Category: Richard Florida

U.S. youth less car-crazy than their elders?

Something is changing in America. People aren’t driving as much – even taking into account that the recession and unemployment reduces commuting. Several people, including a writer for Ad Age magazine, have noticed a dip in the rates at which young people are getting driver’s licenses.

Jack Neff, writing in the May 31 AdAge.com, says, “The automobile, once a rite of passage for American youth, is becoming less relevant to a growing number of people under 30.” His piece shows the stats that back up that thesis.

Similarly, Nate Silver, writing in the May 6 Esquire, opens his piece this way: “This is surely one of the signs of the apocalypse: Americans aren’t driving as much as they used to.”

And the ubiquitous Richard Florida, writing at theatlantic.com, points to Neff and Silver’s articles and ponders whether his predicted “great reset” is taking place. This view dovetails nicely with Florida’s new book, “The Great Reset.” He’s been writing about “resets” for the Atlantic for some time now.

If you read the pieces it’s hard not to think they’re onto something. AdAge, especially, is known more for pointing to consumer trends than for worrying about issues such as the fiscal and environmental irresponsibility of suburban sprawl.

But here’s another sign that something truly is changing. Automakers *#8211; who have nothing if not a history of extraordinarily effecting ad campaigns – are changing the backdrops on their ads, using more sexy urban scenes and fewer beautiful wilderness scenes. Catherine Lutz and Anne Lutz Fernandez point this out in a June 3 Huffington Post piece, From Upstream to Downtown: Car Ads Head to the City. The two are authors of the book “Carjacked: The Culture of the Automobile and its Effect on Our Lives.” In the HuffPost piece, they write, “Just when some of us have decided we want to live in places where we don’t have to be quite so dependent on the automobile, the automobile is trying to follow us there.”

If you’re interested in more about “Carjacked” – a book I recommend as one that looks at the world in ways you probably hadn’t thought of before – here’s a Q/A I did with Fernandez for OnEarth.org.

Megaregions: Next big thing? Or just nutty?

Alan Ehrenhalt, respected editor of Governing magazine, has weighed in on the issue of “megaregions,” wherein he questions this decades-old theory that metro regions (e.g. CharLanta( need to be treated as one entity. Hence the term, CharLanta.

I don’t intend to be on a Richard Florida kick (See my posting about “The Ruse of the Creative Class”) but Ehrenhalt does quote Florida as hopping on the au courant megaregions trend. But he goes on to note that transportation is one area in which planning regionally, or more to the point, megaregionally, makes sense.

Megaregionally? Charlotte can’t even come up with transportation planning that recognizes that Cabarrus, Iredell and York counties have anything to do with traffic in Mecklenburg! As a certain editorial writer on the Observer’s editorial board who is also a blogger opined Jan. 3 (you folks in the Charlotte region probably slept late and missed this):

Plan Transportation Regionally

It sounds like a bizarre camaraderie of dwarfs: MUMPO, GUAMPO, CRMPO, GHMPO and RFATS (in the Disney version he’d be the chubby, clumsy one). Let us not forget LNRPO and RRRPO (the small but snarling pirate dwarf?).
As if the names aren’t funny enough, here’s a thigh-slapper: All seven are transportation planning agencies for greater Charlotte.
Even if you toss out GHMPO (Greater Hickory Metropolitan Planning Organization) you still have an insane number of separate agencies ostensibly planning transportation in one metro region. And if you don’t think transportation planning in Rock Hill-Fort Mill (RFATS) and LNRPO (Lake Norman Rural Planning Organization) doesn’t affect transportation throughout the greater Charlotte region, well, you haven’t traveled on Interstate 77.
Ask most planners and they’ll tell you – off the record of course, so as not to tick off politicians – that sane transportation planning is mere fantasy until all six or seven MPOs and RPOs merge into one true metropolitan planning organization.
MPOs are federally mandated to plan “regionally.” Indeed, Title 23 of the U.S. Code says an MPO should cover a whole metro area. However, smaller cities such as Gastonia or Concord have little interest in joining with the Mecklenburg behemoth, fearing their share of state and federal transportation money would shrink.
If the region’s governments won’t do the right thing, the state should force it. At least two men in Raleigh get it. N.C. Department of Transportation Secretary Gene Conti is savvy about transportation policy, politics and about true regional planning. So is Sen. Dan Clodfelter, a Charlotte Democrat whose seniority and smarts have given him significant clout in Raleigh.
And both states must figure out how an MPO can cross state lines, so York County, S.C., can join the region’s transportation planning. Cincinnati, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., all have multi-state MPOs. It can’t be rocket science.

To read all six of the editorial board’s Agenda 2010 items, visit this link.

‘The Ruse of the Creative Class’

Is Richard Florida, author (“The Rise of the Creative Class”), professor and guru of the Creative Class philosophy, just another Harold Hill selling bohemian coffee shops and brew pubs, instead of band instruments to gullible townspeople?

An article in the American Prospect, “The Ruse of the Creative Class,” by Washington Post writer Alec MacGillis inches up to that conclusion – without completely landing it. But MacGillis point to the huge number of cities such as Elmira, N.Y., and Cleveland, that embraced Florida’s theories – some of them paying rather a lot of money to his consulting firm – but haven’t yet found creative class nirvana.

MacGillis writes, “… by some measures, yuppie idylls like San Francisco and Boston have lagged behind unhip, low-tax bastions like Houston and Charlotte, North Carolina.”

Ouch! Unhip? Us? (And I know plenty of people are yelping, “low-tax”??!!!)

The lengthy article is nuanced and points out many complexities, and quotes Florida at length answering his critics. I recommend reading it – before you come to any knee-jerk decision on whether you do or don’t agree with it, or with Florida.

That said, my take on Florida’s theories goes roughly like this: He pinpoints something that has been important in some cities, but there’s no silver bullet that will solve what ails many cities. If a city attracts more artists and creative types, it generally prospers. But simply declaring one’s city to be “creative” doesn’t make it so, nor does paying a consultant to come tell you you should be creative. (Charlotte tried that a while back. I don’t think we’re any more or less creative than we would have been. We’re bigger now, so we have higher numbers of “creatives” but I’m pretty sure that was a result of growth, not any study for which anyone got paid.) Cities are organic and develop in organic ways that are hard to manage and predict.

Creative class, raise your hand

Social theorist Richard Florida has both champions and skeptics. Joel Kotkin, for instance, who spoke in Charlotte in October at the Partners for Livable Communities conference, pooh-poohs Florida’s theories.

But one big national foundation is putting money into figuring out how to apply Florida’s theories to Charlotte.We’re one of three cities starting a Knight Creative Communities Initiative. Others are Tallahassee, Fla., and Duluth, Minn.

Florida, in his bestseller, “The Rise of the Creative Class,” uses data to show that cities that prosper (at least in the measures he sets) also happen to be attractive to what he calls the creative class. The creative class are young, well-educated and work in jobs that require creativity. Cities that attract them, Florida says, also exhibit tolerance for immigrants, newcomers, artists and gays.

Note, he doesn’t say the gay people, per se, are the creative class. The point is that the civic soil that promotes tolerance also seems to be a fertile habitat for the creative class – and for economic prosperity. The Creative Communities Initiative is being launched by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, in partnership with seven major Charlotte-area groups as well as Richard Florida. It’s seeking 30 volunteers, “community catalysts.”

Think you’re a creative class community catalyst? To apply, visit UNC Charlotte’s Urban Institute web site.

Other community partners are: the Arts & Science Council, Central Piedmont Community College, the Charlotte Chamber, the Charlotte Regional Partnership, Foundation for the Carolinas and The Lee Institute.

What’s the Knight Foundation and how does it relate to the formerly Knight Ridder-owned Charlotte Observer? The foundation is completely separate from the paper, though its money originally came from the family that founded the “Knight” part of Knight Ridder. Here’s some info: “The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation promotes excellence in journalism worldwide and invests in the vitality of U.S. communities where the Knight brothers owned newspapers (one of which is Charlotte).”