and after graduation went to live and work somewhere else: They were here last weekend for Thanksgiving. They'll be back for Christmas. You see them all over town - sometimes with friends but often with parents who in subtle or not so subtle ways are trying to show their kid that Tampa is really a cool place and wouldn't he rather live here than in Atlanta or Boston?

These are part of the group of young adults (or almost) we so desperately want to attract that Creative TampaBay Inc. commissioned a study nicknamed the "Young and Restless" to find out how to get them here. It dittoed what I've been thinking this week: Our best bet is to get the ones back who left.

We are not the only place that wants the college-educated 25- to 34-year-olds. Everyone wants them. But, the study revealed, of the top 50 metro areas, Tampa Bay ranks 47th for that age range, and, worse, only 25 percent of those here have four-year college degrees.

If our kids go to state schools, as a lot of them do, there's a decent chance they'll come home after graduation. In a competition with Gainesville or Tallahassee, Tampa looks pretty good. Orlando, maybe not.

If they go school in the Northeast or Atlanta or even Raleigh-Durham, it's another story.

No surprise if they want to stay in Washington, D.C., say, or live in a city more urban, more fun and with more good jobs than Tampa. What's in Tampa but Mom and Dad? And, at 25, that's not necessarily a plus.

But don't despair. After a while they're going to get married. They'll have kids, or at least start thinking about it. Suddenly their priorities change.

This is the time to get them. It's a small window. Once careers are established and kids are in school it's too late.

There are reasons to come home.

A young woman, the daughter of a friend, came back. She had loved living in Chicago. Then came her first child. It used to be easy enough to take out her dogs, but now that it required wrestling the baby into a snowsuit and lugging the stroller, it took an hour. And dogs go out more than once a day. It had been great to walk to the Art Institute, but now who had time? And with a second child, forget it!

My daughter and her husband are still within the 25-34 range. They were here in early November, visiting from Manhattan, where they live in a fifth-floor walkup. Things beneath notice when she lived here are now exotic and desirable. Imagine shopping at a supermarket without playing bumper carts, and taking your grocery bags home in the car! And the prices are so much better! Everything in New York is such a hassle; how could she do it all if she had kids?

So I started thinking a little more seriously about their moving here - and wondered if they could afford it.

Sure, New York is horrendously expensive, especially housing, but they have a rent-stabilized apartment. (And no cars - so no car payments, no insurance payments, no gas, no repairs.)

Where would they live?

They don't want to live in the 'burbs.

Four years ago, after selling our house, I looked at rentals in South Tampa. All of them - Post Walk Hyde Park, Madison SoHo, 345 Bayshore - have since gone condo. Hyde Park Place, which had been a rental complex for years, went condo. Camden Ybor City went condo.

The downtown residential projects? Condos - almost all of them.

Seminole Heights? No cute little bungalows for cheap left there.

So the inexpensive housing we could use to entice them even a few years ago isn't there anymore. We'll need something else.

Free babysitting? That still goes a long way, doesn't it?

--Sandra Thompson, a Tampa writer, can be reached at sandrathompson1@mac.com City Life appears on Saturday.

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