No skinny jeans or side parts here: NC city is trendiest for Gen Z renters, study says

The nation’s trendiest city for Generation Z renters is right here in North Carolina, a new report finds.

Greenville ranks No. 1 on a list of places where younger adults want to move, according to results released Monday from the housing website RentCafé.

And another North Carolina city wasn’t far behind on the list.

Durham landed the No. 10 spot in the rankings, which weighed the year-over-year increase in people filling out rental applications in cities across the United States.

To come up with its findings, RentCafé said it studied anonymous data from more than 3 million applications on the RentGrow screening tool. The data came from U.S. cities with more than 60,000 residents and at least 1,000 rental requests.

While the study only reviewed applications from adults, researchers defined Gen Z as people born from 1997 to 2012.

Some members of the generation have turned to TikTok to slam beauty and fashion trends that are popular among older adults. Those include rejecting skinny jeans and touting parting their hair down the middle instead of on the side.

When it comes to renting, members of Gen Z are flocking to smaller cities in the Midwest and South instead of the bigger locations that the older millennial generation had embraced.

“The economic and public health consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic have likely influenced Gen Zer’s preferences for less populated, more affordable cities/towns in Mid-America and outside of the large southern metro areas e.g. Atlanta, D.C., Charlotte, Houston, than Millennials,” Ronnie A. Dunn, urban studies associate professor at Cleveland State University, said in a news release.

For example, a RentCafé study from October found Charlotte was one of the country’s most desirable places for millennial renters, McClatchy News reported.

Greenville, roughly 85 miles southeast of Raleigh, is home to East Carolina University. The city of about 93,000 residents was the only typical “college town” at the top of the most recent rankings and got a nod for having the biggest increase in Gen Z rental applications from 2019 to 2020.

While Greenville’s year-over-year total spiked 84%, the increase in Durham was less steep at 53%, results show.

But the two cities missed RentCafé’s list of the cities with the largest share of Gen Z renters in 2020. Boulder, Colorado, landed in the top spot in those rankings, results show.