Lunch Pails or Laptops

If you were the economic development director for a major US city, which list of cities would you want yours to emulate?

List A

San Francisco
Austin
Boston
Seattle
Portland
Houston
Raleigh-Durham
Washington
New York
Minneapolis-St Paul

List B

Riverside-San Bernardino
Camden
Ft. Lauderdale
Newark
Las Vegas
San Antonio
West Palm Beach
Orlando
Oklahoma City
Richmond-Petersburg

You would probably pick list A; and who could blame you? Who doesn’t want to be like Seattle, New York, Portland? If you haven’t guessed, list A consists of large metro areas that rank in the top 25 of Richard Florida’s Creativity Index. But what if I told you that list B is made up of places that ranked among the “top 25 cities for doing business” according to a recent study? (Yes, Camden.) And what if I also told you that the same study cited 5 of the cities from list A among the “10 worst metro areas?” Might you change your mind? (Of course, you’d probably want to see the study first. It was conducted by Joel Kotkin and David Friedman for Inc. Magazine. The rankings are based on current and historical job growth as well as balance among industries. You can find it here.)

This little exercise is intended to turn the creative class ideology – the idea that cities need to attract a certain breed of creative professionals to remain economically vital – on its head. Others have beaten me to it. In a City Journal article titled “The Curse of the Creative Class,” Steven Malanga points out that “since 1993, cities that score best on Florida’s analysis have actually grown no faster than the overall US economy, increasing their employment base by only slightly more than 17 percent. Florida’s indexes, in fact, are such poor predictors of economic performance that his top cities haven’t even outperformed his bottom ones. Led by big percentage gains in Las Vegas (the fastest-growing local economy in the nation) as wekk as in Oklahoma City and Memphis, Florida’s ten least creative cities turn out to be job powerhouses, adding more than 19 percent to their job totals since 1993 – faster growth even than the national economy.”

While I’m put off by Malanga’s sardonic tone – especially his use of “the professor” as a term of derision – his position is worth consideration. Both Malanga and Kotkin, one of Florida’s most vocal detractors, argue that traditional factors are more important ingredients of growth. Affordability tops the list – both in terms of cost of living (including real estate prices) and the costs of doing business (including tax burden).

Still, even if the job growth figures cited above cannot be refuted, I admit that it’s easier to swallow list A as a group of role model cities. And I assume others probably feel the same way. So, why are those cities are innately more appealing, in spite of credible evidence? There are lots of reasons, but perhaps intellectual elitism plays a role. We know that the cities in list A are places with lots of high tech workers and artists of all kinds, but the sources of job growth in the list B cities are unknown, probably very broad, and likely to include lots of regular blue-collar Bubbas. For those of us who study cities (and therefore think we know best) the term growth seems to mean a certain kind of growth – it means more laptops, not more lunch pails! Image is everything, and the list A cities surely have a better image.

Sticking with the theme of elitism, consider the following. When cities like Cincinnati start distributing public money through “cultural funds” to attract edgy arts groups and bohemian culture, how widely are the benefits spread among the population? When we reshape our urban landscape to create entertainment districts, condos, and apartments that appeal to a moving target of young creative types what impact does it have on the locational decision of traditional middle class families? And at what point do we go from real cities with soul to PotemkinVillages?