The Limits of the Creative Class
21st March 2013
Joel Kotkin looks behind the Clever Plastic Disguise.
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.
Urbanists, journalists, and academics—not to mention big-city developers— were easily persuaded that shelling out to court “the hip and cool” would benefit everyone else, too. And Florida himself has prospered through books, articles, lectures, and university positions that have helped promote his ideas and brand and grow his Creative Class Group’s impressive client list, which in addition to big corporations and developers has included cities as diverse as Detroit and El Paso, Cleveland and Seattle.
Well, oops.
Since Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, the Crust has been all about the notion that Clever People Planning Things is a guarantee of success in any endeavor, unlike the sloppy and sub-optimal results of the free market.
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.”
Funny how the people who reflexively deride ‘trickle-down’ when talking about supply-side economics seem to think that it works perfectly well when it’s them, the Smart People, doing it. Any city with a self-styled ‘Arts District’ knows that sinking feeling taxpayers get as they see more and more of their money poured down the sink-hole of trying to beat the dead horse of urban downtowns back to life.
“You can put mag wheels on a Gremlin,” comments one long-time Michigan observer. “but that doesn’t make it a Mustang.”