He hasn't been mentioned since page 25, but Richard Florida is out with a new self-promotion scheme book. Slate's review http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/..._florida_s_the_new_urban_crisis_reviewed.html What is wrong with America? For urbanist Richard Florida, a key answer lies in our malfunctioning cities, where the clustering of people and capital is “at once the main engine of economic growth and the biggest driver of inequality.” That is the Janus face of the modern American metropolis. In The New Urban Crisis, Florida sets out to prove that this is what’s happening and show how we can fix it.... It’s safe to say that The New Urban Crisis will not generate the same kind of heat {as The Rise of the Creative Class}. Florida’s latest brings some new data into a competent synthesis of contemporary thinking on cities and inequality. As you might expect from a book that aims to diagnose and solve the problems of global urbanization in a little more than 200 pages (with 100 more of appendices and endnotes), its content falls short of its ambition. Florida devotes just 18 pages to the megacities of the developing world. Most of his suggestions, like so many of the glittering renderings and fantastical maps that populate contemporary discourse about cities, are both theoretically appealing and practically infeasible. The right ideas at the wrong time. Florida comes to the problem armed with numbers. He addresses two crucial issues: the widening economic divide between cities and the widening economic divide within cities. Those problems seem quite different, but at their root is a deep and daunting question: Is it better to help troubled places or to help the people in those places move? Florida’s answer to that question is: both. He also calls for zoning reform, investment in the infrastructure for density, affordable and centrally located rental housing, raising service industry wages, and investing in people and places to tackle concentrated poverty. Wouldn’t that be nice! It’s indicative of the tenor of this book, which is heavy on studies from sociologists and economists (at one point, there’s a page where more than half the sentences introduce a new ratio), but addresses history only in short anecdotes, and politics hardly at all. This blindness to the perversity of American politics (which Florida otherwise follows closely) weighs heavily on the book. Florida calls for investment in high-speed rail but doesn’t mention the California high-speed rail project, which is underway, or the Obama administration proposals scuttled by Republican governors in Florida, Ohio, and Wisconsin. He calls for transit in sprawling cities but doesn’t mention the trials of Houston’s light rail network or the failure of Detroit’s regional transit plan. He’s right to advocate for a land tax as a solution to constrained urban development, but it was only five months ago that Southeast Michigan’s entire business community couldn’t muster support for a minuscule property tax for trains and buses.
Florida periodically has a column in our local rag, The Toronto Star, I usually start reading it based on the title - then finding out half way thru I disagree with the tenor, go check the by line, and curse myself for getting suckered again. He seems to be cut of the same cloth as David Brooks & David Frum - people who have a pulse on current issues - but put forth shockingly weird/poor/overwrought analysis to fit their ideology.
He was in Pittsburgh at Carnegie-Mellon U. when he first got famous (I lived about 40 miles East at that time) and he was stunned when the non-creative classes among the locals were dismissive of him. This article pretty much nailed the reason: Instead of delivering tax breaks for headquarters, factories, and stadiums—the dominant mode of economic development, then and now—cities just had to make themselves cool. Creative class theory was alternately embraced and vehemently disputed. Florida later conceded that creative hot spots tended to benefit mostly the creative class itself. Thankfully, I figured that out when I took the book for a test-read in the cafe, otherwise I likely would've bought the hardback. I got it out of the library and read most of it. Wish I could take credit for this from the comments: Missed headline opportunity: "Florida Man Has Pipe Dream"
I was trying to work in a Florida man joke too, ha. I dunno what it is about the topics he latches on to - the only thing they seem to have in common is a vaguely appropriate solution to a problem that has other existing methods that are already in place. Here's his latest article: http://www.thestar.com/opinion/comm...ng-the-winner-takes-all-new-urban-crisis.html His conclusions: On their face they seem decent, but in reality: 1. NIMBYism isn't really the issue - the developers invested heavily in exuburban farmland-to-suburb plays and would rather try to overturn the Greenbelt legislation than do the slightly more difficult and less profitable work of building denser infill - even though they have the OMB in their pocket already. 2. Affordable housing is an issue, but this solution is laughable without a comprehensive solution involving multiple levels of government - this will never be addressed via the private sector alone. 3. We have a pretty massive outlay for transit on the table already (i.e. tens of billions) - but good lord the political football that is GTHA transit is a massive issue. We have a provincial agency that is supposedly building RER, but doesn't grasp the transit-as-distributed-network concept and still is stuck in commuter rail line-of-thinking. Said agency also has a separate division to operate a line to the airport that was mismanaged from the get go, was priced horribly at the outset and isn't optimally designed for the corridor it serves. We've been arguing about building one of the single most expensive one stop extensions of a subway line in the world to a under used mall/corporate centre, instead of surface LRT network of 30+ stations that would actually serve the citizens of Scarborough instead of keeping a handful of politicians' promises and serving the Mayor's corporate buddies' interests. Never mind the federal, provincial and municipal politicians who've championed dubious line extensions and campaigned on poorly thought out plans via google maps. Until our Florida Man has the wherewithal to address the reality on the ground, and actually calls for good governance in his analysis - I'm gonna be super skeptical. /rant
Ah: Found the thread and your post, so I can just quote you and not do that annoying @crazypete13 thing as well. Man, I hate when people do that. An interview with Richard Florida. https://www.vox.com/new-money/2017/5/9/15545328/richard-florida-interview VOX The book has been marketed as your mea culpa for some of the ideas you wrote about in your 2002 book The Rise of the Creative Class. But I didn’t actually see that in the book. Are there big arguments in your earlier work that you now see as mistaken? Richard Florida I think if anything, I under-predicted. I would have never predicted that this urban revival would come steamrollering through the way it has. The other thing I could not anticipate [was] the divides this would create. It was Rob Ford’s 2010 election as mayor of Toronto that was my kick in the ass. I'm sitting here in Toronto working with the mayor on an inclusive prosperity agenda, thinking about how do we upgrade these service jobs. I thought there was no way in hell Toronto would elect this guy. Then I came across this incredible research by my University of Toronto colleague David Hulchanski. It's amazing. He goes and looks at the data on Toronto's socioeconomic geography. In the year 1970, 66 percent of Torontonians lived in middle-class neighborhoods. By the year 2005, it was 29 percent. The city was cleaved. There are now these areas of concentrated wealth and poverty. And what I said above about Florida not seeing something that pretty much EVERYONE in Pittsburgh who wasn't enamored of calling himself or herself a "Creative" could see still holds. I'm heading home and I'm going to return books to the local library. My walk will take me past this place... The childhood home of Jane Jacobs, whose work isn't without flaws, but... Well, let's just say that Richard Florida's childhood home isn't going to have a plaque going up anytime soon....
He's not wrong - in the sense that he is talking about the differences embodied by the Information Revolution. There is a massive gap between those that are successful in the modern economy and those left behind. What he doesn't touch on is the why it's happening, or how to address it, and moreso that he didn't or doesn't factor the negative externalities of obsolete labour and wealth intensification in cities. In many ways the political solutions needed for cities need to be addressed for sub-national and national entities too, though I suspect cities will be the vanguard, and in reality things may get a lot worse before they get better.
We know why it's happening in terms of global economics. We also know why it's somewhat intensified in cities...things like cities as lifestyle brands where many housing units sit empty (owned by those of very high wealth). The lack of solid domestic investment opportunities in places like China and Russia contribute to that. Alpha cities are seeing a lot of this as nationals in those places are trying to pull money out of those markets. My big gripe with Florida (other than what has been touched on in this thread) is that he's selling a universal solution. As if issues in more high profile cities translate effectively to St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Cleveland...or further down the latter to an Akron, Dayton, or Toledo. Things that need to be addressed more effectively: housing filter models. They're how we get cheap housing to lower income residents. In hemmed in, expensive cities, it's not happening because there's not really a frontier. Not all bad, but not good for affordability. In other places (like a St. Louis/Indianapolis), we've hit an inflection point where 50s-70s suburban style housing is the new recipient of poverty. Those areas aren't configured for poor people. He doesn't like to talk about that. Maybe that's in the new book, but this was obvious stuff when he was writing his first book. Part of that is reconfiguring suburban areas. Part of that is tax incentive reform, community land trusts, community benefits agreements and clawbacks in incentives, zoning changes and the like. The other part of the equation is doing more household/person based economic relief rather than place based. If Youngstown won't grow again, the government should be cutting checks for people to leave rather than investing in households in a way that is insufficient to relo, so people rot in place.
His new book is in my public library. If it's still on the New Acquisitions shelf on Monday, I'll give it a skim to see if it might come up. That would be interesting if he figured this out, finally.
I have a hunch he's catching on, based upon a chapter I saw in the table of contents in the "look inside" feature on amazon. Still, whenever he gets into this stuff, he dances around issues in favor of references to the Wire or "edgy " bands and baristas. Real academics like Galster are where it's at. The link below isn't coffee table reading. It reads like an economic text rather than name dropping elements of pop culture. But it gives an excellent overview of the analytical framework in 11 pages. Something Florida can't do in a book. Galster is one of the guys who started quantifying filtering effects 30 years ago. He gets the externalities. He understands that there are certain inflection points that dramatically change neighborhoods on both an upward and downward trajectory and he's measured them. A lot of the neighborhood measurement tools we use were devised by him. He's advocating for "middle neighborhood" targeting to stabilize the entire filtering process. http://www.frbsf.org/community-development/files/case-for-intervention-in-middle-neighborhoods.pdf
I put that on my iPad after reading a few paragraphs. I was not surprised that Florida isn't in the bibliography.
Dublin wasn't choked with traffic when I was growing up but now it has become unbearable. The last time I was there it seemed the entire city center was just a parking lot. Dublin wasn't built for cars. Car ban for Dublin's College Green may come in as early as this year
Did they perhaps confuse rural with suburban Not good for city kids. I guess they did not confuse the 2. I wonder if it is because they move the hell out of their parents towns. https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/10/rural-areas-are-better-economic-mobility/571840/
Just saw a reference to that study. No time to read it yet, but my first thought was "is it because they move the ******** away"
Did not know where to put this, but Chicago has a new Mayor. Rahm Emanuel, good bye and f*ck off. Chicago's new mayor is Lori Lightfoot. She won just 17% of the vote to lead the 14 candidate election. Tonight she obliterated Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle by 74% to 26%. For those of you who don't know, Lori Lightfoot is a former partner at Mayer Brown, a former federal prosecutor, head of the Chicago Police Board. She is a 56 year old, African-American lesbian. She had better not disappoint.
Gone are the days when half of Chicago would have voted for Donald Trump for mayor, simply because he was white. Rest In Misery, those days. They sucked.
Voter Turn out during the first round was about 35% Voter Turn out during the run off was about 33-35% Well it sure is nice that we the people of Chicago care about these things.
Sadly, those numbers are really good by municipal election standards. The national average is about 20%. NYC and LA are typically 20-25%. 30% turnout in a hotly contested municipal election is high here. Last time around only 4 wards here out of 28 cracked 35%. 8 of 28 had more than 30%.
6 actual socialists elected to the city council, not that significant since they're are 50 alderman but times change
2 Articles on city lab about the problems with dealing with housing. One about California. https://www.citylab.com/equity/2019...ousing-bill-sb50-single-family-zoning/586519/ This one on why just building more is not enough. https://www.citylab.com/equity/2019/05/housing-supply-home-prices-economic-inequality-cities/588997/
Maps of political segregation in cities, I am going to assume they tend to follow similar lines to racial separations with in cities. Example: Jackson MS. https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/republicans-democrats-cities/