The Creative Class Myth

Florida’s idea was a nice one: Young, inno­v­a­tive peo­ple move to places that are open and hip and tol­er­ant. They, in turn, gen­er­ate eco­nomic inno­va­tion. I loved this idea because, as a free­lance writer, it made me impor­tant. I was poor, but some­how I made every­one else rich! It seemed to make per­fect sense. Madi­son, by that rea­son­ing, should have been clam­or­ing to have me, since I was one of the mys­ti­cal bear­ers of prosperity. …
I’m not sure what exactly I expected, but within a year or two it was clear that some­thing wasn’t right. If Madi­son was such a Cre­ative Class hotbed over­flow­ing with inde­pen­dent, post-industrial work­ers like myself, we should have fit in. Yet our pres­ence didn’t seem to mat­ter to any­one, cre­atively or oth­er­wise. And any­way, Madison’s econ­omy was hum­ming along with unem­ploy­ment around four per­cent, while back in fun, cre­ative Port­land, it was more than twice that, at eight and a half per­cent. This was not how the world accord­ing to Florida was sup­posed to work. I started to won­der if I’d mis­read him. Around town I encountered a few other trans­plants who also found them­selves scratch­ing their heads over what the fuss had been about. Within a cou­ple years, most of them would be gone.

Frank Bures wrote a really great essay in Thirty Two Magazine, a new publication for the Twin Cities, about the myth of the creative class — an idea pushed by urban theorist Richard Florida that a city with a strong presence of artists, gays and lesbians, and immigrants would drive economic growth. Economists agree that a healthy amount of college-educated people does help drive economic growth — and much of the creative class are college-educated — but there has not been a lot of evidence showing that cities like Washington D.C., Boston, and New York grew because creative people came there, or if creative people came there because the cities were growing.

This is all really just to say if you’re expecting to move to Portland to find a booming economy full of young, creative types, you’ll need to adjust your expectations.

Photo: Shutterstock/Fluffy2008

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