The Antiplanner’s Library:
Richard Florida’s The New Urban Crisis

In a review of Richard Florida’s recent book, The New Urban Crisis, left-wing writer Sam Wetherell says that cities that have followed Florida’s “creative class” prescriptions “are becoming gated communities” for the rich, “or at least the college-educated children of the rich.” They suffer from increased inequality, gentrification pushing the poor out to the suburbs, and a disappearing middle class.

As a socialist, Wetherell believes the problem is a crisis of capitalism. But really the problem is a crisis of big government. Whatever the source of the problem, Wetherell claims that, in The New Urban Crisis, even Florida “all but admits that he was wrong,” though “he stops just short of saying it.”

In fact, Florida doesn’t say he was wrong at all. Instead, his prescriptions for the New Urban Crisis are the same as his prescriptions for the old one: more density, more transit, more government controls such as minimum wage laws.

Florida certainly admits that the “superstar” cities he favors have “increasingly unaffordable housing prices and staggering levels of inequality.” He points out that, 40 years ago, New York City was quite affordable (as were San Francisco, San Jose, and Los Angeles). He even cites Matthew Rognlie‘s research showing that unaffordable housing is the primary cause of growing inequality. But Florida never comes close to saying that any of his prescriptions have made housing unaffordable or increased inequality.

As Wetherell sensed but never says, it is Florida’s density prescription that makes housing unaffordable because, to increase density in a world where people have the mobility to live where they want, cities must use urban-growth boundaries or other containment policies. The transit prescription contributes to this because dense cities become more congested and people who don’t want to drive in congestion have to live in those neighborhoods where planners are willing to extend transit lines.

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Florida’s book never explicitly endorses growth boundaries or growth management. But he does endorse minimum wage controls, rent controls, inclusionary zoning, and other government efforts to interfere with the free market. Although he admits that these aren’t the most efficient solutions to the problems, all of his solutions involve one form of government control or another.

Florida loves to point out how successful his “creative class” cities have become. “Just six metro areas–the San Francisco Bay Area, New York, Boston, Washington, DC, San Diego, and London–attract nearly half of all high-tech venture capital across the entire world.” But he may be confusing cause and effect. It is likely that cities that attract this capital also attract the people who give the cities a high “Bohemian” index, not that the density and other factors that Florida favors are what attracted the venture capital.

Neither San Diego nor San Jose really meet Florida’s ideas of what a city should look like. Neither have really dense downtowns and their transit systems are little more than show pieces that few people use. Fifty years ago, they were the epitome of sprawl. San Jose got rich because of its proximity to Stanford University, and the urban-growth boundaries it adopted in the mid-1970s made the area dense. While overall densities today are high, those densities are spread out, not concentrated like San Francisco or Manhattan.

It is really hard to say San Diego and San Jose have anything in common with New York and San Francisco except that all of them have adopted policies that made housing expensive and pushed out the poor. There is no better way to increase average incomes than to exclude low-income people from the average.

So I’m not convinced that Florida really understands the New Urban Crisis or that this crisis is a direct result of planning by the New Urbanists who enthusiastically received Florida’s earlier works. Certainly, Wetherell doesn’t understand that the inequality, gentrification, and other problems in our cities are due to government mismanagement, not capitalism run amuck.