I wanted to share a good read passed along by Diana Deibler. She reached out asking for a video from our recent Power Breakfast that featured ISU economist Liesl Eathington providing some interesting statistics about the exceptional rate at which Des Moines is growing. What sparked Deibler’s interest was a Politico article that shared results from a recent poll it conducted of about 50 mayors nationwide. 85 percent of the mayors listed attracting millennials as a top-10 priority for their administration. That in itself isn’t groundbreaking, but the article goes on to explore the challenges cities are having in understanding what it is that millennials truly want. In addition, it explored the notion that perhaps community leaders “don’t entirely get” the demographic. Here’s this nugget: “Two-thirds of mayors surveyed said they hadn’t identified millennial community leaders or spokespeople to engage with.” And that played out in responses. “A plurality of respondents at 47 percent reported that cultural amenities were the “single most important characteristic” that they touted when attracting millennials to their cities. But when quizzed on the largest impediment to that goal, a solid majority cited a lack of either transit or affordable housing, with only 13 percent saying a lack of those cultural amenities is holding them back. In other words, for many of America’s mayors, both the problem and the solution still elude ready identification.” The survey also found that when asked what specific initiatives cities had taken to attract millennials, the mayor’s “scattershot responses reflected that they are not working out of the same playbook.” I did read one interesting thing that perhaps Des Moines could look into: “Nearly a third of mayors take the task of luring millennials to their cities seriously enough that they’ve created a city office (or at least a job) for that explicit purpose.” No mayors from Iowa were listed as participants in the survey, but two of the mayors did not identify themselves. Here’s the full article