These Baby-Chasing Grandparents Are Turbocharging Demographic Shifts
From Austin, Texas, to Charleston, S.C., golf and grandbabies beckon
From Austin, Texas, to Charleston, S.C., golf and grandbabies beckon
Gillian Held wanted her daughter to grow up around her grandparents. But moving from suburban Orlando back to New Jersey would have meant downsizing. So last year, Gillian’s parents sold their house and relocated to Florida several months before baby Nora was born.
“I said, ‘I don’t want to be Grandpa on a screen,’” said David Held, a retired New York City police officer who now helps watch his 7-month-old granddaughter two days a week.
Baby chasers are one of the cuddlier demographic trends contributing to America’s southward migration, a shift that is shaping everything from home building to municipal finance. Retirees have long sought out Southern states’ warmer weather and year-round golfing. Lower living costs and ample jobs have prompted a decade-long population boom in the South, and now those states boast a new attraction for many older Americans: their grandchildren.
Decades of rising stock prices and home values have left older Americans with much of the nation’s wealth, Federal Reserve data show. High mortgage rates are no obstacle to longtime homeowners who can sell their paid-off houses and buy new ones without a mortgage. In an era of more-flexible work, relocation doesn’t have to mean retirement. When grandparents live nearby, families can spend less on child care—and eldercare.
Housing-research firm Zonda publishes a yearly Baby Chaser Index ranking cities by growth in residents 25 to 44 and 60 to 79. Austin, Texas, Charleston, S.C., and Jacksonville, Fla., topped last year’s list. Ali Wolf , the firm’s chief economist, first heard about the trend six or seven years ago from home builders: “They would say, ‘We sold a house to a millennial and then we sold a house to their parents.’”
It all started in the 1960s, when baby boomers became the first generation to routinely move hundreds of miles for school or work, said Andrew Carle, who oversees a program in senior-living administration at Georgetown University. For much of the 20th century, parents in the U.S. raised their children close to where they grew up—at least those parents who hadn’t emigrated to escape persecution or dire poverty.
“We went away to college, we moved multiple times for our jobs,” said Carle, who is in his mid-60s. “We could move anywhere but we are choosing to move closer to our adult kids.”
A new job and lower home prices prompted Alonzo Emery ’s daughter and son-in-law to move with their two children from San Mateo, Calif., to the Austin area a decade ago. Emery, a retired vocational training program administrator, and his wife, Mary, followed two years later after a third grandchild was born needing medical treatment.
Texas’ culture and weather have been an adjustment for the couple, and they miss their son and son-in-law in California. But Emery, a former Arizona State University running back, gets to attend his 14-year-old grandson’s football games. He and Mary are learning dance moves from their 11-year-old granddaughter. “She’s put us on video,” said Emery, 73.
Moves like the Emerys’ have wide-ranging impacts for home building and even city budgets. The nation’s fastest-growing city is now the Austin suburb of Georgetown, Texas, where almost a fifth of the population lives in a single massive age-restricted housing community. This year, the city nabbed a triple-A bond rating.
The median age of repeat home buyers hit 61 this year, a four-decade high, according to the National Association of Realtors, with the most commonly cited reason for selling being the desire to be closer to family or friends. Twenty-one of last year’s 50 fastest-selling planned communities have built or are building age-restricted areas inside larger all-ages developments, according to consultant RCLCO.
Nashville, Tenn.-based Kinloch Partners, which rents out homes near large corporate offices in the Southeast, estimates that the retired parents of newly transferred executives live in around 10% of them.
“They have a guaranteed income. They don’t trash the house,” said Chief Executive Bruce McNeilage. Some pay a year of rent upfront.
For young families, the value of a nearby grandparent keeps growing. Child-care costs are up 6.4% over the past two years to a median monthly price of around $1,500 in major metro areas. The share of mothers with a child under 3 who work has risen over the past three decades to 66% last year from 58%, according to the Labor Department.
Gillian Held and her husband, Jordan, employ a nanny three days a week. Her parents take Tuesdays and Wednesdays, staying overnight at the couple’s home, where they have their own bedroom.
“We fully talk to them like they’re employees,” said Gillian, 32. “It’s an ongoing joke that when they want to go on vacation they have to take PTO.”
David and Cynthia Held , both 62, had long toyed with the idea of retiring to Florida. New Jersey’s cold winters and high living costs were wearing on them. Then in 2019, the Helds lost their son, Gillian’s brother Craig, to suicide at age 30. Living close to their daughter came to feel even more important.
By the end of 2022, Gillian and Jordan were married and talking about becoming parents. Home values where the Helds lived in Monmouth County, N.J., had shot up 27% over the previous two years, according to Zillow . David and Cynthia sold their house and moved in with Gillian in October 2023. A few months later, Cynthia fell in love with a place in a 55-and-over community in Port St. Lucie. They paid in cash.
The economics can be tougher for would-be baby chasers with grandchildren in the Northeast. Retired professor and author Michelle Herman and her husband are planning a move from Columbus, Ohio, to the New York City area to help raise future grandchildren. “Financially it makes zero sense,” she said.
There can be other snags. Herman contributes to a parenting advice column and recently counselled families considering a move to come to a clear understanding about how much child care the grandparents will provide. Grandparents should also do their own soul-searching before they relocate and have realistic expectations, she said.
“I actually have known people who’ve done this and came back because it didn’t work out,” Herman said.
—Nicole Friedman contributed to this article.
A divide has opened in the tech job market between those with artificial-intelligence skills and everyone else.
A 30-metre masterpiece unveiled in Monaco brings Lamborghini’s supercar drama to the high seas, powered by 7,600 horsepower and unmistakable Italian design.
A divide has opened in the tech job market between those with artificial-intelligence skills and everyone else.
There has rarely, if ever, been so much tech talent available in the job market. Yet many tech companies say good help is hard to find.
What gives?
U.S. colleges more than doubled the number of computer-science degrees awarded from 2013 to 2022, according to federal data. Then came round after round of layoffs at Google, Meta, Amazon, and others.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts businesses will employ 6% fewer computer programmers in 2034 than they did last year.
All of this should, in theory, mean there is an ample supply of eager, capable engineers ready for hire.
But in their feverish pursuit of artificial-intelligence supremacy, employers say there aren’t enough people with the most in-demand skills. The few perceived as AI savants can command multimillion-dollar pay packages. On a second tier of AI savvy, workers can rake in close to $1 million a year .
Landing a job is tough for most everyone else.
Frustrated job seekers contend businesses could expand the AI talent pipeline with a little imagination. The argument is companies should accept that relatively few people have AI-specific experience because the technology is so new. They ought to focus on identifying candidates with transferable skills and let those people learn on the job.
Often, though, companies seem to hold out for dream candidates with deep backgrounds in machine learning. Many AI-related roles go unfilled for weeks or months—or get taken off job boards only to be reposted soon after.
It is difficult to define what makes an AI all-star, but I’m sorry to report that it’s probably not whatever you’re doing.
Maybe you’re learning how to work more efficiently with the aid of ChatGPT and its robotic brethren. Perhaps you’re taking one of those innumerable AI certificate courses.
You might as well be playing pickup basketball at your local YMCA in hopes of being signed by the Los Angeles Lakers. The AI minds that companies truly covet are almost as rare as professional athletes.
“We’re talking about hundreds of people in the world, at the most,” says Cristóbal Valenzuela, chief executive of Runway, which makes AI image and video tools.
He describes it like this: Picture an AI model as a machine with 1,000 dials. The goal is to train the machine to detect patterns and predict outcomes. To do this, you have to feed it reams of data and know which dials to adjust—and by how much.
The universe of people with the right touch is confined to those with uncanny intuition, genius-level smarts or the foresight (possibly luck) to go into AI many years ago, before it was all the rage.
As a venture-backed startup with about 120 employees, Runway doesn’t necessarily vie with Silicon Valley giants for the AI job market’s version of LeBron James. But when I spoke with Valenzuela recently, his company was advertising base salaries of up to $440,000 for an engineering manager and $490,000 for a director of machine learning.
A job listing like one of these might attract 2,000 applicants in a week, Valenzuela says, and there is a decent chance he won’t pick any of them. A lot of people who claim to be AI literate merely produce “workslop”—generic, low-quality material. He spends a lot of time reading academic journals and browsing GitHub portfolios, and recruiting people whose work impresses him.
In addition to an uncommon skill set, companies trying to win in the hypercompetitive AI arena are scouting for commitment bordering on fanaticism .
Daniel Park is seeking three new members for his nine-person startup. He says he will wait a year or longer if that’s what it takes to fill roles with advertised base salaries of up to $500,000.
He’s looking for “prodigies” willing to work seven days a week. Much of the team lives together in a six-bedroom house in San Francisco.
If this sounds like a lonely existence, Park’s team members may be able to solve their own problem. His company, Pickle, aims to develop personalised AI companions akin to Tony Stark’s Jarvis in “Iron Man.”
James Strawn wasn’t an AI early adopter, and the father of two teenagers doesn’t want to sacrifice his personal life for a job. He is beginning to wonder whether there is still a place for people like him in the tech sector.
He was laid off over the summer after 25 years at Adobe , where he was a senior software quality-assurance engineer. Strawn, 55, started as a contractor and recalls his hiring as a leap of faith by the company.
He had been an artist and graphic designer. The managers who interviewed him figured he could use that background to help make Illustrator and other Adobe software more user-friendly.
Looking for work now, he doesn’t see the same willingness by companies to take a chance on someone whose résumé isn’t a perfect match to the job description. He’s had one interview since his layoff.
“I always thought my years of experience at a high-profile company would at least be enough to get me interviews where I could explain how I could contribute,” says Strawn, who is taking foundational AI courses. “It’s just not like that.”
The trouble for people starting out in AI—whether recent grads or job switchers like Strawn—is that companies see them as a dime a dozen.
“There’s this AI arms race, and the fact of the matter is entry-level people aren’t going to help you win it,” says Matt Massucci, CEO of the tech recruiting firm Hirewell. “There’s this concept of the 10x engineer—the one engineer who can do the work of 10. That’s what companies are really leaning into and paying for.”
He adds that companies can automate some low-level engineering tasks, which frees up more money to throw at high-end talent.
It’s a dynamic that creates a few handsomely paid haves and a lot more have-nots.
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