The New Urban Crisis

   Richard Florida went from Newark-born son of a factory foreman to Rutgers student to long-term professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburg. He saw how Pittsburg kept hemorrhaging its population, no matter how many tax breaks it offered. He asks why all the tech companies were going to Boston, New York City, San Francisco, and Silicon Valley, when the cost of living in those places was so high? What was unattractive about Pittsburg if the living cost was so law and there were so many financial incentives to be there?  The answer is that the talent was in Boston, NYC, and the West Coast, but nobody with the talent wanted to live in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania.

    Professor Florida’s research shows cities, not the suburbs, to be the most government-dependent. Factory closings make the city ground zero for unemployment, along with a loss of income tax revenue, and if the houses are deserted, they lose property tax income and the schools suffer. Worse still, poverty has been reaching the suburbs in the last few years (and this is not the first book about it) so there’s less refuge for those fleeing the city. He blames a lot of it on poor infrastructure in cities and suburbs, especially in car-dependent communities (forget about biking to work in the snow) where no car means no getting to work. I remember being a teenager in Nassau County, and my summer job options were limited to camp counselor (lucky to make minimum wage there) unless I found one in the city ($8 to use the LIRR) or found a job nearby (forget about biking to work on the highway) in the county.

    Gentrification (now a dirtier word than NIMBY) is a problem too. He recounts taking flak for suggesting that small, quiet jets be allowed to land in Toronto. The response was an extreme “absolutely no” even though the city needed the revenue. It was the elites who were against the jets at the airports (turboprop only) even though there wouldn’t really be much noise from them (we’re talking about small jets, not 747’s.) All the “no noise” and “no building” demands were going on at the same time as a financial deficit, and into the strife waded Rob Ford, the big unhealthy drug-using mayor, who tore up the bike lanes and plowed up the nostalgia. The people who voted for him were the less-educated, fed up with stagnation and with little use for creative arts districts. They welcomed the malls because they provided jobs.

    At the same time, Florida is not entirely sympathetic to the anti-gentrification lobby. He criticizes Spike Lee, and his analogy of “white mothers pushing strollers down 125^th street at 3am” which he equates with neocolonialism. However, the author cites how 40 years ago the Black leadership criticized “White flight,” while at the same time attacked the few Whites who moved in as interlopers. If you read Judith Maitloff’s memoir Home Girl then you’ll see an unusual shift; in the early 2000’s, it was the educated Black residents who were happy to see Whites moving into Harlem. Elderly Black men and women, part of Harlem’s creative class (a lot of them were educators) were fed up with the crime and filth. They were fed up with the Dominican drug dealers, and fed up with the out-of-state plated cars pulling up to buy drugs. They were happy to see White people moving in. It makes you think.

    I don’t agree with a lot of his descriptions of gentrification, however. Soho wasn’t really gentrified (nobody got evicted), it simply went from an industrial zone to a residential one. The artist’s lofts were all owned by the artists, sold to them as co-op apartments. Take for instance 80 Wooster Street, one of the early artist spaces in the area. The artists bought the lofts for $10,000 each in the 1970’s, and so what if they sold them 20 years later for 50 times that? These artists paid their dues, and they’re entitled to profit. As for it becoming a place of overpriced stores, that’s life, it’s going to happen one way or the other. Furthermore, thanks to rent-control and tenant protections, few people were evicted from their homes in NYC. The real problem is that when the rent-controlled tenant’s daughter turns 22 and wants her own place, she won’t find an affordable one nearby. Will she opt for an apartment in a disreputable area, or a safe and cheap neighborhood that’s an hour and a half from her job?

    As for the “creative class” that the author doesn’t seem to like, they’re hardly powerful by any means. The average creative types in Manhattan and Brooklyn are making less than $45k and are crammed five to an apartment. As far as the poor go, the author quotes Patrick Sharkey’s book Stuck in Place, about multi-generational poverty. Newcomers can’t be responsible for a problem that existed long before they arrived.

    I’ll sum up by saying that no building in this country has lasted since the dawn of time. The author mentions childhood trips to the Woodbridge Mall in New Jersey, a wonderful suburban experience. What the author forgets is that the mall was built on the site of the old Woodbridge clay pits, and the backwoods people who lived there must have been evicted. Did anybody hear their complaints?