Once again urbanologist Joel Kotkin has taken to the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal to confound currently popular thinking about regional prosperity. This time, he tackles those enamored with the “creative class,” or, more properly speaking, those who build their economic development strategies around chasing the “dream demographic” of the young, hip, urban members of the creative class. The real growth, Kotkin contends, is occurring in regions that have proven themselves attractive to young families raising children.
Married people with children, Kotkin observes, “are twice as likely to be in the top 20% of income earners, according to the Census, and their incomes have been rising.” Spoofing the “brew latte and they will come” theory of economic development, he argues that the path to prosperity is creating regions that are family friendly. As he quotes one Philadelphia official, “We have to look at the parks, the playgrounds and the schools.”
As always, Kotkin provides a maddening mix of insight and confusion.
Yes, Kotkin is right, a region cannot build prosperity on young, yip urban singles, empty nesters, gays and bohemians alone. The full demographic panoply is required. While the so-called “nuclear family” is undoubtedly in decline, it is still predominant. Most people still want to get married and raise children — and most do. Their requirements are quite different from those of the young, hip and restless. And they are migrating in large numbers out of great American cities such as New York, Chicago and San Francisco to less “cool” places like Charlotte, Raleigh and Atlanta.
Yeah, the 24-year-old computer programmer with spiked hair may be willing to work 20 hours a day on dot.com start-ups, living off Jolt cola and pizzas. But the boring old “family guy” and his spouse tend to be older and more mature, have more on-the-job experience, have added more to their educational credentials, have climbed farther up the corporate ladder, have a broader network of professional contacts, earn a higher income and have accumulated more wealth than the 24-year-old still paying off his college loans.
While “creative class” guru Richard Florida argues that the creative class magnets like Boston, Austin and San Francisco are characterized by cultural diversity, tolerance and coolness, I have long argued that more culturally conservative communities like Richmond, Roanoke and Hampton Roads could build their base of human capital by acting as magnets for families with kids. The Richmond region does have a small but vibrant hip/gay/bohemian community focused on Shockoe Bottom and Virginia Commonwealth University in downtown, but the region is predominantly a “family guy” kind of place. That’s what we are, and we just need to be comfortable with it, and not try to be something we’re not. Indeed, as Kotkin says, we should turn it into an advantage.
But Kotkin gets one very important thing confused. He celebrates “economic and demographic growth,” as measured by job creation and population growth. He implicitly equates growth with prosperity. But prosperity, I contend, is something quite different. A better measure of prosperity is per capita income, adjusted for the regional cost of living and burden of state/local taxes, along with a host of quality-of-life indicators. By fixating on growth as the desiderata, Kotkin ignores the strains that a surging population places on public finance, the environment, traffic congestion, and affordable/accessible housing.
By contrast, Richard Florida focuses on per capita income as a measure of prosperity — and he is quite right to do so. For all of my criticisms of his fetish with “diversity” and “tolerance,” which come across as code words for San Francisco-style cultural values, I think Florida comes closer to getting it right than Kotkin does.
