One of the claims made by Indianapolis transit advocates was that improved transit would help the region “compete for jobs and talent.” They cited a study by a group called CEOs for Cities that found that “Young adults with a four-year degree are 94% more likely to live in close-in urban neighborhoods than their counterparts with less education.”
This is the old Richard Florida idea that cities should strive to attract the “creative class” of well-educated people that want to live in lively cities with walkable, transit-intensive neighborhoods. Ninety-four percent sounds like a big number, but let’s put this into context.
The CEOs for Cities study defined “close in” as neighborhoods near downtowns housing an average of less than 5 percent of urban area populations. “Young adults” includes people in the 25- to 34-year-old age class. The 2010 Census found that about 31.5 percent of this age class has a four-year degree or better. If this group is 94 percent more likely to live close in than their cohorts without a four-year degree, then less than 7.5 percent of young, well-educated adults live “close in.” This is less than 2.5 percent more than might be expected if the population was evenly distributed by education class.
While 2.5 percent hardly seems enough to justify spending billions of dollars on transit, there are other reasons that have nothing to do with transit that would lead to a disproportionate number of well-educated people to live close in. For one thing, land near downtowns is more expensive, and therefore so is housing. Well-educated people are likely to have higher incomes, so are more likely to be able to afford to live close in, regardless of their transit preferences.
In addition, downtown jobs tend to be in finance, insurance, and real estate–jobs that tend to demand better educations. So it makes sense that well-educated people would tend to live closer to downtown regardless of their transit preferences. In other words, there is no reason to think that transit has anything to do with attracting this group of people.
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Besides, the whole “creative class” idea was just exploded by a new study published by the Portland Business Alliance. “Higher Education and Regional Prosperity” asks why average Portland-area incomes have fallen from nearly 5 percent more than the national average in 1997 to nearly 5 percent less than the national average in 2010.
It turns out that the incomes of less-educated Portland-area workers have kept pace with national averages. Nearly 96 percent of the decline in average Portland incomes is due to falling incomes among the well-educated, and most of that is due to people in the 25- to 39-year-old age class.
These young, well-educated people who Portland attracted at Richard Florida’s advice have not creatively boosted the region’s income and fortunes. Instead, they are working fewer hours than their cohorts in other metro areas, and fewer than older workers. When they do work, they tend to work in lower-paying occupations and earn less, per hour, than their cohorts in similar occupations in other metro areas. “Attracting college-educated workers is not enough,” concludes the study.
The study is careful to say that the problem might be that there just aren’t enough jobs for those workers. But Florida’s creative class is supposed to create its own jobs.
This whole scheme is a house of cards that is falling down in Portland and certainly won’t work in Indianapolis or other urban areas. The creative class supposedly wants transit, so everyone else has to subsidize it for them. The creative class supposedly wants high-density, mixed-use housing, so everyone else has to subsidize it for them. The creative-class supposedly wants walkable and bicycle-friendly streets, so everyone else has to subsidize it and put up with more congestion for them. Portland has given them everything they supposedly want, and they decided to come to Portland to retire and sleep to eleven.
How many 25 year old CEO’s do you see? The urbanophiles usually grow up and decide the city isn’t worth it. I was born and raised in Baltimore and if they could afford to hire 2000 additional cops, I might move back. I personally wish why city was cleaner, greener, and safer, just not in the cards but it’s getting better.
Portland used to have a thriving forest products industry and was headquarters to a few such companies. But 30 years to environmental resurgence have chased away the forest industry. Companies are leaving the city left and right. Business are failing because the “creative class” are not exactly the clientele they want. They have imagination but no skill. I know someone who drove through Portland everyday; in his own words…”collapse is all over prime real estate is sitting just rotting. Streets torn up pot holes every where But wait…Portland just ordered millions of dollars for new bike lanes….Yea that makes allot of sense” Because freight is apparently delivered by bicycle. While Portland’s reputation for livability and its creative class ethos has fulfilled the first part of that equation, it hasn’t done much in the way of invigorating their economy. And it’s overabundance of overeducated, underemployed citizens creates a great deal of competition for few jobs and therefore also depresses salaries. Or, as the IFC series Portlandia puts it, our city is where young people come to retire. The creative class aren’t exactly creating new products, at least none for export. Even if it has lower cost of living it does not offset Portlands lower wages, and consequently it is actually less affordable to live in the Portland region than in other creative class cities like Seattle, Denver, or Minneapolis. Their high school graduation rates are lower than state average. Creative folks wanna just live around other creative folks in a fun city. I think the problem is that the creative types who live here are more interested in local ventures (opening new restaurants and bike and coffee shops) than in creating new export industries. They’re not interested in interstate or international commerce and uninterested in investing in anything beyond the local community. This Localism movement is really a youth revolt against the supposed evils and blandness of corporations and big business. Big Pharma, Big Agriculture, Heavy industry, trucking, shipping, manufacturing, which appears fine when your in your teens and 20’s, not so much later on in life.
If only we had more “cool kids” in our city…..
Urban planning seems to be intellectually bankrupt. Florida’s dumb theory was all about wish fulfillment. We’d like lots of hot young people to come to our city. We don’t want highly paid, blue collar manufacturing jobs, because those guys are not HOT and fashionable. We wan to attract people to our urban core we want to date. As you may know, our last mayor was caught in the men’s room kissing a teenage intern. I honestly think that the urban planners have a “boner” for the so-called creative class.
BTW- as a creative person (in the conventional sense) I never understood why I was classed with engineers.
Also- what artist needs city planning? All urban planning does is force artists out of cheap lofts. In Portland, I predict a decline in music because no one can get a “band house” anymore (a cheap place for the whole band to live, with a basement for practice). There’s no room for musicians in the new micro-apartments with no parking.
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I should not have mentioned the mayor’s kissing incident, as it is off point.
However, I do wonder about the Freudian aspects of city planning. The “Creative Class” is better described as the ” Physically Attractive Class.” Part of the allure of the other super group, the bike lobby, is they look good. Cyclists are more ripped than other voters.
The goal was for planners to attract new young people. The idea being these will end up the next Mark Zuckerburg, Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. Formally obscure people whose ideas made them exceedingly wealthy which would be good for the city. After all billionaires pay taxes out the ass and if they headquarter their company there, the better. It’s just like the Hollywood pursuit. Thousands of people go to Hollywood to show off their stuff, they wanna be actors, musicians, entertainers and most of them are particularly untalented. They cant sing, cant act, cant dance. And a lot of them are not specifically educated, skilled or trained so they latch on to the entitlement and oppositional crowds. And in California and Oregon, they’ve won. They’ve chased away lucrative industries for reasons of environ-mentality. Can’t mine for rare earth metals (even though they’re crucial for the electric cars they want). The celebrity environmentalists chased away the forest products industry in the name of endangered species, now they import soft wood from Canada.
The result is a huge surplus of new residents who are not significant tax contributors but still place demand on public services. California is now the largest welfare state. Their total population is 1/8th of the nations total yet they have 33% of the nations welfare recipients. The free market apparently failed for some of these cities who’ve reached their peaks so the last resort is to hire a group of planners and enact laws to manipulate the people of business to operate close to them so they collect the rewards (taxes).
People who denounce the free market and voluntary exchange, and are for control and coercion, believe they have more intelligence and superior wisdom to the masses. What’s more, they believe they’ve been ordained to forcibly impose that wisdom on the rest of us. Of course, they have what they consider good reasons for doing so, but every tyrant that has ever existed has had what he believed were good reasons for restricting the liberty of others.
Somewhat off topic.
Here’s why planners suck.
Too much control. I am over 40 and don’t need a ducking nanny. If I wanna have beer or tobacco or cannabis delivered, it’s none of your ducking business. GTFO of my business. There’s a $1.8 billion basic transportation maintenance backlog in Seattle. Fix the ducking roads, planners.
The problem is assuming that companies need workers with college degrees. They don’t need people with degrees, they need workers with skills. If cities want to be successful they need to not focus on attracting the creative class but people with skills for STEM jobs.