The Creative Class

I've heard a lot about the "creative class" lately (NPR had a story this morning). All our cities need is some gays, some rockers, some coffee shops and some artists and we will all be living the vida loca! There is a shuckster out there by the name of Richard Florida who is one of the primary popularizers of these ideas, and he gets payed a lot of money (the Bader Foundation in Milwaukee just gave him a bunch for speaking here) because lots of city planners and intellectuals love to hear that they are the most productive and important members of social and economic systems. They traffic in it because it's a lot easier to say, look at these new condos and this great new club, see how our city is changing for the better even though populations and wages are declining in central cities in the US. Milwaukee has a lot of this talk lately, downtown is reviving, a new urban space is being created because gays, rockers, and coffee shops are now in the hood.

The problem with this approach can be summed up in one word, JOBS. People moved to Milwaukee for 100 years because we built tractors, brewed beer, designed and manufactured tools and dies for other industries, because we built motorcycles and engines. We made things. Now we don't. And it was not just because we made things in Milwaukee, Detroit, Cleveland, Troy, Albany, and other upper Midwest cities that these cities prospered it was because the workers in these industries organized to demand high wages and benefits that created demand thus raising the standard of living for all in our communities.

The new urbanists and Florida's ilk want us to believe that if we spend our monies on sports stadiums, convention centers and high end performing arts centers we will bring in the "right" kind of diverse people and we'll see them in their outdoor cafe's and this will cause a turn around for urban poverty. Well I think they have it exactly backward. If you have decent high paying jobs people will move anywhere. How many thousands recently applied for the longshoremen jobs in California? How many thousands lined up for auto worker jobs because there was a rumor of jobs last year.

I think people like Florida don't really believe their own propaganda or at least the people that pay their bills don't because we knew in Milwaukee that the convention center would be a colossal drain on funds in this city and would only serve a small group of hotel owners, builders, and restauranteers. We also knew the same for the baseball stadium that sits open 2/3rds of the year and wasn't even put downtown because of the suburban constituency that it serves. Cities like Milwaukee now play the role, at least in the central part, as low wage ghettos. Basketball arenas, convention centers, hotels, restaurants, and other entertainment centers dominate some of our most storied cities. Low wage service workers help keep the prices low for these venues. The central city has reversed its historical role from center to periphery. Suburbanites now use the city primarily for a playground that has been made easily accesible by transportation systems that allow easy access in and out of the city.

Milwaukee and other cities like it need high paying jobs. And if coffee shop staff, rock club bouncers and bartenders and gay go-go dancers got paid $46,000 with decent health benefits and a pension I would be cheering right along with Florida. But in the meantime I say lets have socialized medicine, an industrial policy, support for trade unions on a massive scale and local government that helps people train for the skills that will allow them to make a decent living while they work and a long prosperous vacation when they retire.