Richard Florida and the New Urban Crisis

I just finished reading Richard Florida's newest book, The New Urban Crisis.  It gives a great (if often gloomy) look at how technology and the "back to the city" movement have changed the world in the last fifteen years.

In 2002, Professor Richard Florida exploded onto the economic development scene with his book, The Rise of the Creative Class.  A big part of his findings were that a new class of workers, which he called the "Creative Class," comprised about 35% of the U.S. workforce.  This class was made up of tech workers, scientists, educators, researchers, artists, designers, engineers, media, healthcare, and people in the legal professions.  These people have to think, use creativity, and make complex decisions on a daily basis. 

Back then, in 2002,  in the U.S., about 1% of people worked in agriculture, less than 20% were part of the Working Class (manufacturing/construction/transportation), and around 30% were part of the Creative Class.  The other 50% or so were in the low wage Service Class.  The Creative Class people mostly made good money and lived well.  The former American Middle Class, the Working Class, were (and still are) disappearing as jobs were lost to new technology and outsourcing.  In its place, tens of millions of people were struggling to survive by working one or more low wage Service Class jobs. 

Teaching then at Carnegie Mellow University in Pittsburgh, a city devastated by the loss of high paying factory jobs, Professor Florida saw lots of bright tech students graduating from the college, but none of them were staying to work in Pittsburgh.  He started researching the issue, and found that most of the tech workers, this new Creative Class, were clustering in a small number of areas.  They were going to Silicon Valley (San Jose/San Francisco area), Boston, Seattle, Washington D.C., New York, Austin, and to a lesser degree, the Raleigh Research Triangle. 

The tech companies, he found, were moving to where all the talented tech workers lived.  That's the opposite of what happened with Industrial Age manufacturing companies.  So in "Rise" Florida made the case for cities to work to build their creative climates like art, music, and high tech scenes.  Research universities also played a key role in attracting the top Creative Class people. 

After reading his book and hearing him speak, civic leaders across the U.S. and the world worked on making their cities more inviting to this Creative Class.  It worked in many ways.  Cities across the nation have attracted upscale people back into their revived downtown areas.  They've attracted businesses and venture capital dollars as well.  There are now around 100 "innovation parks" in the U.S., like the Wake Forest Innovation Quarter here in Winston-Salem, NC. 

Unfortunately, the clustering effect of these creative people worked better than Richard Florida had expected.  That leads to his findings in The New Urban Crisis.

Here are his main points:
1.  In describing what he calls "winner-take-all urbanism," only a handful of larger cities have really benefited greatly from this Creative Class clustering.  The best people, the main tech companies, the most promising start-ups, and the vast majority of venture capital money are going to a handful of places.

2.  This has created a crisis in the "winner" cities.  While the tech workers live well, the prices of housing and other things have risen, and the majority of non-Creative Class people have a harder time affording to live in these cities.

3.  As upscale techies and other well off Creative Class people move back to the rebuilt downtown areas, many of the lower income people have been pushed to the suburbs.  Poverty, crime, drug problems, and over all distress of just surviving has spread to suburbs throughout the country.

4.  The core issue of the New Urban Crisis continues to be the loss of the American Middle Class that made this such a prosperous nation for several decades. 

5.  Finally, while the New Urban Crisis is serious in the U.S., the U.K., and even Canada, it's much worse in the developing countries around the world. 

And then, to top all this off, we had the huge populist uprising that led to Donald Trump taking over in the White House.  While he promises many things, his policies are pretty much the opposite of what is needed to help out the tens of millions of struggling Service Class workers and the hundreds of smaller cities and towns that don't benefit as much from the Creative Class concentrating in a few regions. 

Richard Florida spends the later part of the book outlining the policies he thinks will help us spread the benefits of the Knowledge Based economy that has replaced the old Industrial Economy of the 1800's and 1900's. 

You can get a good feel for his ideas by listening to the talk above.  But, of course, the book is much better and goes into all the details explaining his findings.  If you look toward the future, want to build your city up, or are a civic or cultural leader, The New Urban Crisis is worth the read.

(The links to buy the book are unpaid links.)