Monthly Archives

June 2017

The New Urban Crisis Press

KQED: Google Eyes San Jose for Campus for 20,000 Employees

Last week, the San Jose City Council voted to start negotiations with Google to sell the company 23 acres of city owned land near the Diridon Caltrain Station. The purchase is part of Google’s plan to build a massive transit oriented village that would include six to eight million square feet of office and retail space and bring up to 20,000 Google employees to the city. Community activists are concerned about pressures the development may exert on wages and housing prices and the overall impact it may have on San Jose’s culture. In this hour, we’ll learn about Google’s possible San Jose campus and we want to hear from you — if your town is home to a large company — what are the benefits and drawbacks?

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June 29, 2017
The New Urban Crisis Press

The Chicago Forum on Global Cities: (video) The Urban Crisis

What policy priorities are needed for global cities to drive more sustainable and inclusive prosperity? How does today’s technology revolution affect how cities build a strong, enduring, middle class? How are cities providing access to the skills and training needed for city youth to fill the jobs of tomorrow? Can global cities grow a thriving creative class without a new urban crisis perpetuating small areas of affluence aside much larger areas of disadvantage?

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June 29, 2017
The New Urban Crisis Press

New York Times: Why America’s Great Cities Are Becoming More Economically Segregated

Richard Florida became famous among people who think about cities 15 years ago with “The Rise of the Creative Class.” He predicted that postindustrial cities would succeed by focusing on the three Ts: technology, talent and tolerance. People in the “creative class” benefit from density, he said, and would move to places where laws are kind to tech entrepreneurs, where museums provide an evening out and where gay people are comfortable. Indeed, New York recovered its private-sector jobs nearly four years faster than the nation after the Great Recession.

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June 26, 2017
The New Urban Crisis Press

Politico: A Declaration of Urban Independence

On Monday, November 7, 2016, I made what I thought were the final edits to the manuscript of my latest book, The New Urban Crisis, and sent it off to my publisher. The next day, my wife and I invited our American friends to come to our house in Toronto to celebrate what we were all but certain would be Hillary Clinton’s election. We pulled out all the stops. We hung up red, white and blue bunting, and dressed our baby and our puppy to match. My wife’s sisters supplied us with life-sized cutouts of Clinton and Donald Trump, which they had literally “muled” over the border from the Detroit suburbs. At 6 p.m., when the polls began to close, we turned on the TV to watch the early returns. By 8:30, the party had come to a crashing stop. I spent the rest of the night glued to Twitter; I hardly even noticed when the last of our guests departed.

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June 23, 2017
Opinion EditorialsRichard Florida Columns

Evonomics: Richard Florida: It’s Not (Just) the Working Class. It’s the Service Class.

The Service Class, not the Working Class, is the key to the Democrats’ future. Members of the blue-collar Working Class are largely white men, working in declining industries like manufacturing, as well as construction, transportation, and other manual trades. Members of the Service Class work in rapidly growing industries like food service, clerical and office work, retail stores, hospitality, personal assistance, and the caring industries. The Service Class has more than double the members of the Working Class – 65 million versus 30 million members, and is made up disproportionately of women and members of ethnic and racial minorities.

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June 14, 2017
The New Urban Crisis Press

Tennessee Politics: (Video) Richard Florida on wages, taxes and empowering locals

This is an addendum to a previously published broadcast recorded on May 19, 2017. I explored with University of Toronto Professor and Richard Florida some of his proposed solutions he outlines in his latest book “The New Urban Crisis.” These include how to transform low wage service work into middle-class family-supporting work and how to update the tax code to make it less regressive and more fair. Dr. Florida also shared his blunt observations on how to empower local communities and address the divide in America between urban, rural and suburban communities.

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June 13, 2017
The New Urban Crisis Press

Harvard Business Review: Are the Super-Rich Really Ruining the World’s Great Cities?

Every time I have visited London over the past several years, I invariably hear the same story from my taxi driver. As we drive past Hyde Park on the way to or from the airport, he will say, “You see that building?” nodding towards a modern glass tower next to the Mandarin Oriental hotel. “Some of the apartments cost £50 million or more. And no one lives there—it’s always dark.”

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June 13, 2017
The New Urban Crisis Press

Urban Milwaukee: The Good and Bad of Urbanism

Richard Florida became synonymous with urbanism a decade-and-a-half ago when he wrote a largely upbeat book, “Rise of the Creative Class,” about the renaissance taking place in major cities across the globe.

In his latest literary work, Florida, director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto and a global research professor at New York University, has taken a more sobering look at some of the challenges facing urbanism.

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June 13, 2017
The New Urban Crisis Press

Kvartti: The rise of the creative class urban crisis

The US City of developer Richard Florida woke fifteen years ago cities around the world to detect the “creative class” in terms of the opportunities provided by economic success. In his latest work pessimistic Florida to declare the message of the new urban crisis that concerns the inner urban segregation. An interesting question is which indicators this crisis can be accessed and find solutions.

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June 13, 2017
Inclusive DC Press

Press Release: ‘Union Market Talks’ Event Brings Together City And Business Leaders, Renowned Journalists And Celebrated Author To Explore Inclusive Prosperity And ‘The New Urban Crisis’

EDENS partnered with the Urban Land Institute, the Economic Innovation Group and CityLab to bring together nearly four hundred D.C. thought leaders and community advocates. “Discussing inclusive prosperity in an open forum helps us come together and appreciate our communities’ rich diversity,” EDENS CEO Jodie W. McLean said. “EDENS’ purpose has always been about enriching community, and engaging with community leaders, urbanists, neighborhood activists and businesses. It is essential in DC and throughout the country that we all work together to create opportunities for all.”

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June 6, 2017
The New Urban Crisis Press

WURD Radio: (Video)Information Is The Best Medicine 5.27.17 – Dr. Richard Florida

Dr. Richard Florida, author of ”The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class—and What We Can Do About It”, and University Professor and Director of Cities at the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto joined the program to discuss the correlation between gentrification and health inequities.

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June 6, 2017
The New Urban Crisis Press

WAMC: (Video)How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, And Failing The Middle Class

In recent years, the young, educated, and affluent have surged back into cities, reversing decades of suburban flight and urban decline. And yet all is not well, Richard Florida argues in The New Urban Crisis. Florida, one of the first scholars to anticipate this back-to-the-city movement in his groundbreaking The Rise of the Creative Class, demonstrates how the same forces that power the growth of the world’s superstar cities also generate their vexing challenges: gentrification, unaffordability, segregation, and inequality.

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June 6, 2017
The New Urban Crisis Press

Urban Milwaukee: Professor, author Florida goes ‘On the Issues’ to discuss challenges facing cities

In 2002, Florida’s best-selling book, “The Rise of the Creative Class,” focused on a demographic shift happening around the world — an urban revival sparked by young, creative, tech-savvy professionals. Now, 15 years later, Florida has written a far more sobering book, “The New Urban Crisis.” It explores a darker side of the urban renaissance, something he calls “winner-take-all urbanism.” Florida sees deepening inequality in our cities, growing segregation and poverty, and the disappearance of the middle class. Florida will discuss his new book, the dimensions of the challenge facing not only cities but suburbs, and what can be done about it.

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June 2, 2017
The New Urban Crisis Press

The Unassuming Economist:The Quest for Inclusive Cities

“Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody”—this is a quote that appears before the introduction section of Richard Florida’s new book. Florida is concerned that cities are failing from been inclusive. The benefits of cities are not reaching everyone.

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June 2, 2017
The New Urban Crisis Press

PBS News Hour: Is the ‘creative class’ saving our cities, or making them impossible to live in?

Richard Florida may be the most widely read author on the subject of cities these days, and probably has been since the turn of the millennium. He first became known for cheerleading the idea that if cities attracted what he called “the creative class” — professionals in the arts, in the media, in tech — they would prosper. And so they did — with a vengeance.

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June 2, 2017