Corridor Business Journal Article

johnk@corridorbiznews.com

It isn’t often that mainstream America knows an economics professor by name. But Richard Florida is not your typical economics professor.

Mr. Florida, who is the Hirst Professor in the School of Public Policy at George Mason University, is the author of two popular and somewhat controversial books about what he calls the “creative class” that have sparked many communities – including the Corridor – to rethink their economic, cultural and social strategies when it comes to luring people and companies to the area.

Mr. Florida set the stage with 2002’s The Rise of the Creative Class, and furthers his arguments on a global scale with this year’s The Flight of the Creative Class. He will talk at the Priority One annual luncheon in Cedar Rapids on Oct. 11, and will participate in the “Visions in Focus” event at Hancher Auditorium in Iowa City later that day. What follows is a full transcript of an interview conducted with Mr. Florida last week. An edited version of the interview ran in this week’s Corridor Business Journal.

Q: People bring you in because they want to hear something that will help them to improve their cities; can any city apply your principles and succeed?

A: I know Iowa pretty well. I’ve been to Iowa a bunch of times. I’ve been mainly to Des Moines. I know what’s happening there, and Jesse Elliott who works with me went to school at the University of Iowa, and he’s pretty darn plugged into things Iowa.

In addition, under Anita (Walker, director of the Iowa Department of Cultural Affairs)’s leadership, you guys did probably the single best benchmarking study – the two economists at Iowa State produced what to my mind is the single best benchmarking study of a creative economy in a state that I’ve ever seen done.

So, I think you have all of the analysis and tools that you need. I really think it means focusing people’s energy on building this creative economy. Why I like the term creative economy is because it’s inclusive. It says that if you’re an artist, if you’re a musician, if you’re an entertainer, if you work in tech, and even if you work in the manufacturing sector or the service economy, and you want to, in effect, creatify those jobs, those sectors, you can do that. So, I think it makes a lot of sense, and I think what we have in from of us in Iowa, the process is ignited, it’s actually validating and perhaps enhancing the energy that is already underway. That’s the hard part. It’s easy to identify this, it’s easy to kind of talk about it. It’s easy to even start it going. It’s hard to keep the momentum upwards, and it’s even more difficult to keep the inertia from setting in. The reason is not because the people give up, but because there are so many barriers and blockages, and you know, I talk about this in my new book, The Flight of the Creative Class, there are so many darn squelchers out there.

Q: Why are these squelchers wrong?

A: Iowa City ranks third of metros under 250,000 on my indicator of the creativity index; Cedar Rapids ranks eighth in the same thing; Des Moines, in regions of 250,000 to 500,000 ranks fourth, directly behind Madison, Wis., everybody’s talent and technology magnet. And people, I read in the press, you know, it’s so funny, “Florida believes only cities like San Francisco and Boston and Austin that appeal to hippies, yuppies, trendoids and gays,” and I’m thinking, did they read my book? OK, there’s Iowa City, there’s Cedar Rapids and there’s Des Moines, third, fourth and eighth. And the point I want to make, the thing I have to say is, places like Cedar Rapids, Iowa City and Des Moines have really huge assets to compete in this creative economy. They are representations of the creative economy. And the Iowa State study shows this, that Iowa is doing pretty darn well, and has pretty good competitive advantage, and reasonably high wages… they document sector after sector where Iowa has – and this arts and culture, which so many people want to denigrate, you and I might believe in it and the people behind it may believe in it, but so many people out there want to denigrate and say it’s just “artsy fartsy” stuff and it doesn’t generate economic value. Well, that study shows that it generates a lot of economic value. And it also feeds people’s energy.

We have a new Gallup poll that we’ve just completed called “Soul of the City;” I’m a senior scientist at Gallup, which is one of the coolest things about moving to (Washington) D.C., and we surveyed 3,100 in 22 cities across the country. Two things that come out of that that are really important. If you look at what people want in a city, and people want stable finances, they want good finances, they want a job they love, they want a workplace in which they’re engaged, but the want that from their private job. If you look at what they want in their city and what satisfies them in their city – this is the first time anyone’s ever done this – there are a few things. It’s broadly considered aesthetic quality. And I don’t mean sun, and fun and surf and beach. Does it have parks? Does it take care of its natural environment? Is the air and water quality good? Does it preserve its historic buildings? Do the neighborhoods kind of have a great look and feel?

And secondly, diversity. And when we asked the question is it a good place for young single people, is it a good place for recent college grads, is it a good place for families, is it a good place for the elderly, is it a good place for racial and economic minorities? Those two things: does it matter if you’re young or old, black or white or Hispanic or Asian, rich or poor, what occupation you do, those are the two things, across the board, that people really, really value and give them pride about their city. So I think that’s telling city leaders things that we have typically thought were the sidelines – the aesthetic quality of our towns and the diversity and the openness – were not the sidelines, they’re the centerpiece and if you do those things right, and you have a great and vibrant private sector, you’ll grow.

Q: This is in comparison to what?

A: I think too much of the debate over cities and been over this economistic, go steal a plant from another town, go steal a stadium from another place, go steal a call center, oh God, we’re gonna get a Wal-Mart. And now, we’ll have to build a prison; that’ll create jobs. Or the thing in the Gulf Coast, with casinos. What is driving cities, not just what creates income – we talk about subjective well-being or human happiness – is this aesthetic quality and this diversity thing. And one other thing that comes out of this poll, which actually Jesse pointed out – we all overlooked it, probably because we’re old – if you look at all the groups that people don’t like in a city, it’s surprising that it’s not the ethnic communities, the gay and lesbian community. The group that is least tolerated over all, are young recent college graduates in the survey. And that was quite an eye opener to us, the fact that so many towns say they want young recent college graduates, but when you look at the survey statistics from people, they’re saying, our town, if we had to rate what our town is least open to, it’s young college grads. And we just thought, we didn’t have any facts and figures on that. It’s not that they’re out late at night and make noise, they bring competition into the labor market, and they want a different kind of political environment, and they’re inquisitive in their questioning. So this thing about towns saying they want young people, but what is coming up in our surveys is them saying, “Well no, that’s the group that maintains the most resistance, that’s another thing that political leadership, especially in a state that has such great colleges, and universities, needs to look at – how do we make our state and its communities the most open, the best places to plug in for these young people as they’re looking for places to live and work.

Q: People misinterpret your ideas, saying you advocate catering to gays, for instance. What are your thoughts about their motivations?

A: I think there’s a misinterpretation on both side. There is a misinterpretation of critics, and there is a misinterpretation of supporters, who say “I’m going to build a latte bar, coffee shop, a music venue and a skate bar and I’m going to have Nirvana. So both sides feed into one another, and it’s kind of a product of the culture wars. But I think what the critics do in particular is paint an either-or situation. If there’s one thing my work tries to say, is that as a region, you have to have a portfolio of options of lifestyles for every different kind of person, and I think that’s really scary, because it threatens groups that have long-held power. And, I can just illustrate this, without using the words “patriarchy” and “male-dominated.” Almost every time I speak, someone comes up to me and says, “I really like what you said. You’ve helped me now understand, 20- and 25- and 27-year-old children. Only once, in five years of speaking, has that person been a male.

So, I think there is a sense among -- I wrote my work for folks who run chambers of commerce, who run economic development organizations -- and that’s my feel, that’s where the most resistance has come, and my work has been embraced by the arts and culture community. So I think there is a structure to our leadership that advantages certain groups that run businesses or things, and puts other groups in a subordinate position. I think that in some ways my work challenges that. The good thing is though, n matter how resistant people are, I always say this: This idea is like a virus, and it doesn’t matter how much you try to inoculate a community and kill it; and it doesn’t mean it’s my idea… you can call it anything you want, arts, culture, creativity, giving people what they want, letting them have diversity, letting them be free – this little virus that I’m associated with, once it gets into a town, it’s hard to inoculate. I think you see that. I think you see that in town after town, community after community. So I’m just really lucky that I’ve been part of that debate. What I find that I have to do now is go to communities and what I do is clarify my ideas and talk about what I thought I meant to say. But I think that’s helpful. I’ve had so many people come up to me and say, “I was predisposed not to like you, and once I meet you and hear what you have to say, I kind of like it.”
And I think there’s been so much debate and criticism and framing, if you will, of these ideas, and reframing, that it’s good to be able to come to a town and just engage everybody on all sides and say, “This is what we really mean and we all can do this together.” I think aside from a few urbanists that feel like their toes have been stepped on, I think in general the debate is moving forward in a really fine and powerful way.

Q: What is the most valid criticism of your work on this?

A: I think The Rise of the Creative Class was my first attempt to write down some new ideas about cities. I always thought of that as exploratory research, not confirmatory. So, first thing I would say is, everybody in the universities, let’s get with it. And I would challenge my university colleagues; if you look at the criticism of my work, 90 percent of it is opinionizing. There are very few people -- aside from one guy associated with a conservative think tank who happens to be an English major, not a big grounding in economics or sociology – first things first, we’ve got to get some more real, objective, university-quality research and analysis out there on what on what are the “non-market factors.” Ninety-nine percent of the research on cities looks at traditional economic factors. So there are great people all over the country who can do that work, so let’s do it. Sociology departments and geography departs.

I think that probably the most valid critic of my work has been Ed Glaser at Harvard. He’s certainly the person who has the best tools. I think, and I responded to Ed’s review of my book because it’s one of the few things that’s been scientific. There’ve been two really scientific looks at my work, one by Ed Glaser at Harvard, who wrote a review and reran some of our numbers and doesn’t really report them, and another one by a fabulous group of economists at Utrecht in the Netherlands. The Utrecht group I’ll go to first. They said, “We don’t like this thing. It doesn’t smell right, it doesn’t sit right.” They went and really read the book, and they replicated the analysis for the Netherlands. What they said – I try to make two contributions in my work, academically – one, I argue, that if you want to understand the “knowledge economy” or “innovation economy,” you have to understand it as a set of occupations, and I name these the creative occupations because they go beyond technology or knowledge; they have arts, entertainment, culture, the professions of technology. And I contrast that with other industry-based formations and I contrast that with the human capital measure, which is an education-based measure. These guys come out of that and say, “No, no, no. Florida is right. Florida’s theories set the new standard.” It’s on my web site. “Once we looked at this and poked and prodded it, didn’t like it, but when we really beat the heck out of it, Florida, what he said is right. This creative occupations measure is the best tool that’s ever been invented to understand regional growth.”

Now, what they subsequently say, they have another paper… we have to understand what enables a region to grow and attract these creative occupations. And here is where I’m going to get into my debate with Ed Glaser. Ed Glaser says that what you have in a place is a set of capabilities, which are stocks. What all regional growth people say, what all economics people say, and this is amazing, is that what you’re dealing with is a stock of capabilities, a stock of knowledge, education, technology. What my work says is that those aren’t stock, they’re flows. I mean, if you think about it for more than 30 seconds, people are a basic flow. Technology is a flow, innovation is a flow. And what I’m really trying to get at is what determines those flows. So when Ed throws in linear regression, human capital, creative occupations, gay index, bohemian index, diversity measures, of course the education measures or the human capital measures will come out determinative. Because its’ not a linear model. You have to determine what creates that stock of educated or creative people, and then how that stock of educated or creative people affects growth. It’s a two-stage model, and that’s what these Dutch guys are looking at. So if you want to dismiss it, you throw everything in a model together, and the education variables -- because they’re the direct-effect variables – will condition growth. The point is, you have to understand where that stock of those educated or creative people came from in the first place. So you need two models, one of why people locate and the other of once they locate how they affect growth.

Those, you could say they’re criticisms, but they’re open questions and debates. In those debates, I think there are two operative factors. On the one hand, the old school say it’s jobs, and we know that’s not the case. The smart people say there are two things that work in addition to jobs: amenities or lifestyle or the nature of a place. And the second one, which is my contribution, which is not amenities, what I say is diversity and openness and the ability of people to feel comfortable. I have all this research I’m doing with the Gallup organization where I’m a senior scientist; that research points to – and that’s why I say this is an evolving field – that two things work together. Looking at what people want in a city, when you look at the two primary factors that drive people, what they want and what they get out of a city, it’s aesthetics and diversity. So what we’re finding is that those effects aren’t independent, those effects are conjoined. So I think that’s where we’re headed in our understanding of cities, and people have their posturing, ranting about yuppies sophistos, hippies and gays, they’re going to get some headlines, but they’re not really affecting the debate, the science moves on.

Q: There seems to be this growing divide between towns where this is happening and those where it is not.

A: Iowa cities and towns have a huge advantage in this. I think the big advantage facing Iowa cities and towns is the incredible housing cost spiral, that I would say plagues Washington D.C. and Boston and Austin, Texas and Seattle, the places that sort of inserted themselves early on in the creative economy. It’s simply impossible for young people or people with families to live in those places. So they become very sterile and less-interesting places because creative energy is priced out. You know, as Jane Jacobs said to me quite presciently, when a place gets boring, even the rich people leave. So I think there are some advantages for towns and communities to build on, simply leveraging that housing cost opportunity. CBJ

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