Kotkin vs Florida
Among the most pervasive, and arguably pernicious, notions of the past decade has been that the "creative class" of the skilled, educated and hip would remake and revive American cities. The idea, packaged and peddled by consultant Richard Florida, had been that unlike spending public money to court Wall Street fat cats, corporate executives or other traditional elites, paying to appeal to the creative would truly trickle down, generating a widespread urban revival.
-- Joel Kotkin
Florida himself, in his role as an editor at The Atlantic, admitted last month what his critics, including myself, have said for a decade: that the benefits of appealing to the creative class accrue largely to its members--and do little to make anyone else any better off. The rewards of the "creative class" strategy, he notes, "flow disproportionately to more highly-skilled knowledge, professional and creative workers," since the wage increases that blue-collar and lower-skilled workers see "disappear when their higher housing costs are taken into account." His reasonable and fairly brave, if belated, takeaway: "On close inspection, talent clustering provides little in the way of trickle-down benefits."
Yes: Boulder and Raleigh-Durham and Fairfax County
No: Cleveland, Toledo, Hartford, Rochester, and Elmira, New York.
Perhaps the best that can be said about the creative-class idea is that it follows a real, if overhyped, phenomenon: the movement of young, largely single, childless and sometimes gay people into urban neighborhoods. This Soho-ization--the transformation of older, often industrial urban areas into hip enclaves--is evident in scores of cities. It can legitimately can be credited for boosting real estate values from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Wicker Park in Chicago and Belltown in Seattle to Portland's Pearl District as well as much of San Francisco.
Empathy or Concern Troll ?
in many ways the Floridian focus on industries like entertainment, software, and social media creates a distorted set of economic priorities. The creatives, after all, generally don't work in factories or warehouses. So why assist these industries? Instead the trend is to declare good-paying blue collar professions a product of the past. If you can't find work in deindustrialized Michigan, suggests Salon's Ray Fisman, one can collect " more than a few crumbs" by joining the service class and serving food, cutting hair or grass in creative capitals like San Francisco or Austin.
These limitations of the "hip cool" strategy to drive broad-based economic growth have been evident for years. Conservative critics, such as the Manhattan Institute's Steve Malanga have pointed out that many creative-class havens often underperform economically compared to their less hip counterparts. More liberal academic analysts have denounced the idea as " exacerbating inequality and exclusion." One particularly sharp critic, the University of British Columbia's Jamie Peck see it as little more than a neo-liberal recipe of "biscotti and circuses."
Urban thinker Aaron Renn puts it in political terms: "the creative class doesn't have much in the way of coattails."