Creative Class

That’s the title of a brand new working paper I wrote with Charlotta Mellander. Here’s the first bit.

“Want to know where a great place to invest in real estate will be five or 10 years from now? Look at where artists are living now,” so wrote a 2007 Business
Week story provocatively titled, “Bohemian Today, High-Rent Tomorrow.” A
wide body of studies has shown that artist and gay populations act as urban
pioneers and that their location choices can have substantial upward effects on
housing prices (Castells 1983; Ley 1994; Zukin 1995; Smith 1996). But artistic
and gay populations are relatively small and the evidence of their direct effect
on housing prices is limited and anecdotal. There are roughly 330,000 working
artists in the United States
and approximately 1.3 million total “bohemians” if we count everyone who works
in arts, design, entertainment and media occupations, amounting to approximately
1.3 percent of the US
workforce in 2000. There are 8.8 million self-identified gay and lesbian gay
people in the United States,
roughly 4 percent of the adult population (Gates and Ost 2004). Still, the
basic idea that gay and bohemian populations effect on housing prices surely
makes for good headlines. And the notion has become an accepted conventional
wisdom among many urbanists and real estate developers. But, a basic question remains: Can groups that
are this small really have a significant effect of housing prices? This is the
core question for our research.”

Click here to download the whole thing. Enjoy.  We look forward to your comments.

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