Tag: Creative class
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Transience and Fresh Blood, Two Sides of the Same Coin
Every community needs fresh blood — newcomers who bring different perspectives and creative ideas. But it’s possible to have too much of a good thing. If everyone is a newcomer, communities lose social cohesion. Transients don’t have the same stake in a community that the old-timers do and they’re less likely, all other things being equal, to…
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Redefining Richmond: Arts! Culture! Food!
by James A. Bacon Richmonders berate themselves (and outsiders mock them) for their inability to decide where and how to build a baseball stadium for a AA baseball team. If the region’s political and civic leadership can’t pull off this most basic of regional tasks, one might legitimately wonder if they can accomplish anything useful…
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More Awesomeness in Richmond
Another reason I love my home town: Richmond has 40 miles of world-class single-track bicycle trails. I’ve been on a few of them, although, I do confess, I don’t ride nearly as fast as the two guys in this short video! (Nor can I do the neat wheelie tricks up and down stairs.) What I…
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Live Art
It was a gorgeous day in Richmond yesterday, temperature in the high 60s and the most perfect blue sky I have ever seen — the ideal setting for street artists to ply their craft. In the second annual RVA Street Art Festival, nearly 30 painters gathered at the old GRTC bus garages this week and…
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Let’s Jump on the Peer-to-Peer Bandwagon
Vested interests in cities around the country are mobilizing to thwart a new generation of peer-to-peer technologies threatening to disrupt the lodging and transportation industries. I have documented the difficulties of Uber, the e-hailing service (tap on your smart phone app and an Uber limo comes to pick you up), in Washington, D.C., where it…
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Misunderstanding the Link between Taxes and Economic Development
by James A. Bacon In his latest post at the Atlantic Cities blog, Richard Florida asserts that a “lower state income tax does not spur economic development.” In support of his proposition, he argues that states with higher tax burdens are more affluent; they have higher concentrations of talent and workers in the so-called “creative”…
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The Limits of the Creative Class
In a blog post on “New Geography,” Joel Kotkin unloads with both barrels on Richard Florida and the ailing cities that paid him big consulting fees to help reinvent themselves — for the most part unsuccessfully — as “hip and cool” places appealing to the creative class. Kotkin’s riff was inspired, apparently, by a recent…
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The New Geography of Jobs
by James A. Bacon “The New Geography of Jobs” is arguably the most important book about urban economics published in 2012. Author Enrico Moretti, an Italian-born economics professor at Berkeley, analyzes the great divergence occurring between metropolitan regions in the United States. While much of his narrative about the “innovation” sector as the key driver…
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Solid Thinking about Richmond’s Future
by James A. Bacon Richmond’s Future, a regional think tank founded by former Virginia Commonwealth University President Eugene Trani, is spear-heading the most interesting conversations taking place today about the future path of the region’s economic development. It’s a welcome change from the regional leadership’s old habit of touring other cities in the search of…
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Tourism and the Creative Class
by James A. Bacon A draft plan written by PriceWaterhouseCoopers LLP makes a valuable contribution to thinking realistically and creatively about Virginia tourism. The “Virginia State Tourism Plan” comes tantalizingly close to integrating the development of tourism initiatives with economic development in the Knowledge Economy… but never quite completes the loop. Virginians have long touted…
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Hi-ho, Heyo, It’s Off to Blacksburg We Go!
Yesterday I argued that the economic odds were stacked against Virginia’s smaller metropolitan areas when it came to stimulating the start-up and growth of technology businesses. Economies of scale in the knowledge economy, I suggested, favor large regions with larger, more diverse labor pools. Could I have been wrong? (What, me wrong? Never!) This morning,…
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Innovation and Business-Establishment Density
by James A. Bacon In previous posts, I have postulated that some human settlement patterns do more than others to promote creativity and innovation. Following the lead of such thinkers as urbanist Jane Adams, architect Leon Krier and economic geographer Richard Florida, I have suggested that certain urban forms — cul de sac subdivisions, massive…
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The Entertainment Economy — Double-Edged Sword
by James A. Bacon As robots, artificial intelligence and other labor saving innovations penetrate the economy, traditional jobs that entail making things or providing routine services — Toro is testing a robotic lawn mower for golf courses, for Pete’s sake — could disappear. The only jobs that will be left, it seems, are those in…
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Cool Richmond: Two Hours from the Beach… and One Minute from Itself
by James A. Bacon The denizens of River City are ecstatic about Outside magazine’s designation of Richmond as the “Best River Town in America.” The recognition is very cool, considering the competition. Better than Ashville, N.C., and Durango, Colo., cities known for their connection to the great outdoors? Yessss! (Fist pump!) Cynics might observe that…
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The Great Jobs-Skills Mismatch
by James A. Bacon Much of the unemployment in the United States is tied to cyclical economic factors like swings in housing starts and industrial production but some of it stems from a mismatch between the jobs available and the skills of unemployed workers, contends Brookings Institution scholar Jonathan Rothwell in a new article, “Education,…