Report: Philly is the best place for millennials right now

Philly continues to ride the millennial wave, with a new report deeming it the best place in the country to be a young adult right now.

Real estate website Trulia said as much in its latest report, which came up with an interesting method to create its list. Researchers looked at the 100 largest U.S. metros, then compared how 28- to 32-year-old millennials were doing right now versus their older working-age peers.

The researchers used this age group because they’re out of college, but still getting their start in the job market.

After crunching the numbers and 2015 U.S. Census data, Philadelphia was ranked the number one city for millennials now because they are more likely to be homeowners, make more money, and have more jobs than their older peers aged 33 to 55. The news comes fresh on the heels of a recent separate report, which predicted that Philly would be the sixth best U.S. city for millennials in 2017.

Philly has long been a homeowner’s city. But the report also found that Philly’s amount of millennials with college degrees may explain why they’re performing so well here.

In Philly, millennials are 43 percent more likely to have college degrees than their older peers.

“This may help explain why they earned 78.8 cents for every dollar earned by those 33 to 55, which is a higher amount than in any of the other largest metros,” housing economics researcher Felipe Chacón wrote.

Despite Philly’s number 1 ranking, it doesn’t come with its imperfections: It has the highest poverty rate among all major U.S. cities, and its unemployment rate is 6.8 percent, which is higher than cities like Chicago or Boston.

Among millennials in general, the report by Trulia found that despite common gap of success between the two age groups has remained pretty on par over the time. A lot of millennials still live at home and make less money, but the same goes for Gen Xers, the researchers noted. In other words, the struggle is real no matter your age.

Rounding out the top list of U.S. cities were Grand Rapids, Michigan; Omaha, Nebraska; New Orleans; and Oklahoma City.

• Grandpa was a millennial [Trulia]