I say:
Part of Washington, D.C.’s resurgence is not just that it’s a government town and has AOL high-tech. DC in a very real way has become a suburb of New York. And a lot of the media and broadcast — NPR functions that are there, XM Radio, many of the documentary film producers, many of the writers for The New York Times — have actually relocated [to DC] because of the affordability and connectivity.
Washingtonian reacts:
Urban Studies theorist Richard Florida calls Washington a suburb of New York City. Let the outrage begin.
Urban Turf clarifies:
In all seriousness, clearly Florida does not mean suburb in the conventional sense. And his point is an interesting one: technology enables some of New York’s elite to call D.C. home.
You?
March 7th, 2009 at 5:39 pm
Interesting that the examples cited – XM radio firms, NYT – are near bankruptcy. Many other “creative” businesses are also in big trouble due to the current economic depression. Prof Florida’s blog seems to focus intently on the real estate bust as the “cause” of the depression. When in fact the late famous bubble was a systemic credit bubble that not only inflated assets like real estate, but also inflated the value of everything else in the economy – cars, clothes, even haircuts and restaurant meals.
In the US, but also in the rest of the world, there has been a massive and unsustainable “creativity bubble” just like there has been a massive housing bubble and commodities bubble and retail bubble and equities bubble, all under the malevolent umbrella of the Friedmanite credit bubble. The proliferation of progressive documentaries, indie rock, and bohemian fashion are great and all but were only made possible by 30 years of an unprecedented credit-fueled culture of consumption. By definition this boom was not sustainable. Now that the world’s citizens have woken up from their collective pipedream and start to realize the pigmen are here to collect the debts, nobody has the money any more to consume all the charming knick-knacks produced by the RichardFloridian creative class. Their sources of income lost, the creative class must therefore contract and deflate just like the realtor and mortgage broker demographics are contracting and deflating, equilibrating to a more modest and sustainable size.
The only growth sector in economy right now is subsistence farming. Massive amounts of capital and labor must be liquidated in order to deleverage the our collective credit bubble; everything must go.
March 8th, 2009 at 2:58 am
Nice interview (except for the bit about the overrated, state-the-obvious T Friedman).
Also, the elite make nice headlines but not the creative sausage.