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2007-10-02 issue:

The appeal of cities

Why young people move together to urban areas and what they do when they get there

by Anna Groff

Print Article

When graduation time nears for college students, making future plans becomes more urgent. Many find themselves ready to venture beyond the rural, college town they may have spent their entire lives in, but they also have a strong desire to hold on to the relationships they invested their last four years in. Holding both priorities, many young people make plans to move to a new city with their friends.

Young people feel drawn to cities that they or their friends lived in during a year or semester of service. They may like a city for the arts scene or the outdoor activities available. Or they may be attracted to the Mennonite community already established there.

Popular cities include Washington; Pittsburgh; Baltimore; New York City; Chicago; Portland, Ore.; Denver, Pasadena, Calif., and San Antonio, Texas, among others.



Laura Leischner, 21, is sold on Denver. Laura, who participated in the Ministry Inquiry Program with First Mennonite Church of Denver, says she’ll return to Denver after she graduates from Goshen (Ind.) College next spring.

Originally from Harrisonburg, Va., Laura likes Denver for its surroundings—the mountains— with the urban atmosphere and nature in close proximity, as well as the size, which doesn’t “feel too overwhelming,” she says.

The growing group of young Mennonites is also attractive.

Laura says people make such close friendships at college—and they don’t want to lose those friendships—so they move together to cities. Many people prioritize relationships over career when choosing a city and decide to job-hunt after the move, she says.

Many graduates in a new city reconnect, or connect for the first time. Laura says she hangs out in Denver with college peers she wasn’t necessarily friends with at school, but there’s a “common bond.” She says a group of friends meet up on Sunday nights to picnic and attend City Park Jazz, an activity that creates “a sense of community within a larger city,” she says.

Laura’s friends have jobs as teachers, wait staff, research assistants, secretaries, nonprofit employees and free-lance graphic designers.

“Jobs run the spectrum,” she says.

“When I come back, I’ll most likely waitress in order to make a lot of money fast,” she says, “although I’m not opposed to other things. It seems to be an interesting dichotomy between starting one’s career and doing interim things until the time feels right to move on to something else, perhaps more long term.”

For Denver resident Heidi Swartzendruber, city life is nothing new.



Heidi, who describes herself as a “city girl,” grew up in Denver, and partway through Hesston (Kan.) College she worked with Mennonite Voluntary Service (MVS) in Seattle before attending Goshen College.

After graduating, she did MVS again—this time in San Francisco—before returning to Denver, where she now lives.


Heidi says these urban experiences helped her discover her Mennonite identity. “A lot of Mennonites in cities will go back to a Mennonite church because it is who you are in a huge amount of people,” she says. The distinctive Mennonite beliefs are attractive, she adds.

In cities such as San Francisco, and especially in the social work field, many people assume “Christian” means “right-wing” or “fundamentalist,” she says. “You have to find your way and show people who you are.”

While most young people do not have the variety of urban experience Heidi has had, many want to experience city life—with the art galleries, films, current activities and job opportunities, she says.

People move in groups because it’s so hard to move alone, she says. For example, Heidi’s younger sister Sarah just graduated from Goshen and decided she wanted to return to Denver, where she grew up and still had connections to high school friends.

She returned to Goshen after Christmas break and told other seniors about her decision, encouraging them to move with her.

People indifferent about which city they want to live in will move with a group of people, Heidi says.

Sarah’s excitement for Denver proved contagious. A handful of people from Goshen moved, and others plan to join. Those who moved last summer got temp jobs for several months before finding permanent jobs. Many live together in two houses.

Job searching is different in each city, says Heidi. For example, she says she would “never move to San Francisco without a job.”

Heidi says voluntary service is a good idea if one wants to move to a city with a competitive job market, like San Francisco. MVS also provides an automatic church and community, she says. “If you don’t like it, you can move away.”

Non-MVSers who move to cities often have two approaches to church, says Heidi. The first group include people who didn’t attend church regularly in college but see that the church community post-college has value, so while they aren’t exactly sure what they want from it immediately, they know they want to participate in several years.

The second group needs a stable community, especially when they feel new to an area. This group desires the weekly routine of attending church “to come and be in a space to listen to music and make connections with people who have similar beliefs,” she says.

Heidi says First Mennonite Church of Denver offers this “open, nebulous space.”

Matthew Kraybill, a young adult who now lives in Pasadena, Calif., agrees that Denver is a new popular spot for young adults. He knows of 10 people in their late 20s, mostly graduates of Eastern Mennonite University (EMU), Harrisonburg, Va., who live in Denver or are planning to move soon.

Before moving west, Matthew lived in West Philadelphia with 10 to 15 EMU graduates. He says Philadelphia offered career options and friendships, and for many it was close to home in the East.

Patrick Buller was new to city life when he moved to Phoenix, Ariz., in 2004. He felt ready to leave his “small-town Kansas” even though he wasn’t set on moving to a large city.

But friends won out when they encouraged him to move to Phoenix. Since the move he’s made even more connections, especially through Trinity Mennonite Church in nearby Glendale.

The church is “so welcoming and intergenerational,” he says.

Patrick now encourages other young adult friends to move to Phoenix. “I think there’s a certain energy associated with big cities,” he says.

Like other cities trendy to groups of friends, Patrick says many young people have moved to Phoenix because of the social networks and the community at Trinity Mennonite.

“I can think of a few people who moved out because of grad school or a new job, but I’d say at least half move out for social reasons, [for] friends and community,” he says.

Community aside, Patrick says he’s “still not completely at home” with the urban lifestyle. For example, since Phoenix is so “spread out” and “carcentric,” it’s difficult for him to see his friends or attend events as regularly as he prefers.

“I love driving, or at least I used to think so, but I hate deadline with traffic everyday,” he says. “I often want to take public transportation to make commuting more bearable, but the speed and accessibility of public transportation is poor because of the nature of a sprawling city.”

His job is also in the opposite direction of church and friends. Unlike some urban transplants—who move first, job-search second—Patrick had a job lined up as a computer network engineer for a school district prior to the move.

He believes Phoenix has many job options for young people. “The city is growing faster than it’s able to keep up, so new jobs are popping up all the time. Schools are desperate for teachers, and housing has been cheap in the far-out suburbs,” he says.

Like Patrick, Tiffany Yoder says many of her peers feel pulled to cities for a change from a rural setting.

A 2006 Bluffton (Ohio) University graduate, Tiffany lived in Boston this past year and worked with Americorps.



“Not only are there more job opportunities and things to do,” she says, “but I think some grads really wanted to get out of the typical rural Mennonite setting that many may have grown up in or at least spent numerous years living in.”

She met most of her friends in Boston through work but has also connected through online social networking with friends from Lancaster (Pa.) Mennonite School who were also living in Boston.

Tiffany says church can also be a great way to get acquainted with a city and aid the adjustment, even if it doesn’t happen immediately. “I didn’t get involved with a church regularly until January,” she says. “I moved in late August [of 2006].”

She and her roommate visited non-Mennonite churches at first, hoping to meet other young people, but found they desired a Mennonite community, so they attended a Sunday evening service in Cambridge with an older congregation.

With Bluffton University’s new urban experience semester program in Pittsburgh, the number of Bluffton graduates in Pittsburgh may increase in coming years.

This fall nine Bluffton students will participate in the inaugural Pittsburgh Semester program, an off-campus program for regional Christian colleges, at the Pittsburgh Project on the city’s North Side. Many Goshen College graduates and others have moved to Pittsburgh, either for graduate school or to participate in the MennoCorp Pittsburgh Urban Leadership Service Experience, a one-year program for college graduates.

According to Cindy Lapp, pastor at Hyattsville (Md.)Mennonite Church, the program of Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, Va.— Washington Scholars Community Center—draws young people to D.C. either temporarily or more long-term.

If the Pittsburgh Semester functions as the Washington Scholars Community program does, young people from Bluffton might consider Pittsburgh an option for their futures.

Elise Derstine, who did not participate in the Washington Scholars Community Center, still chose to move to D.C. However, after three years, she says it’s hard to remember exactly how she ended up there. She knew she wasn’t ready for graduate school immediately after graduating from Goshen but wanted to work for a few years, and at that time D.C. seemed like a good fit for Adam, her fiancé, now spouse.



She and Adam also realized they had other college friends in the area—a popular appeal—and predicted an easy job-hunt in D.C. “We were right,” she says. “D.C. is just about the best place to explore a career with the unlimited nonprofit organizations, federal government and several universities. … I think this is what brings many young people to D.C. in general—and usually only for a brief time.”

Every year Elise has had to say goodbye to another group of friends who move on from D.C., but then a new group moves in—beginning the cycle again. She wonders how many Mennonites move to D.C. and stay for life; her impression is that many leave after a couple of years.

“I find myself planning to leave D.C., and it seems I’ve known that from the beginning … but we’ve already been here longer than most young people we know,” Elise says.

Many of her friends are connected to Mennonites or work for organizations that regularly encounter Mennonites, like Sojourners magazine.

Most of the young Mennonites she meets live in her neighborhood, Mt. Pleasant, which consists of mixed-income people in the northwest quadrant of D.C., or Columbia Heights, a neighborhood in central D.C.

“We have our own little network here,” she says. “Sometimes I look around at one of our gatherings and realize we all found each other in this city somehow, and rarely is it ever because we met on a Sunday morning.”

Baltimore also draws young people for graduate school, MVS or to join their friends there. Amy Clemens, the MVS coordinator in Baltimore, says the “city is not for everyone,” and she’s known young people who have moved there but returned to their hometown because they weren’t happy.

Others love Baltimore and its “overgrown, small-town” feeling, which is how many describe the city, she says.

Some young people who attend North Baltimore Mennonite Church choose to make roots and become more involved in congregational life. At North Baltimore, and Mennonite churches in general, Amy says, there is an “expectation to participate,” as it’s small, not a megachurch.

However, a young person must decide that it’s “my church,” not “my mom and dad’s church,” she says, for true involvement to happen.

Last spring, Elise and Adam started attending House Church, a Mennonite fellowship that has been gathering in D.C. for the past 30 years.

Prior to that, the Derstines spent a year at an ecumenical church but left after “realizing we had not formed meaningful relationships within the community.”

This was her first experience at a non-Mennonite church and says she is still unsure how that affected her experience.

However, Elise says she feels a “strong attraction to church community at this time in [her] life, and I’m paying attention to that.”

Anna Groff is assistant editor of The Mennonite.

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