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"Most of the young people that go to college go away, and then they don't come back," says Lee Bianchi, a retired engineer who lived in Clinton, Iowa (pop. 26,647), from 1961 to 2008.

That's long been the storyline in small-town America, which for decades has bled citizens — especially young ones — to the glamorous big cities. One might have thought technology would stanch the flow, at least among millennials: With Wi-Fi and telecommuting, young people theoretically could dodge overpriced real estate and ugly commutes and opt instead for a spacious house with a big yard and a broadband connection.

But it turns out the millennial generation is only accelerating the demographic shift. In fact, this may be the most "bright lights, big city" generation in history. While the number of millennials is ticking slightly upward in small towns and rural areas, it's nothing compared with the growth of their numbers in suburbs and cities.

"At this point, the prognosis does not look good for much of small-town America," writes William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution.

The kids aren't just flocking to the city proper, either, but to the metropolis writ large, including the fancier suburbs. The top destination for millennials is the Washington, D.C., suburb of Arlington, Va., where their ranks grew by a staggering 82 percent between 2007 and 2013. Arlington's median home sale price is $557,250, and of the 290 Arlington apartments listed on Zillow, only 10 would let you live alone for less than $1,200 a month.

An enterprising millennial with a flexible employer might hop across the Chesapeake Bay to the historic district of Cambridge, Md., (pop. 12,690) with a porch overlooking the Choptank River. With a thriving downtown and arts district, Cambridge was No. 10 on Livability's list of Best Small Towns in 2013. Homes go for $164,154, and a monthly $1,200 rental will get you a detached house or a 1,600-square-foot townhouse.

But affordable real estate and waterfront views don't have millennials biting. They continue "a multigenerational pattern of young adults preferring more expensive urban areas over lower-cost rural ones because the lifestyles and opportunities in such places make the extra burden of cost worth it," says Robert Lang, professor of urban growth and population dynamics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Which is to say: Getting to a big city — or at least near one — still has the smell of success.

"We don't all hail from small Midwestern towns, but most came from places where they felt limited — small-town Maine, suburban west Texas, California's Central Valley and the Inland Empire," wrote twentysomething Brittany Shoot of her friends and neighbors in the San Francisco Bay Area. "It's easy to find people who will sneeringly complain about how trapped they felt as teenagers."

Small towns will have to hustle to recruit and retain millennials, experts say. The American Planning Association urges local planners to mimic the appeal of city centers by creating "density." That means keeping the walkable neighborhoods and traditional town centers that millennials say is key to making a community a desirable place to live.

Smart-growth advocate James A. Bacon sees opportunities to fight off "brain drain" and attract urban "escapees" who start small businesses, but he worries that towns aren't taking advantage. "Unfortunately, to date, local economic developers have stuck with the industrial-recruitment strategy that bears less and less fruit," Bacon writes.

But without economic opportunity — that is, good jobs — the most charming downtown in the world can't attract permanent residents. Small towns may have to reinvent themselves, according to experts like Frey of the Brookings Institution.

But all is not lost. The numbers that point toward the decline of small towns also show a positive narrative for millennials, and perhaps a sunnier economic outlook than you'd expect. Notwithstanding student-loan debt and the stereotype of living in their parents' basements, a RealtyTrac analysis released in September showed that this generation is moving where the rents and mortgages are high. Arlington is just the tip of it.

From 2007 to 2013, the 10 counties that gained the most millennial residents had a median home price of $406,800. And the average population of those counties was 587,522 — a far cry from small-town living. Baby boomers filled out the other side of the equation by downsizing to counties with average populations of 261,232 and a median home price of $144,875.

So the best answer as to why millennials are moving away from smaller towns may be simple: because they can. And small towns will have to rev up their sales pitch to convince young adults that they can live not just cheaply but also well in the places that older generations called home.

migration

Millennials

rural America

Urban demographics

Decades ago, an "oops" pregnancy might have meant a rush to the altar. But when Michelle Sheridan got pregnant three years ago, the topic of marriage never came up with her boyfriend, Phillip Underwood, whom she lives with in Frederick, Md.

If anything, it was the opposite.

"It changes the dynamic of the household," she says. "I had a friend who put off her marriage. Got pregnant, and she's like, 'Let's just wait, 'cause we don't know if we're going to be able to make it through this.' "

That attitude reflects a sea change in family life: For the generation under age 35, nearly half of all births are now outside marriage. This family structure, once common mainly among African-Americans and the poor, is spreading across races and into the middle class.

Factor in education, though, and the difference is stark, raising concerns of a new class divide. Among young women without a college degree — those like Michelle Sheridan — 55 percent of births are outside marriage, according to an analysis by the research group Child Trends. For those with at least a four-year degree, it's just 9 percent.

“ I don't want to be in my mid-30s having kids. But I can be in my mid-30s getting married, and it makes no real difference.

- Michelle Sheridan

Like half of all U.S. pregnancies, Sheridan's was not exactly planned.

"We think we mistimed something," she says. "But it wasn't really, like, a bad time, or, I don't know ... it just ... seemed like an OK thing to do?"

"I stared at the pregnancy test for 10 minutes, waiting for it to change," Underwood says.

"But then he got really happy — it was actually really cute," Sheridan says.

It wasn't Sheridan's first child. Her older son, Logan, is 8; his father left before he was born. Michelle spent four years as a single mom before meeting Underwood, and says she felt no stigma or fear about that.

And even though she's now 28 and Underwood is 32, she feels no urgency to tie the knot.

"I don't want to be in my mid-30s having kids," she says. "But I can be in my mid-30s getting married, and it makes no real difference. It's still somebody to spend the rest of your life with."

Like so many children of the 1980s and '90s — the decades when the nation hit its highest divorce rate — both Sheridan and Underwood are also wary about the institution of marriage.

Underwood says when he was a baby — or when his mom was still pregnant, he isn't sure — "my dad left for a loaf of bread and never came back."

Sheridan's parents stayed together but fought a lot.

i i

Diana and Dave Black, both 27, married last year. They're among a shrinking minority of millennials who feel financially secure enough to tie the knot. Jennifer Ludden/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Jennifer Ludden/NPR

Diana and Dave Black, both 27, married last year. They're among a shrinking minority of millennials who feel financially secure enough to tie the knot.

Jennifer Ludden/NPR

"That was hard to watch," she says. "I don't want to go through that, and I don't want my kids to see it."

Marriage And Money

Money is another factor in the couple's choice not to marry. Sheridan spent years as a restaurant server, then as a pizza delivery driver. She got pregnant just as she had managed to start college full-time, with federal aid. Underwood is a car technician, but he was going through a rough patch, workwise.

"It was so sporadic, and it would go from full-time one week to 20 hours the next," he says.

Their apartment is government-subsidized. Things were so tight at one point that they shared a cellphone.

But isn't marrying young and poor and then working your way up the time-honored way?

"That seems terrifying at this point," Sheridan says. "It's hard enough to work up just on your own."

Instead of marriage being a vehicle into adulthood and stability, young adults now see it as the cherry on top, the thing you do once you're established and financially secure. The problem is, that's become harder to do.

"Fifty years ago, when people graduated high school, they could go out and get a manufacturing job and have a pretty good wage, you know, some benefits," says Arielle Kuperberg, a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro.

But those wages have been falling since the 1970s, she says, and the unemployment rate for high school graduates today is about double what it is for those with a college degree.

Kuperberg says it's not that lesser-educated couples don't want to wed. She studied the labor market in 20 cities, "and in cities that had better labor markets for people with less education, there was actually a smaller gap in marriage rates," she says.

The Pew Research Center also recently looked at how the labor market is affecting the marriage market in different cities, and found that never-married women overwhelmingly say it's "very important" that a potential spouse have a steady job. But Pew also found only 84 employed single men for every 100 single women among adults ages 25 to 34.

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Kuperberg worries that a changing economy is making marriage almost a luxury — something only for the better-off.

The Marriage Divide

At the other end of this marriage divide, Diana and Dave Black of Harrisonburg, Va., started dating in college and now have graduate degrees and budding careers.

The couple is among the minority of millennials who feel secure enough to say "I do" — though Dave waited to propose until he got a handle on his student loans.

"I had the bulk of them paid off at that point," he says, "and I felt like I was in a decent place to shell out the additional money for the ring."

They were the first in their social circle to get engaged. Now both 27, neither feels ready for children just yet.

"For me, parenthood is such an enormous responsibility," Diana says. "and the longer I give myself, I feel like the better prepared I'll be."

But that doesn't mean they're not planning. They recently bought a four-bedroom house with a big yard out back and good schools nearby. And upstairs is a perfect child's room, complete with secret passage.

"This door here goes to the attic," says Diana, "so for a kid, that would feel very Harry Potter-tastic, I think!"

Two different stories, two couples who each say they're acting in the best interests of their children — or future children. But researcher Kuperberg says this class divide in marriage could mean even more inequality in the next generation.

The problem, she says, is not that people are having kids without being married. It's that in the U.S., on average, unwed couples are far more likely to split up by the time their child is 5 — and research shows that can have a host of negative impacts on children.

"It leads to some behavioral problems," Kuperberg says. "It can lead to academic problems. It just leads to kind of less of a sense of stability, which hurts their chances later on."

Of course, it doesn't always happen that way.

Earlier this year, Phillip Underwood landed a steady job as a car technician at Wal-Mart. He says that made him think differently about proposing to Sheridan.

"I know every week I will be working 40 hours," he says. "I'm not making the most money in the world, but we're not financially tight."

"We have diapers, and everybody eats," Sheridan says, laughing. "And we can drive if we need to drive somewhere."

By the end of his first month on the new job, Underwood had bought a ring. Sheridan said yes. Since then, he's landed an even better job, and the couple has set a wedding date: next June.

This story was produced for broadcast by Marisa Penaloza.

income disparity

Millennials

Income

Income Gap

parenthood

Parenting

Marriage

relationships

Haiti once produced half the world's coffee. The lush, shade-covered mountainsides provided an ideal environment for imported Arabica trees.

Today, Haitian coffee barely registers in global surveys. Trade embargoes, deforestation and the rise of global coffee powerhouses such as Brazil and Indonesia are just a few of the reasons. And now, there's climate change.

But here in a stand of coffee trees near Beaumont, one of the few forested parts of Haiti, coffee — growing, drinking and selling it — remains part of the culture. Women sing Creole folk songs as they examine clusters of coffee cherries. Inside the fruit are pits that will be fermented, roasted, ground and, one day, brewed as coffee. They pull the bright red ones from branches and toss them into a plastic bucket.

The local co-op will buy and process these cherries, then sell the low-quality beans at local markets. The highest-quality beans will get sold to a nonprofit buyer in Madison, Wis.

"Since my childhood I've grown coffee," says Enock Telemaque, who owns the trees the women are harvesting. "I grew it with my father and my mother."

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Journey Of A Specialty Coffee Bean, From Cherry To Cup

Telemaque's children grow coffee, too. But his grandchildren may not have that chance. Climate change is pushing up temperatures in Haiti, says Anton Eitzinger with The Center for Tropical Agriculture. That's bad for coffee and for farmers.

"Where coffee is strongly affected by climate change, we need to think about diversification to other crops," says Eitzinger.

Valuable crops, such as mangoes and cocoa. And for Haitian farmers to continue growing coffee, they're going to have to do it at increasingly higher elevations, where the air is cooler.

Haiti's coffee exports have steadily decreased over the past two decades. They hover around $1 million a year — just a fraction of the global trade.

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But to growers like Eliza Bezaire, coffee sales are still a livelihood.

She leads us past a cement slab with piles of beans drying in the sun and into her tin-roof home to show off a full, 60-kilo (approximately 132 pounds) sack of coffee she harvested — predicting it will land her $3 a pound.

"Coffee is the bank account. We send our children to university with coffee," says Bezaire. She's heard she'll need to make changes, like possibly moving to higher ground.

The higher regions will continue to produce coffee. That's where Gilbert Gonzales gets his beans. Gonzales is vice president of Rebo, one of the largest buyers in Haiti. Most coffee grown in Haiti gets consumed in Haiti, but Rebo also sells beans to companies in Ireland and Japan, and its packaged, roasted coffee online in the United States.

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Gonzales says any export is worth the investment because overseas prices are better. He's trying to break into the ultracompetitive West Coast market, to sell at stores and high-end cafes.

"There is a need to modernize. There is a need to increase yields. There is a need to inject confidence in the sector," says Gonzales.

So he's making the jump into farming. Rebo is creating three demonstration farms at higher elevations around Haiti, places to teach farmers how to grow coffee that Rebo can sell globally.

"Buyers would feel more confident knowing that Haitian firms are investing in production," he says. Gonzales calls it an investment in the future.

For now, Haitian growers are trying to use new varietals from Colombia that are more heat-resistant. But they won't know if those efforts are working for a few more years, when the trees start to bear fruit. Irrigation, crop rotation and shade management techniques in heavily deforested Haiti could also help stave off further changes, but it's likely the region will never see the same boom it once had.

coffee farming

coffee

climate change

Haiti

Former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani was among those who showed up at the Metropolitan Opera last night to denounce the production of The Death of Klinghoffer, which protesters say glorifies terrorism.

Chanting "Shame on the Met!" protesters, numbering about 400, said the performance of the 23-year-old opera was an affront to the memory of Leon Klinghoffer, a passenger on the Italian cruise liner Achille Lauro that was hijacked by members of the Palestinian Liberation Organization in 1985. Klinghoffer, 69, was shot in his wheelchair and dumped overboard.

The New York Times says: "Political figures, including ... Giuliani, joined a rally, several hundred strong at Lincoln Center, to denounce an opera that has become the object of a charged debate about art, anti-Semitism and politics."

The Associated Press reports:

"Standing across the street from Lincoln Center, Giuliani said he wanted to warn people that this opera 'is a distorted work.'

" 'If you listen, you will see that the emotional context of the opera truly romanticizes the terrorists,' he said."

The AP says "Monday's performance went on with a few orchestrated disruptions: Boos were shouted from scattered seats, and a voice kept yelling from a balcony, 'The murder of Klinghoffer will never be forgotten!' The evening ended with a standing ovation that drowned out any heckling."

As NPR's Joel Rose reported earlier this week, the opera, by minimalist-inspired composer John Adams, has been a lightning rod since its debut in 1991. Some accuse Adams of being anti-Israel. "But the opera's supporters dispute that. They argue that Klinghoffer is a dramatic masterpiece that deserves to make its Met debut on Monday," Joel reports.

opera

Rudy Giuliani

New York