By Brian McGowan

We prefer bikes to cars. We prefer vertical living to single family homes with sprawling lawns. We use the internet to compare pricing but prefer to touch and feel the item before they purchase it. We prefer authenticity to mass production – and – we want to know that the person they are spending their money with cares about their community, the environment and humanity as a whole. We are millennials and we are the largest, living generation on planet Earth.

Standard & Poor’s U.S. chief economist, Ann Bovino notes that there are 80 million millennials spending $600 billion dollars annually. In just three years, millennials will average $1.4 trillion in spending accounting for 30% of total retail sales.

So, how will this

By Brian McGowan

Staten Island is New York City’s smallest borough and often the focus of urban jokes. Due to its history as a farm community and vacation hot spot for New York City’s super wealthy, residents were presumed “unsophisticated”, “clannish” and “insulated” from the culture and diversity of the greater metropolis.

Anyone who still holds that opinion of Staten Island hasn’t taken a look lately.

Staten Island is home to nearly 500,000 people, 53% of which over the age of 24 have a college education. Staten Island boasts one of the highest median family incomes in New York City at $117,068 and we generate $1.2 billion dollars annually in unmet retail demand.

With respect to diversity, Staten Island’s population has changed rapidly

If you haven’t had an opportunity to visit Urby Staten Island, the 900 unit mixed use development by Ironstate headed by David Barry, I suggest you get there soon because leases are quickly being signed – and with good reason.  From an urban farm and farmer in residence who grows vegetables enriched by compost from household food scraps, to the communal kitchen where the chef in residence prepares meals for tenants using those vegetables, Urby Staten Island is a one of a kind residential experience designed to make life easier for the young Millennials it is attracting.

Ironstate Development Company was the genius behind Pier Village in Long Branch, New Jersey – a successful mix of unique street level retail with apartments above in an area which was