Richard Florida on the shaping & reshaping of America

[davidfcooper]

See the map: Shaping of America and also read Florida's Atlantic article on how the financial crash will reshape the country. Woe be those regions shunned by the creative class.

Comments

[bikergeek.livejournal.com]

Ho-hum. Yet another person of liberal bent prematurely dancing on the grave of red-state America.

I wonder what will happen when the people who support the much-vaunted "creative class"--the secretaries, barbers, auto mechanics, bus drivers, and plumbers who provide services to the "creative class"--cannot afford to live anywhere near the creative class they serve. We can't all be rocket scientists. In fact, the so-called creative class is already priced out of the cities they made so wonderful in the 1980s and 90s. What happened to all the musicians who used to live in Allston-Brighton, or the artists who used to live in the Fort Point Channel area of Boston? Answer: they can't afford to live there any more. The only people who can afford to live in those places are stockbrokers and lawyers.

If the future of America is one where one needs an income of a third of a million dollars in today's dollars to afford a mortgage, I weep. That is not an America I want to live in.

[achinhibitor.livejournal.com]

A good background to this is "The Work of Nations" by Robert Reich. You do have to make some distinction between people who are creative and people who make livings by being creative -- non-selling artists have always been with us, but they're of little economic importance.

(Though I read an article in the Boston Globe Magazine that noted many artists/singers live in the Amherst, Ma. area because it has plenty of intellectuals (due to the colleges) but the cost of living is cheap (due to the lack of well-paying jobs for non-intellectuals, and location doesn't matter because the artists sell nationwide.)

People who support the "creative class" a/k/a "symbolic analyticals", in the sort of support that has to be done nearby, will perforce get paid enough to live there.

But there's a weird effect which makes most of these statistics extremely suspect, that is, the enormous disparity in the cost of living between different regions. (David Buss had an article on this in Atlantic a couple of years ago.) Yes, to live in a decent place in Boston you need to make $300k, but in much of red America, you can buy a house and raise a family decently on maybe $30k. So by statistics, such a red zone appears to be poverty-stricken, but by quality of life, the people may be less financially stressed than yuppies in the big city.

[davidfcooper.livejournal.com]

According to salary.com a resident of New York, NY needs $88K to approximate the quality of life that $50K buys in Houston. Boise City, ID and Corvallis, OR are even less expensive than Houston, as are, closer to home, Binghamton and Rochester, NY, and all these cities boast a creative class. Just moving across the East River from Manhattan to Queens lowers one's cost of living by $12K. The collapse of real estate values and the loss of jobs is likely to be more pronounced and longer lasting in cities that lack a creative class. So far most NYC homeowners have seen far greater declines in the value of the mutual funds in their retirement accounts than in the value of their homes.

In NYC the artists are referred to as the shock troops of gentrification who eventually also become its casualties. In the 1960s & 1970s artists priced out of Greenwich Village moved to SOHO. In the 1980s they were driven out of SOHO to Williamsburgh, Brooklyn. In the past decade they have been priced out of Williamsburgh into neighboring Bushwick. Bushwick is a rather depressed and frankly depressing neighborhood; we'll see if it can ever be gentrified. The poor and lower middle class have to live somewhere, but in NYC they will increasingly have longer commutes to jobs in Manhattan.

[achinhibitor.livejournal.com]

I'd expect that in areas without a "creative class" the bubbling of housing prices has been less than in the more hotbed cities. But also consider that the true red areas aren't cities, and don't show up in your database at all.

[davidfcooper.livejournal.com]

Some sun-belt areas without a "creative class" had housing booms based entirely on the presumption of continued population growth and rising home prices. Those areas, whose main industries are construction and real estate sales, will not rebound.