Richard Florida's Creative Class focus doesn't actually work.

[bailey]

Analysis [[even by Florida himself) shows what I think many here already knew.

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.


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.”

http://www.thedailybeast.com/article...ive-class.html

Of Course, Detroit/Rustbelt cities and Michigan are featured...

The most risible example of this may have been former Michigan Jennifer Granholm’s “cool cities” campaign of the mid-oughts, that sought to cultivate the “creative class” by subsidizing the arts in Detroit and across the state. It didn’t exactly work. “You can put mag wheels on a Gremlin,” comments one long-time Michigan observer. “but that doesn't make it a Mustang.”

Alec MacGillis, writing at The American Prospect in 2009, noted that after collecting large fees from down-at-the-heels burgs like Cleveland, Toledo, Hartford, Rochester, and Elmira, New York over the years, Florida himself asserted that we can’t “stop the decline of some places” and urged the country to focus instead on his high-ranked “creative” enclaves. “So, got that, Rust Belt denizens?” MacGillis noted wryly in a follow-up story last year at the New Republic. Pack your bags for Boulder and Raleigh-Durham and Fairfax County. Oh, and thanks again for the check.”

From his own article in January in the Atlantic.

.... this overall effect turns out to be an illusion. The "average" amount left over is higher simply because the most highly skilled and highly paid group does so well that it pulls up overall wages. The punch line changes dramatically once we consider the effects of higher housing costs on the three different classes of workers.

Highly skilled knowledge, professional, and creative workers continue to benefit. They have more than enough left over in the more expensive metros. The positive correlation between their wages left over and housing costs [[.58) indicates this, and the line on the scatter-graph points upward.


But the opposite is true for the other two classes of workers. The correlations between left-over wages and housing costs are negative and significant for each of them [[-.36 for service workers and -.20 for blue-collar workers), and the lines on the scatter-graphs slope down.


The benefits of highly-skilled regions accrue mainly to knowledge, professional, and creative workers.


The trickle-down effect disappears once the higher housing costs borne by less skilled workers are taken into account.

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/job...eography/4465/