For years, Charlotte’s leaders have wanted to attract certain kinds of people to the Queen City: successful married couples in their 30s and 40s, people with children, stable jobs and middle-to-upper level incomes. Fifteen to 20 years ago, that was fine. But not anymore, says Richard Florida, professor of regional economic development at Carnegie Mellon University and best selling author of the book The Rise of the Creative Class, a book that has turned heads and fired discussions nationwide.
“Census numbers don’t lie,” Florida says. “Middle-aged yuppies are no longer driving the economy.”
Less than a quarter of American households now consist of traditional nuclear families, but cities continue to focus on those people’s needs, ignoring the most critical engine of economic growth in modern society — young, innovative, highly educated people, those who make up what Florida calls the “creative class.” In a modern, high-tech world of rapidly changing markets, they are the segment of the workforce on whose efforts corporate profits and economic growth increasingly depend, Florida says.
After watching businesses and talented young people leave his adopted hometown of Pittsburgh, Florida began to wonder where they were going and why. Over the past decade, Pittsburgh had launched programs to diversify the region’s economy and attract high tech industry. It rebuilt its downtown, invested in its airport, and built a sprawling new sports complex for the Steelers and the Pirates. Between Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh, the city is the US’s sixth largest center for college students and a national magnet for university research funding. Pittsburgh is home to museums and cultural venues of national caliber, has affordable housing and even scored the coveted title of “America’s Most Livable City” in the 1986 Rand McNally survey.
Yet one of the most popular destinations for Pittsburgh’s highly coveted young college grads was Austin, Texas, a place that at the time had a small airport, no professional sports teams and lacked a major symphony, ballet, opera or museum comparable to Pittsburgh’s.
So Florida set out to figure out why these young people were eschewing Pittsburgh for places like Austin, Boston, Washington, DC, and Seattle. Florida found the answer almost by coincidence.
In 1998 he met Gary Gates, a doctoral student at Carnegie Mellon who happened to be studying the location patterns of gays at the same time Florida was studying the location choices of high-tech industries and talented people. When the two men compared their lists of the country’s high-tech spots and high gay concentrations, the lists were surprisingly similar. Other measures Florida came up with, like the Bohemian Index, a measure of places with high concentrations of artists, writers and performers, produced similar results.
“Many highly creative people, regardless of ethnic background or sexual orientation, grew up feeling like outsiders, different in some way from most of their schoolmates,” Florida writes. “When they are sizing up a new company or community, acceptance of diversity and of gays in particular is a sign that reads, “non-standard people welcome here.'”
So how badly should a city want the long-haired freaky people of the creative class running around? Very badly, says Florida. He claims the creative class now includes some 38.3 million Americans, roughly 30 percent of the entire US workforce, up from 10 percent at the turn of the 20th century and around 20 percent in the early 1980s. These people, he says, have considerable spending power. In 1999, the average salary for a creative classer was nearly $50,000 compared to $28,000 for a working-class member and $22,000 for a service-class worker, which explains why regions with large numbers of creative class members are becoming increasingly affluent.
Who are these people?
They’re entrepreneurs in everything from computer technology to fashion. They may own their own businesses or they may work for already established companies that are trying to keep pace in rapidly changing markets. They’re not just the folks profiting from innovation, they’re the people driving it, and are often among the most talented people in emerging or rapidly changing fields. They do a wide variety of work in a wide variety of industries — everything from entertainment to finance to high-end manufacturing, journalism, advertising and the arts. Though they do not consciously think of themselves as a class, they share common values of “creativity, individuality, difference and merit.”
According to census figures, only 23 percent of those Florida defines as members of the creative class live in nuclear families and only 7 percent of those are families with a stay-at-home mother. The rest of the households are very different configurations — a single parent with kids, someone who’s adopted kids, and a significant percentage of folks who are either single or divorced with no children. That’s why Florida believes cities can no longer offer just one bundle of one-size-fits-all amenities.
“You now have 75 percent of your most affluent population requiring a very different amenities bundle,” said Florida.
Cities that attract them, Florida says, have higher levels of what he calls “quality of place.” Decisions made by the creative class about where to live are based in large part on their lifestyle interests, which vary somewhat, Florida says, from the standard “quality-of-life” amenities most cities think are important.
“(Cities) pay lip service to the need to attract talent but continue to pour resources into recruiting call centers, underwriting big box retailers, subsidizing downtown malls or squandering precious taxpayer dollars on extravagant stadium complexes,” says Florida. “These places have institutional sclerosis.”
In an interview with Creative Loafing, Florida said that not once during any of his focus groups and interviews did members of the creative class mention professional sports playing any role in their choice of where to live and work. Instead, he said that one of the most important lifestyle amenities these people wanted was a vibrant, varied nightlife with a wide mix of options, a sign, Florida said, that a city “gets it.”
The creative class craves stimulation, he says, not escape. They’re fascinated by urban grit alongside renovated buildings, the commingling of young and old, longtime neighborhood characters and yuppies, fashion models and bag ladies. It was felt by most, Florida said, that a place full of chain stores, chain restaurants and nightclubs was not authentic because you could have the same experience anywhere. Instead, they wanted hangout spaces unique enough that something comparable couldn’t easily be found in another city. They favored interesting music venues, neighborhood art galleries and theaters, performance spaces and a teeming street culture that is a blend of cafes, sidewalk musicians and bistros.
Authenticity also came from several aspects of a community, like historic buildings, established neighborhoods and a unique music scene. Outdoor amenities were also extremely important to the creative class. They’re typically into bicycling, jogging, kayaking, trail running and snowboarding, activities for which the traditional public park model wasn’t really set up.
“The point is, this sense of having fun, being yourself, expressing yourself fully is valued,” Florida told Salon in a recent interview. “But as long as people continue to try to prop up the downtowns, throwing money, burning money by building stadiums and convention centers, it’s not going to happen. People in Detroit and Pittsburgh keep thinking they’re going to have a headquarters, they’re going to have retail and they’re going to have a stadium and mom and dad are going to come from the suburbs with little Johnny to a game. That’s just not what drives cities now. What drives a city, we know increasingly, are good places to live, great neighborhoods, great cafes, nightlife, places to have fun. Austin saw this from day one.”
But attracting the creative class is only one part of the picture. The underlying point of attracting the creative class is to also attract the industries that employ them, which in this highly competitive age are increasingly willing to move where the talent is, rather than vice-versa. That’s why “low entry barriers” that allow new firms to easily enter and keep the industry vital are important, Florida writes. Low entry barriers for people were equally important to those from the focus groups Florida quizzed. They want plug-and-play communities where anyone can fit in and feel right at home quickly rather than having to spend a lot of time seeking out what appeals to them.
Florida says regions with the highest number of creative class members are also those experiencing spikes in affluence and economic growth. In most of these areas, members of the creative class make up more than 35 percent of the workforce. Places like Washington, DC, the Raleigh-Durham area, Boston and Austin have met this mark, as have smaller regions like the college towns of Chapel Hill, East Lansing, Michigan, and Madison, Wisconsin.
At the other end of the spectrum are areas bypassed by the creative class, like Las Vegas, Grand Rapids and Memphis. These places, chief among which are Memphis and Greensboro, are where the working class makes up over 30 percent of the workforce. Of the 26 large cities where the working class makes up more than one-quarter of the population, only one, Houston, ranks among the top 10 creative class destinations.
How does Charlotte rank? In general, the creative class shies away from traditional corporate communities like Charlotte. Florida’s ranking system rates cities on 11 separate indexes; our city’s rankings are based on how our region, which includes Mecklenburg and the surrounding counties, stacks up to 331 other US metropolitan areas.
In the four technology ranking indexes, Charlotte is something of an underachiever. In the first of these, which measures patents per 1,000 people in the region by zip code, the Charlotte region ranked 167th out of the 331 metropolitan areas surveyed. In the innovation index, which measures year-to year changes in the number of patents granted per capita in a region, Charlotte ranked 242nd. In tech growth, a measure of the year-to-year average change in high-tech output, Charlotte came in at 78.
Though states weren’t ranked, the ability to attract small to medium-sized businesses is also important to giving creative class members the diverse employment options they seek. Unlike the way things worked over the last few decades, highly talented, educated young people no longer move to a region for a specific job, but because a specific region offers a diversity of employment options in fields in which they are interested. According to the US Small Business Administration, small businesses generate 51 percent of US private-sector output, produce 55 percent of product innovations and obtain more patents per sales dollar than larger businesses. They also account for 75 percent of net job creation each year.
The Small Business Survival Committee, which annually ranks states according to how their policies affect something they call “the environment for entrepreneurship,” listed North Carolina in the bottom third of the nation in 2002 due to everything from our high crime rate (42nd in the nation) to our high personal income tax rate (44th in the nation) and high capital gains tax rating (46th in the nation).
In talent measure indexes, the Charlotte region’s overall creativity index ranking was 86. In the talent index, the percentage of people aged 25 or above that has a bachelor’s degree, Charlotte ranked 90th. But Charlotte ranked 183 on the Super Creative index, which measured the amount of people employed in creative occupations like design, computer and engineering technology, architecture and entertainment, among other things. In the tolerance index, the Charlotte region scored in the top third.
Charlotte ranked 100 based on the number of same sex unmarried partners identified in the 2000 census. The region ranked 113 on the Bohemian Index, a measure by census statistics of those who claimed employment in artistically creative fields like photography, design or painting.
This article appears in Oct 9-15, 2002.
