Richard Florida’s ‘Creative Class’ may prosper, but will everybody else?

RICHARD FLORIDA WAS THE FASHION all the urbanologists and economic development big thinkers were wearing five years ago. You couldnt wade through an op-ed piece or endure a civic organization luncheon speech without bumping into at least one reference to Richard Florida and his creative class theory on our economic future.

Which, broadly summarized, was this: The future belongs to those metropolitan areas able to build clusters of people in science and engineering, architecture and design, education, arts, music and entertainment, whose economic function is to create new ideas, new technology, and new creative content. Around this core, the creative class also includes a broader group of creative professionals in business and finance, law, health care and creative fields. Density, diversity, tolerance, youth, high levels of educationthose are the markers of a creative class city.

Put more crudely, the Richard Florida message was: Forget those Loserville burgs that had built their economies on making, growing or extracting stuff, and especially forget the dreary, conformist lethargic suburbs. Members of the (sniff) service and working classes would be better off in cities with higher concentrations of the creative class.

Floridas musings played well in Seattle, in part because they fit precisely how the city saw itselfyoung, hip, leading edge, tech savvy, diverseand in part because they seemed to capture the direction the citys development was headed. In turn, Florida fueled the mutual admiration society with frequent references to Seattle (Portland, too) as just the sort of creative class city he had in mind, noting approvingly the development of in-city tech concentrations such as South Lake Union over suburban nerdistan (were guessing that means you, Redmond).

The trend toward an America divided between the creative-class centers and those where you cant find either a good web-design job or a restaurant with an edible meal has experienced hiccups along the way, such as the dot-com bust and the housing finance meltdown. Floridas writings have also generated considerable questioning, if not outright criticism, over the years. Of late, one of the more interesting quibbles about an aspect of creative class theory has been raised by … Richard Florida.

Writing in The Atlantic Cities under the headline More Losers than Winners in Americas New Economic Geography, Florida admits: On close inspection, talent clustering provides little in the way of trickle-down benefits. Its benefits flow disproportionately to more highly skilled knowledge, professional and creative workers whose higher wages and salaries are more than sufficient to cover more expensive housing in these locations. While less-skilled service and blue-collar workers also earn more money in knowledge-based metros, those gains disappear once their higher housing costs are taken into account.

Florida later noted in another publication that, far from recanting his creative class theory, he was doubling down on it, advocating for a new urban social compact to improve the lot of those at the bottom.

Florida is the big-ideas guy, not a detail man, so the messy intricacies of what this new urban social compact entails and who pays for and enforces it (never mind whether it will actually work) are left undefined and undescribed. But the larger controversy raised by Floridas examination of the creative classs economic benefits is significant for Seattle because Seattle, up until now, has bought in so enthusiastically to his vision.

A lively arts and entertainment scene and great restaurants may make life much more pleasant for well-compensated creative types, but those jobs dont pay very well. Where are the people who perform those tasks going to live? Certainly not in the pricey condo and apartment towers providing density to the downtown core.

The fight over the future of SoDos industrial zone, the cost of housing in any neighborhood thats had even a whiff of urban hipster gentrification, whether Seattle still wants or can maintain a sizable middle classthese issues are all inherent parts of the creative class trend, and there are plenty more where those came from.

Maybe the trends are inevitable and the problems are unresolvable, but Seattle needs to understand what its in for, good and bad. So far it has been fixated on the fun stuff. As it is finding out, when you buy the vision, you buy the whole package, the urban hassles as well as the urban amenities.

BILL VIRGIN is founder and owner of Northwest Newsletter Group, which publishes Washington Manufacturing Alert and Pacific Northwest Rail News.