Drinking the Downtown Elixir

Richard Florida is the Canadian professor and urban planning theorist who convinced central planners and media enablers across the land to redevelop downtowns to attract the so-called creative class—that is, the people who were formerly called Young Urban Professionals, or Yuppies for short.

The underlying premise was that a critical mass of upwardly-mobile, college-educated, and mostly single knowledge workers would transform a local economy with their energy, industriousness, and progressive ideas. To attract them, cities needed a downtown of bars, cafes, entertainment venues, an artsy vibe, a large gay population, racial/ethnic diversity, streetcars and other public transit, bike lanes, and apartment towers.

In other words, downtown Des Moines should resemble Soho and Greenwich Village.

In the interest of realizing Mr. Florida’s vision, cities relocated factories, warehouses, truck yards, and wharfs to un-hip neighborhoods (or overseas). Also displaced were families with children and blue-collar workers, including black and brown ones.

Even Mr. Florida is now having doubts about what he has inflicted on the proletariat. Yet cities keep implementing his theory.

Take the old industrial city of Milwaukee. An April 30th story in the Wall Street Journal said that the city has “one of America’s most cutthroat rental markets.” Still, the story praised Milwaukee for revitalizing its downtown and spotlighted its downtown attractions and apartment towers. The story then admitted that the construction of high-end apartments has come at the expense of more affordable apartments.

To quote from the story, one of the featured apartment towers has an “outdoor pool and terrace, sky deck, golf simulator, dog run, Peloton studio, fitness center and pet spa.”

In a follow-up on May 2 by the same reporter, the Wall Street Journal ran a two-page feature in its real estate section on Generation Z renters from across the country and the kinds of apartment complexes they prefer: mostly those with expensive amenities.

Gee, I wonder why younger generations can’t afford to buy a house.

By contrast, I could afford to buy a house in metro Chicago early in my career, even though mortgage rates were in the double digits at the time. To save money for a down payment, I had lived for years in a rundown walk-up apartment across from a seedy YMCA, within walking distance of an El station, in order to cut the time and cost of commuting to my job in the Loop. The only amenity was a coin-operated washer and

dryer in the gloomy basement. Excitement and entertainment were cheap, though. They came with riding the El through dangerous neighborhoods on the way home from work late at night.

The April 30th Wall Street Journal story on Milwaukee included an obligatory mention of diversity, saying that the City of Milwaukee has a lot of diversity. It sure does. According to my research, it is 32.3 percent white, 38.6 percent black, 20.7 percent Hispanic, and 4.8 percent Asian.

Here’s what the story didn’t say: that only 26.6 percent of adults in the city have a bachelor’s degree, that the poverty rate is a whopping 23.3 percent, and that the rate of violent crime is four times the national average, according to city-data.com.

But, hey, the city has a spiffy downtown for the creative class, a class that values diversity, as long as the diverse peoples are in the same socioeconomic class as they are.

It’s a similar situation in my adopted hometown of Tucson. Arriving late to the Richard Florida party, Tucson has just recently revitalized its downtown, using funds from a tax abatement scheme, which essentially relies on citizens from the rest of the city and state to subsidize the revitalization.

The redevelopment has resulted in a smattering of new higher-end apartments and plenty of low-wage restaurants, bars, nightclubs and various venues. So far, the promise of high-wage businesses moving downtown hasn’t materialized, except for a satellite office of the Caterpillar company, employing a couple hundred people. Meanwhile, most of the surrounding neighborhoods have high poverty, high crime, high homelessness, crumbling roads, and low K-12 test scores.

This is not to suggest that there is anything wrong with cities changing their zoning, building codes, and transportation options to meet changing demographics and contemporary preferences in housing and lifestyles, as long as they don’t rob Peter to pay Paul. Nor is it to suggest that there is anything wrong with people wanting to live downtown instead of suburbia.

The problem with Mr. Florida’s theory is that it holds for some cities but not for others. A city like New York, for example, grew organically and wasn’t centrally planned by the Dutch. Trying to replicate it in the Sonoran Desert or in Wisconsin will probably not be successful and will come at the expense of surrounding neighborhoods.

Another problem is the underlying assumption that bringing the creative class together in a hip downtown will lead, ipso facto, to innovation and prosperity that would not have otherwise occurred. Perhaps it will for certain industries and professions, but there are plenty of examples where this doesn’t hold.

Take Thomas Edison. His lab was not in Manhattan but in New Jersey, in a town that was subsequently named “Edison” in his honor—a town where I was an executive for a diversified natural resources and manufacturing company.

Likewise, Bell Labs had most of its facilities in suburban New Jersey, not Manhattan. Bell Labs was one of the most innovative organizations in the world and the inventor of the transistor, an invention that led to the semiconductor revolution. Its parent company of AT&T was headquartered in New York City, but its huge main office was located in Basking Ridge, NJ, where my wife and I used to live, in a neighborhood full of engineers from AT&T and Bell Labs.

Previously, I had worked at the headquarters of the US confectionery division of the global giant Mars, Inc., in rural northwest New Jersey. It employed some of the world’s best engineers, marketers, and commodity traders.

Advances in radar technology occurred at the RCA unit in Moorestown, NJ. Up the road was the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, where Albert Einstein was a founding member of the institute and where J. Robert Oppenheimer became the director after developing the atomic bomb.

New Jersey is also the home of leading pharmaceutical companies.

On the opposite coast, Silicon Valley is in suburbia, not downtown San Francisco.

And Bentonville, Arkansas is far away culturally from Soho and Greenwich Village, but is home to Walmart, the company that revolutionized the retail industry.

The examples could go on and on of where Richard Florida’s theory doesn’t hold up.

Maybe cities should stop embracing the theory without question.

Mr. Cantoni can be reached at craigcantoni@gmail.com.