Loudoun County’s economic success depends upon its ability to attract members of the so-called creative class, County Administrator Kirby Bowers said during his State of the County speech yesterday. Accordingly, the county needs to address quality-of-life issues that appeal to these knowledge workers. Writes Megan Kuhn in Leesburg2Day:
Persuading knowledge workers to live in Loudoun is not just about the price of housing, Bowers said. It’s about, “Is Loudoun a cool place?” he said. The development of mixed-use centers with entertainment and nightlife is essential to attracting such coveted workers.
There are “cool” places in Loudoun County, but they are very small communities — Leesburg, Middleburg, Waterford, Purcellville — and they can’t absorb the thousands of knowledge workers flocking to the county. Indeed, the urbanized newcomers threaten to swamp and destroy the village-scale coolness exists in the county. Meanwhile, new development takes the form of scattered, disconnected, low-density development that is the antithesis of “cool.”
As creative-class guru Richard Florida explained it, creative workers value places with diversity and authenticity. Demographic monocultures — subdivisions of houses inhabited by nuclear families in the same income range and age range — do not provide diversity. Disconnected pods of houses and shopping centers, accessible only by car, do not lend themselves to the kind of spontaneous street art and personal interaction that Florida celebrates. Sterile office complexes set in isolated parks — what Florida labels “nerdistans” — are not the kinds of places where creative young people want to work.
Virtually everything that I’ve seen built in Loudoun County in recent years is calculated to repel the creative class. People may continue to move into the county because so little housing is being built anywhere else in the Washington metropolitan area, but that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t move somewhere else if they had half a chance.
