

One Reason It’s So Hard to Become a 'Creative Superstar City' - gkuan
http://www.citylab.com/work/2015/05/one-reason-its-so-hard-to-become-a-creative-superstar-city/394256/

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smacktoward
It's worth noting that this article is written by Richard Florida
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Florida](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Florida)),
whose 2002 book _The Rise of the Creative Class_
([http://www.creativeclass.com/richard_florida/books/the_rise_...](http://www.creativeclass.com/richard_florida/books/the_rise_of_the_creative_class))
introduced the idea that struggling cities could find new prosperity by
reinventing themselves to become more attractive to the "creative class" \--
Florida's term for the mostly young, mostly white, mostly techie types who
have risen to wealth and prominence in San Francisco and New York.

And that Florida raked in tens of thousands of dollars in speaking fees per
speech and hundreds of thousands in consulting fees per gig from lots of those
struggling cities, all on the premise that he could show them the way to
convince the members of that "creative class" to upend themselves from SF and
NYC and move there. (See [http://www.city-
journal.org/html/14_1_the_curse.html](http://www.city-
journal.org/html/14_1_the_curse.html),
[http://www.newrepublic.com/blog/plank/105746/gay-bars-
bike-p...](http://www.newrepublic.com/blog/plank/105746/gay-bars-bike-paths-
ka-ching-the-creative-class-10th-birthday))

And that after all the checks had cleared but those cities failed to turn
around, Florida did some turning around of his own and declared that they had
really been beyond hope to begin with (see [http://prospect.org/article/ruse-
creative-class-0](http://prospect.org/article/ruse-creative-class-0),
[http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114013/richard-
floridas-d...](http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114013/richard-floridas-
detroit-flip-flop-save-or-not-save)).

And that after a decade of working this circuit, he eventually admitted that
programs to attract the "creative class" \-- the programs he'd been selling
those struggling cities for all those years -- mostly just ended up making
life better for the members of that class without benefiting anyone else (see
[http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/03/20/richard-
flo...](http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/03/20/richard-florida-
concedes-the-limits-of-the-creative-class.html), [http://beltmag.com/austin-
cleveland-and-the-cost-of-cool/](http://beltmag.com/austin-cleveland-and-the-
cost-of-cool/)).

So... yeah.

------
arcanus
Surprised Austin did not make the list.

~~~
mathattack
And New York

~~~
bluthru
Many of the artists are priced out.

Moving to NYC in the 70's and getting a brownstone for cheap seems like it
would have been an incredibly interesting time.

~~~
mathattack
They're getting priced out of Brooklyn too. Not sure what the ideal answer is.

