Cover Story: The creative revolution

Richard Florida tours the country with his scripture in hand.

He’s on the lookout for a revival but you won’t find him in any tents.

No, Florida’s on the chamber of commerce circuit, telling the Lear-Jet, expense-account set how to cure what ails their cities.

Before his congregation, he paces and gesticulates, running his fingers through his hair. To the otherwise boring topic of economic development, he lends an alien quality: showmanship. Even the rock ‘n’ roll dust jacket photo on his new gotta-have-it book, The Rise of the Creative Class, seems crafted. Florida sits nonchalant but confident, clad in an open-collar black shirt and ripped blue jeans. A piece of modern art hangs above his head.

The guy’s got a shtick, right down to mantras like his three T’s: technology, talent and tolerance.

For cynics, the first reaction might be to turn away. But then you’d be ignoring the very real and important lesson Florida tries to get across, a lesson from which Atlanta could learn much: If local governments don’t do more to attract young, smart people and rethink the way they try to attract business, the region will be left behind by cities that can.

In his book, which is now in its fifth printing, Florida identifies a 38 million-strong workforce that has emerged with the advent of the age of the knowledge worker. He then prescribes for cities what they need to do to attract these creatives and explains why an area’s future economic development depends on creating the right environment for them.

The premise is disarmingly simple, and quite frankly, largely cribbed from other scholars. But it’s also revolutionary in popular circles: Develop cities where smart people want to live. To Florida and his focus groups, that means fostering a strong arts scene, giving hipster computer programmers a happening nightlife, developing more green space and promoting tolerance that attracts gay and international residents. It also means that metros should invest in their colleges and universities, because they will produce the thinkers so coveted in the new economy.

Florida ties the success of these initiatives to the success of places that are winning the Information Age economic development sweepstakes — places like Boston, San Francisco, Austin.

At the same time, Florida calls on cities to jettison the traditional trappings of economic growth — the tax incentives, stadiums and convention centers. Knowledge-based companies and their workers don’t care about them, he says. To the Intels of the world, the people who make up a community are the most important commodity, because what goes on between their employees’ ears plays such a strong (and unprecedented) role in determining the overall health of the firm.

Atlanta actually ranks pretty high on Florida’s indices — 14th overall among large metros, not surprising, by Florida’s thinking, considering the concentration of universities and the strong gay community. Moreover, Mayor Shirley Franklin has promised to make the city a wireless community, so citizens with a laptop can hop on the Internet from most any public place, and she’s forged stronger ties with Georgia State University, which stands to make the downtown more vibrant.

Still, those advances belie the fact that the city has made its economic strides during the last three decades with very little help from its regional governments. For instance, the city of Atlanta heavily promotes tax allocation districts, but the 2002 budget cut funding for the Bureau of Cultural Affairs’ already paltry budget. It also continues to support outdated Sunday drinking laws and promises to bring an end to 24-hour clubs, which include a mainstay of Atlanta’s gay scene.

To these, Florida would say, “Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.”

To better understand why Florida’s book is important, here’s a quick and not-so-thorough history of economic development. Time was, attracting business had much more to do with an area’s physical attributes than with the humans who lived there. Meaning, do you have coal or iron or fertile land? Does a river flow through your town? The areas that could say ‘yes’ prospered. Then came the industrial age where easy transportation and the availability of a large, cheap labor force mattered more than natural resources. For example, from 1900 to 1950, Florida points out, the working class made up nearly 40 percent of the workforce — by far the single largest sector — and it drove the tone and values of American life. But in the last two decades, as more and more manufacturing jobs have been shipped overseas and others lost to automation, the working class has declined significantly. In its place has arisen what Florida describes as the service class — your waiters and cashiers — and his creative class, a group that makes its living creating “new ideas, new technology and/or new creative content.”
With the rise of this creative class, a group Florida says has an average annual income of nearly $50,000, cities need to realize that companies will go where the most precious resources of the 21st century congregate. So they need to create environments where intelligent people want to live.

“Cities used to try to attract these relatively high-wage, low-skill workers, which was manufacturing plants mainly,” says Georgia State University economics professor Kelly Edmiston. “Those jobs have kind of gone away, so you end up with two kinds of jobs: low-wage, low-skill and high-wage, high-skill.”

The difference between traditional blue-collar employers and high-tech companies is that when a large plant locates in an area, it’s likely to drive out a lot of small manufacturers or prevent another manufacturer from coming in, Edmiston says. With high-tech companies, it’s exactly the opposite. The location of a high-tech firm will actually encourage other firms to locate in the same place, he says. They indicate where the all-important human capital lives.

But attracting large manufacturers is, in many ways, a less complicated task. They just need bodies, and as long as an area could supply a firm with those, as well as access to highways or rails, it could compete. And the way cities have traditionally competed is through tax incentives.

Meanwhile, when they’ve concentrated on economic development, cities have generally focused on big-ticket items in the hopes it would attract business development. Witness Atlanta’s recent endeavors: Philips Arena, Underground Atlanta and the Georgia Dome.

Florida says it’s time to focus on the people. Forget tax incentives and multimillion dollar mega-projects.

“One of the things you find,” Florida says, “is that many of the fastest-growing places are also the most expensive. This whole idea that cheap is better is an idea handed down to us from the ’40s and ’50s.”

Maybe so, but Georgia Tech professor of city and regional planning and public policy David Sawicki explains why so many cities ignore Florida’s advice: “If you think of it as a game, if everyone is giving incentives, then you better not be not giving incentives. That’s kind of the world we live in that everyone is giving incentives. On the other hand, with everyone giving incentives, no one really wins.”

As for mega-projects and sports teams that hold cities hostage with demands for new, taxpayer-funded stadiums, Florida suggests metros just say no. Certainly, numerous studies have shown that professional sports teams have negligible economic impact on their cities. Florida, though, goes a step further. His studies suggest that the creative class doesn’t even care about watching football on Sundays. They’d rather have a place to play Frisbee golf, catch a new traveling art exhibit or watch a cool outdoor rock show.

So, if Falcons owner Arthur Blank one day threatens to move his team if he doesn’t get flashy new digs, Florida would advise Franklin to tell him: “Go your way and we’ll put those resources, which you’re trying to extort out of us, into building up our ecosystem, our habitat, building a better higher education system, generating more graduates, having a more exciting and vibrant arts and cultural and street-level scene, better parks and a higher quality of life and we’ll be just fine.”

Boston, New York and San Francisco have already done it. (Of course, their sports teams aren’t bad either.)

Atlanta, though, has lagged behind these larger counterparts, especially when it comes to arts funding.

Atlanta’s Bureau of Cultural Affairs allocated less than $300,000 in grants in this year’s budget. At the same time, the state cut its grants program by about 8 percent this year, which won’t move the state from the bottom of the pack in arts funding. Fact is, unless you’re on the Woodruff Art Center’s gravy train, there’s very little money to spread around Georgia’s arts communities.

As for his relatively radical idea that cities should concentrate on small projects that enhance the quality of life of its elite residents, Florida dissects America’s changing demographics to build his case for more arts funding — popular, traditional and more avant garde — more parks, and more support for local universities.

“Point of fact is that only 25 percent of all Americans live in a nuclear family,” says Florida, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. “Only 7 percent live in a ‘Leave it to Beaver’ family (defined as a single-wage earner with one parent remaining at home). In big cities like New York, two-thirds of the people are single. In Washington, D.C., only 8 percent of all households are married couples with their own children. So if you’re going to have a vibrant region, it’s no longer enough to offer just something for one kind of household.”

To that end, Florida spends part of his book focusing on exactly what cities should be offering, and he comes up with a very eco- and gay-positive, X-Games-friendly model that puts a heavy emphasis on creating an active and diverse street scene. His model probably accurately reflects the wants and needs of twenty- to thirtysomethings in this age in which people are waiting longer and longer to get married and overcrowded highways have given in-town living a convenient new currency.

The big question is, are all of Florida’s indicators really important to high-tech, new economy growth?

Richard Florida is discussing his theories by cell phone. He’s in a car heading from Pittsburgh to Washington, D.C. The professor’s speaking schedule has him criss-crossing the country, spreading his gospel in cities like Columbus, Ohio, and Lexington, Ky., to the tune of $10,000 a pop. Along the way, Florida is attracting the kind of positive press usually seen with rock stars and movie actors.
It’s no surprise his ideas have found a following. They seem quaintly utopian, places where the main characters and the cities they inhabit are all smart and tolerant and fit. (It doesn’t hurt that most journalists generating that positive press fancy themselves possessing those same attributes.)

Really, what’s not to like?

To Florida’s less well-known colleagues, quite a bit. First off, Florida’s book ignores the importance of affordability and public safety, two measures that rank high in any city dweller’s list of priorities. He also never really identifies the scale he’s discussing. For example, is it enough for a region to have one or two diverse, university-centered nodes, or must you find it in every municipality, nook and cranny?

“I teach these things, and I am staring at my bookcase here of 50 years of literature on economic development and things of this sort,” Sawicki says. “To be an ass, this guy is not a scholar. This is a popular book. It doesn’t have good grounding in a scholarly base.”

Sawicki says Florida spends too much time promoting diversity and the importance of a gay community without actually proving that either of them is inseparable from his creative class or the arrival of high-tech companies. For example, Florida writes that six of the top 10 regions in 1990 in Florida’s Gay Index and five of the top 10 in 2000 also “rank among the nation’s top 10 high-tech regions.”

There may be a correlation, but Florida doesn’t prove that a strong gay population encourages Microsoft types to relocate. For example, Sawicki says, after the outbreak of World War II, studies were done of the Japanese in San Francisco, and researchers concluded that many areas with high concentrations of Japanese immigrants had high crime rates. So, obviously, the Japanese were disproportionately involved in crime. And that information was used to help justify their incarceration in internment camps.

However, Sawicki points out, Japanese immigrants just happened to be living in poor neighborhoods where crime was more likely to happen. Later studies indicated that Japanese immigrants were remarkably unlikely to be involved in crime.

“Is the relationship between a concentration of gay people and high-tech industries causal in any way? I don’t think so,” Sawicki says. “I think gay males and smart people are correlated because they are both attracted to places that are better than average. There are not that many gay people in Omaha, but then again Omaha is not attracting a highly educated, creative population either.”

Florida, though, brushes off Sawicki’s criticism: “Some people would say that the relationship isn’t causal. I’m not a big causal modeler. Once you find an association in this world of complex human and economic-social behavior, you’re onto something.”

Another important criticism of the book is how widely Florida defines the creative class. With some 38 million Americans in it, the group includes everyone from molecular biologists — who are in his so-called creative core — to lawyers to your local indie rock band.

“Florida hasn’t really put his finger on it,” Sawicki asserts. “I think if you put your finger on it, what we’re saying is that this is the kind of person who is an innovator, who actually spins something off or grows something.”

With a definition that’s so broad, Florida may actually be encouraging cities to invest time and money in projects that might indeed make the city more interesting but actually have little impact on attracting knowledge workers. This isn’t a sinister fault, but if Atlanta decides to pour money into developing a music festival, for example, it would be nice to know that it was part of an economic plan likely to be successful.

Finally, one of the more depressing things to come out of the 1990s for liberals was the apparent triumph of free-market capitalism over the philosophy that favored economies tightly managed by governments. Florida’s book, though, reasserts the importance of the role of government in creating favorable environments for his most important class. But Sawicki says there’s only so much a government can do if an area doesn’t have a narrow set of natural amenities.

“If you’re not on the ocean, in the mountains, if your climate is not temperate, if you don’t have a grand university ... we can probably think of two, three other things, you ain’t going to public policy your way out of that,” Sawicki says. “I don’t give a shit what you do. You can start the annual, nude rock festival or whatever, but it will only have so much impact.”

Still, Sawicki says the core of Florida’s thesis is sound, and his advocacy is worthwhile. Sawicki, who likens his own speaking schedule to that of the Maytag repairman’s, believes that the economic health of cities will be in large part shaped by their ability to attract knowledge workers.

“If I was governor for a day, and I could choose an economic development strategy for the state, it would be exactly what Florida is talking about,” Georgia State’s Edmiston says.

Florida just might encourage cities and counties to focus on small, quality-of-life projects instead of your typical chain megaplex and land giveaways to corporations, which diminish the tax base and often don’t encourage more development.

As Sawicki points out, there’s a development debate about which your average City Council member or journalist isn’t even aware — economic development vs. economic growth.

Edmiston explains: “It’s clear that unfettered capitalism is optimal for economic growth, but I’m not sure our big goal should be economic growth. The economy has been booming, but I’m not sure that that’s really improved the quality of life that much.”

Put simply, economic growth puts the emphasis on bringing in new business and new residents. The underbelly of that theory, though, is that it doesn’t address existing economic inequity. In Atlanta, we’ve had 30 years of amazing economic growth, but in 1970, there were 50,000 blacks who were not part of the workforce. Twenty years later, that number still hadn’t changed. Economic development, on the other hand, concentrates on making a city’s citizens smarter, happier and healthier, a sort of off-shoot of Florida’s ideas.

“Atlanta is a great example of growth at any cost,” Sawicki says. “Every time I hear Andy Young talk, here’s a guy who in his soul is just a good man, but the guy believes in trickle down. How many times has he said it: ‘Business is good for Atlanta and let’s just grow this thing, and I’m sure my black people are going to do just fine if we can just grow this thing’? I’d like to shake him around the shoulders and say, ‘Andy, look around you, for Christ’s sake. This beast has been growing like mad for 30 years, and you’ve still got a host of problems.’”

For now, though, it’s Florida’s book that nudges governments along the path that may get them to pay more attention to the needs of its citizens as a way to spur economic growth instead of coming at it from the industry’s end. And that would be a positive change for most places.

“In the end of the book, I say government needs to invest in creativity,” Florida says. “Particularly as we go into this recession, I think we’re going to see government being called upon to invest much more broadly in creativity than it ever has, arts and music and all kinds of things. Doesn’t it make sense?”
kevin.griffis@creativeloafing.com