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Richard Florida Should Replace The Term ‘Creative Class’ With ‘Country Club’

By

richard florida

Here’s a fun fact about me: I embody the Creative Class.

I live in a big, old witchhatted townhouse between Dupont Circle and Adams Morgan in Washington, DC. I love locally raised produce and my exposed brick yoga studio has a juice bar. I fall in love with every silver bullet remedy for civic malaise I come across: teach kids to code! bike lanes! murals! And guess what? I work at a think tank, where we think… for a living!

And so when I picked up the 2014 reissue of Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class before I got on my flight back from SXSW (yup) a few weeks ago, I bought it for the same reason that mean old men listen to talk radio – to get further evidence of what I already believed, which was that urbanism is wonderful and that it heals and builds communities. I also bought the book because I’m obsessed with my hometown, a small city in Virginia, and wanted ideas for how to make it even more sublimely locavore, artistic, and entrepreneurial.

So I was shocked that reading Florida’s book not only gave me zero ideas for my own community, but actually made me question whether the “Creative Class” was something that cities should try to foster, period. As far as I can tell, the Creative Class is just a new name for rich people. For those who have not marched through all 483 pages, here is a typical passage, in which Florida summarizes the migration pattern of his creative bird:

When they first move to New York, young people live in relatively funky places like the East Village, South Slope, Williamsburg, or Hoboken… When they earn a little more, they move to the Upper West Side or maybe Tribeca or SoHo; earn a little more and they can go to the West Village or the Upper East Side. Once marriage and children come along, some stay in the city while others relocate to bedroom communities…Later, when the kids are gone, some of these people buy a co-op overlooking the park or a duplex on the Upper East Side. Members of the Creative Class come in all shapes, sizes, colors, ages, and lifestyles.

They might come in every color of the rainbow, but the most obvious shared trait of this Creative Class is that they are loaded. Florida’s typical character sails through life in the most extravagantly expensive neighborhoods on the planet. The author’s insularity and obliviousness is staggering.

Florida is an apologist for the new ruling class, masquerading as a guru of economic growth.

To test my hypothesis, try substituting a term associated with the old ruling class, “country club”, for Florida’s fetish, the “eclectic downtown.” First we need an appealing, trendy name for people who live in country clubs. Let’s call them “knowledge gardeners.” If you did, a typical Florida passage might read something like this:

Knowledge Gardeners work in high powered corporations, hospitals, and government agencies, sowing and harvesting the products of an increasingly information-driven economy. They choose to live in bucolic, self-contained communities – “walled gardens” or “country clubs” – that offer sociable privacy and outdoor recreation. Knowledge Gardeners are far more educated, more productive, and healthier than the national average. Cities can attract more of these super-residents – and boost growth – by emulating country clubs in their layout and amenities.

This would clearly be bonkers. Country clubs are fine, but people would object if a developer tried to bulldoze a historic, middle class black community to make room for one. And clearly you cannot plop down a country club in the middle of a city. But gentrification feels more ambiguous, even though some “eclectic downtowns” are becoming just as pricey and exclusionary as the gated communities of yesteryear, and even though some cities are not really built to have downtown hubs.

Florida has his causality seriously backwards. What is happening in the Tech Triangle, in Austin, in Seattle, is that affluent people are creating the lifestyles that appeal to them. In our generation, there is a trend towards upscale street life, superficial diversity, and feel-good consumerism. It’s a great quality of life for those who participate in it. And cities should encourage this activity, because affluent people pay taxes. But if a city makes it their entire growth strategy, they will end up neglecting core services, and subsidizing activities that cause displacement. I think we’re going to look back on the creative class urbanist movement and see elements of the urban renewal debacle.

Florida doesn’t worry too much about the fact that the poor and uneducated, especially blacks and Hispanics, are struggling in this creative class economy. On the contrary, he actually points out again and again how toxic service-industry and blue-collar workers are for the economic health of a city – suggesting that these lines of work should just be “phased out.” Indeed, he even admits that members of the Creative Class embrace diversity, except when it comes to blacks, whom they prefer not to live around. Florida’s tacit preference for bike lanes over food stamps, and urban density over more affordable suburban sprawl is especially insidious, because it appeals to precisely the type of people who plan cities, themselves members of the class that Florida so flatteringly describes. Florida provides policymakers with a valid rationale for focusing on quality of life services for the affluent, rather than lifeline services for the poor.

There are economic growth strategies that work for low- and middle-skill workers. And there are many American cities that are doing just fine without a preponderance of Creative Class representation: Houston, Atlanta, Oklahoma City all come to mind. Florida never even addresses these places. James Fallows writes about a trio of counties in Mississippi that banded together to successfully train their workforce to attract high-end manufacturing plants. Joel Kotkin writes about growth corridors in the Midwest and South. This is the kind of unsexy economic development that our brightest minds really need to be focusing on – not solely creating better amenities for the young whites who populate coworking spaces and bike shares, much though I love them. These are luxury goods, and the affluent can access them without public assistance.

Carolyn Zelikow is a Program Associate at the Aspen Institute Future of Work Initiative. She graduated from the University of Virginia in 2012 with a B.A. in English Language and Literature and lives in Washington, D.C.

  • Kenny Easwaran

    The first few articles by Richard Florida that I read appealed to me for exactly the reason you mention – they spoke exactly to my prejudices. But after reading a few more, it became clear to me that the idea of the “creative class” was a bait-and-switch. He sometimes talks as though the creative class was all artists and user interface designers and entrepreneurs and scientists and poets, but when you look at the actual statistical measures he uses, the majority of the actual people that count as “creative class” are boring old doctors, lawyers, and bankers. It’s very rare that he ever attempts any sort of study that looks at whether the former group of people have any different correlations than the latter, and his recommendations always seem to amount to telling cities to attract the former group of people because the latter group of people will bring money.

  • Nathaniel Hood!

    I have always viewed Florida’s statements as positive (as opposed to normative). The places that have done well in the 21st Century, from an economic perspective, as the places he describes. This is not to say there is no value in working class culture or norms; it means that they are no longer the economic driver of place.

    I can’t defend, nor want to, Florida on some of what he’s written. However, I think his general thesis is correct, even if it isn’t the “be all, end all”.

  • Carolyn Zelikow

    Old-fashioned manufacturing is not be the economic driver that it once was – I totally grant that, and wouldn’t argue that we flashback to the union-driven 1950s. But I don’t think that “creatives” are really as significant an economic driver as Florida claims, either, and when you dig into his argument, he really doesn’t give you much ammo to make that case.

    The difference between San Francisco and Baltimore, for example, is not that one has so many more creatives than the other. Baltimore has one of the country’s best art school, the John Waters legacy of flamboyant tolerance, and lots of cheap awesome real estate where young urbanists linger. The difference between these two cities is that San Francisco has had decades of major federal investment in computing and security technology, as well as generations of highly educated immigrants, whereas Baltimore’s major industry collapsed in the early 20th century, after which waves low-skills Southerners moved into the city.

    Occam’s razor: When you are looking for economic drivers – just look for economic drivers. People don’t make money because they are a certain way, but because they do certain things – and the same applies to cities. New York may be “creative”, but it is also the home of finance and fashion. Plenty of cities are booming without any dominant “creative” layer: Dallas, Charlotte, Phoenix to name a few. Those cities all have major industries driving economic activity. This is not to say that culture doesn’t matter, but different kinds of industries are symbiotic with different kinds of cultures – there is not one “best” culture for economic growth.

    In short, to take Florida seriously, you have to take his argument that creatives cause economic growth at face value – and he really does claim causation rather than correlation. Reading the reissue of “Rise”, I just felt that his evidence for this claim was very slim.

  • Monte

    The empire needs its patricians.

  • Carolyn Zelikow

    Yeah – I just think it is so hysterical that you can read chapter after chapter chronicling the life and times of Florida’s “class” without ever getting a simple list of the professions he deems creative. Humorously though, I have to point out that Florida does exclude doctors from his list. Bankers & business managers are in, but medical professionals, who leverage tons of technology and knowledge to run practices and shape treatments for their patients, are out. Go figure!

    It all just feels really arbitrary. At the end of the day, the impression I got from the book was of an academic guy, maybe on his third glass of wine, expounding about his extended circle of acquaintances as “movement”. So doctors, whom one senses that maybe Florida does not find that interesting, don’t make the cut, even though healthcare is a huge industry that will only continue to grow as our population ages.

    All this to say, yup – totally agree.

  • Carolyn Zelikow

    Curious what you mean by this? Obviously income inequality is doing not-great things for our democracy right now. Or maybe you’re saying that Florida is an apologist for a stratified, increasing un-American America?

  • Florida’s typical character sails through life in the most extravagantly expensive neighborhoods on the planet. The author’s insularity and obliviousness is staggering.

    Not to defend him particularly, but your lack of a historical sense is a problem there. The NYC neighborhoods mentioned show mainly that that text hasn’t been updated since the original publication in 2002, when Williamsburg was mainly a Hasidic building site abutting a mainly Dominican main street and the Upper West Side was partly lower middle class. Few in my kids’ school there in those days (especially us!) were anywhere near as rich as you must be to live in your DC neighborhood.

  • A_Sound_Bite

    Richard Florida does not seem to take into account the role, if any, of religious belief in the life of the “creative class.” (Of course, if religion is, for all intents and purposes, absent or only nominally present, why bring it up?) Revealingly Zelikow makes mention that Florida feels that service-industry and blue-collar jobs should be “phased out” of creative-class zones because of the toxicity of such repugnant types of labor–or perhaps the toxicity [*code for cooties] of the laborers themselves.

    St. Maximos the Confessor was a Christian monk and theologian who lived c. 580-662. During those years he spent significant time in Constantinople, Carthage, and Rome, and is known especially for his theological writings. And he is recognized by both the Orthodox and Catholic Churches as a Father of the Church.

    Anyway, here’s one of my favorite quotes of St. Maximos concerning gold, i.e., money, something that Creative Class Country Clubbers have a particularly strong fondness for. [Full disclosure: I like money, too, but I don’t have much of it.]

    “It is not so much because of need that gold has become an object of desire among men, as because of the power it gives most people to indulge in sensual pleasure. There are three things which produce love of material wealth: self-indulgence, self-esteem and lack of faith. Lack of faith is more dangerous than the other two.

    “The self-indulgent person loves wealth because it enables him to live comfortably; the person full of self-esteem loves it because through it he can gain the esteem of others; the person who lacks faith loves it because, fearful of starvation, old age, disease, or exile, he can save it and hoard it. He puts his trust in wealth rather than in God, the Creator who provides for all creation, down to the least of living things.

    “There are four kinds of men who hoard wealth: the three already mentioned and the treasurer or bursar. Clearly, it is only the last who conserves it for a good purpose–namely, so as always to have the means of supplying each person’s basic needs.”

  • Carolyn Zelikow

    This is a good point, and would mitigate the extravagance of the picture Florida paints. That said, this book was a reissue, and the point of these things is typically to adapt an existing thesis to new context. If Florida’s meaning is indeed what you interpret it to be, then a footnote to that effect would have been appropriate. As it is, the very fact that all of the neighborhoods he mentioned (1) were extremely affluent at the time or (2) have become vertiginously expensive in itself points to some the issues that I tried to articulate above.

    On a personal level, I am fortunate, but I am also single, childless, and live with four housemates. Dupont ain’t cheap, but it’s not as much as you might think.

  • Monte

    I’m saying that there will be an upper class, and Florida has simply described the style of it in this generation.

  • Carolyn Zelikow

    I agree that this is what Florida’s doing, but that’s not his stated intention. He is not writing “Bobo’s in Paradise”, although he references it frequently. Instead, he claims to be offering a strategy for the future of cities. His work is prescriptive rather than descriptive. So, while “the poor will be with you always” may be a valid perspective, it is inadequate as an economic growth strategy.

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  • rustybeancake

    I agree with much of what you say, except:

    “Florida’s tacit preference for… urban density over more affordable suburban sprawl is especially insidious, because it appeals to precisely the type of people who plan cities, themselves members of the class that Florida so flatteringly describes”

    Suburban sprawl is only “more affordable” because it tends to be further out from city centres, which are more expensive due to their accessibility and thus value to commerce. There’s no universal rule that says that after you get out of the city centre you have to start building suburban style buildings – it’s just happened that way, and as time goes on and those buildings need replacing, we’ll have to densify them as populations continue to increase. We could also have chosen to skip that intermediate step and just build more dense neighbourhoods as we built out in the first place.

    Not to mention there are very expensive suburban neighbourhoods, and very cheap inner-city neighbourhoods too.

    But, yes, I do generally agree with you that Florida can be annoying in pushing his ‘creative class’ meme and brand.

  • rustybeancake

    “Plenty of cities are booming without any dominant “creative” layer: Dallas, Charlotte, Phoenix to name a few. Those cities all have major industries driving economic activity. This is not to say that culture doesn’t matter, but different kinds of industries are symbiotic with different kinds of cultures – there is not one “best” culture for economic growth.”

    That’s true, and interesting. I guess you could argue that cities should chase a slice of the pie that is the tech industries, as they can be enormously profitable and pay extremely well. It’s also important to diversify your economy – Houston would do well to try and grow a diverse tech sector while times are good, just as places like Dubai and Riyadh are trying to. Calgary is now beating itself up for not diversifying during the boom years. Think of the world class university facilities all those oil royalties could’ve paid for!

    While I agree that each city has it’s own economic specialisations, I also wouldn’t fault non-traditionally tech cities for trying to get a slice of that sweet, sweet pie!

  • rustybeancake

    I bet he doesn’t include machinists or bricklayers in his list of “creatives”!

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  • cageysea

    “… but people would object if a developer tried to bulldoze a historic, middle class black community…”

    In other words, a fictional place, not unlike the Emerald City.

    You gotta love Liberals with their straw men arguments built for knocking down.

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  • A better term for “Creative Class” would be Childless Class. These people are not raising kids. Not that there is anything wrong with that, as Jerry Seinfeld said, but this class of people is not a majority and will never be. People live out in suburbs because they are geared around raising kids.

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