Sure, Joel Kotkin is a vocal critic of the creative class. I’ve enjoyed the back-and-forth. I’ve long said I always learn the most from my critics. But according to Michael Lewyn, it’s not my work that’s the real target. As he sees it, Kotkin’s writing is aimed at a much a broader agenda, reflecting “an almost obsessive focus on declaring cities dead or irrelevant.” In a detailed essay, Lewyn provides a fact-filled point-by-point critique of Kotkin’s anti-urban diatribes, concluding that “Kotkin’s most venomous work is simply chock-full of errors.”
Read the whole thing here (hat tip: Christian Peralta at Planetizen).
March 20th, 2007 at 5:42 pm
Interesting rebuttal to Joel Kotkin. Since many of the references are to Portland, thought I’d add a view from ground zero. When Kotkin wrote the Op-Ed piece for the Oregonian, mostly we sort of laughed at it here.
Regarding the New Urbanism, as I understand it, it’s about creating city-like neighborhoods – like old time small towns. As policy it happens mostly in the suburbs, in Portland the downtown and neighborhoods can take care of themselves. Here it’s focused on encouraging growth near light rail — Orenco Station, The Rounds at Beaverton, Linnemann Station. These have taken a while to be successful and I think the Rounds developer went bankrupt before it was turned around. But these aren’t in the city itself, which I think was Kotkin’s point.
The idea that limiting sprawl in Portland has pushed population and job growth further out is bizarre. In Oregon land use planning and the urban growth boundaries are state law, not city based. So unlike California or Arizona, a developer can’t just go to the next rural county and build. In fact, much of the original impetus for the law was from the Farm Bureau and it was intended to protect farmland, not just to increase urban density. If Kotkin has a bone to pick, let him talk to the Grange.
The escape valve for people wanting out of land use planning is Vancouver, Washington just across the Columbia — which is definitely growing and desperately trying to institute its own planning.
Kotkin’s idea that single family homes are being discouraged and people are being forced into apartments is backwards, although it has a grain of truth — large pieces of land for mass housing development are hard to come by. When developers starting building condo towers near downtown it was seen as risky, nobody knew if they’d sell. In fact, the builders can hardly keep up with demand and I can see a dozen cranes on my way downtown. On the other hand, lots of single family houses are being squeezed into vacant infill lots. In my 120 year old neighborhood, seven new houses have been added within a block of us in the past decade, and many old-timers aren’t happy about it. They don’t have big yards, but when I go elsewhere around the country I see MacMansions squeezed together, so I don’t think that’s just Portland.
I don’t know about lack of children, certainly in my neighborhood there are lots of tykes among the younger families. My daughter & her husband live in a Northeast Portland neighborhood with their two young kids and they have lots of playmates.
Kotkin’s last claim about Portland as an “ephemeral city” that doesn’t create manufacturing jobs got the most laughs. He was obviously working from a preconception and hadn’t been here. Portland’s high tech industry is mostly manufacturing of computer chips and peripherals, unlike Seattle’s software emphasis. There’s also a strong metals industry, among others. Portland in fact stands out among the creative class cities in Rise for its large working class.
Portland does have its problems. Even though it’s the cheapest big city on the West Coast, we struggle to maintain affordable housing — and prices are still going up as people keep moving here. The school system is constantly under repair, although by most cities standards it’s healthy. There is traffic congestion and it’s getting worse, although not like LA or Seattle. Ballot measures have imbalanced our tax structure, the roads have deferred maintenance, higher education struggles for funding. But as one urban planner said “I’d rather have our problems of too much growth than Buffalo’s of not enough”.
March 22nd, 2007 at 10:47 pm
As I recently posted on my blog, even Wal-Mart is looking for downtown locations as are other traditionally suburban box-oriented retailers.
These retailers spend millions on market research and forecasting where future consumer demand and therefore store growth will come from.
If they agreed with Kotkin, they wouldn’t be investing in downtowns.
March 23rd, 2007 at 2:33 pm
Michael – Thanks for those insights. Portland is a very interesting case.
Wendy – The big-box downtown thing is interesting. We confronted that in Pittsburgh neighborhoods, East Liberty to be specific. The community residents were clamoring for a K-Mart. The urban designers and historic preservation types were saying, “but it will damage the fabric of the community.” This spurred a powerful idea. Why think of a big box as a box. In reality, it’s a group of separate functions or “stores.” They drew up some designs of how to break apart the box and embed it in a neighborhood. K-Mart experienced its financial problems and pulled out. But the example still holds. They did get one heck of a Whole Foods, though in that community, in a great old building, which employs a lot of local people and provides a wide variety of produce for various racial and ethnic markets.