Creative Class

The National Bureau of Economic Research says we’re not out of the recessionary woods yet, though some think the economy is looking up. Floyd Norris of the Times, for one, thinks the numbers are pointed in the right direction. (More over at The Atlantic Wire). Restaurants certainly seem to be rebounding.

Today, I stumbled across another intriguing indicator. It’s called the Leading Indicator of Remodeling Activity – LIRA for short. Produced regularly by Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, the index measures “national homeowner spending on improvements for the current quarter and subsequent three quarters,” and aims to track “future turning points in the business cycle of the home improvement industry.” The graph charts the trend. (more…)

We are starting a new series at the Creative Class Exchange entitled “Creative Capstones.” Every few weeks, we will highlight a creative community, inspiring leader, or innovative program that has an interesting perspective on creativity and the changing global economy.

This week, we interviewed Jeremy Holmes from Roanoke, Virginia. Jeremy is a transportation alternatives coordinator with the Roanoke Valley Alleghany Regional Commission and a volunteer “community connector” with the Roanoke Creative Communities Leadership Project (CCLP). Jeremy provided us with his insights on Roanoke, the region’s CCLP successes, and what it takes to build a successful community engagement effort.

Creative Class Group (CCG):  Tell us about Roanoke. What makes it a special community?

Jeremy Holmes: In a purely technical sense, Roanoke is a small urban area of about 200,000 people tucked into the Blue Ridge Mountains of Southwest Virginia, a place with four seasons (a novelty for a California native like myself), easy access to everything from the Appalachian Trail to Washington, D.C., a fairly stable job market and housing prices, and major educational and technological resources in our own backyard.

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Sure, I’ve always been a huge fan of The Clash. Thus the title of this new paper, “Should I Stay or Should I Go, Now: The Effects of Community Satisfaction on the Decision to Stay or Move,” coauthored with my colleagues Charlotta Mellander and Kevin Stolarick. Most research has looked at why people choose to move. This paper turns that on its head and examines why people choose to stay. Interestingly enough, characteristics of the place itself appear to play the biggest role, trumping individual characteristics like income, education, age, and the like. And it’s not economic conditions – like the job market or economic opportunity – that matter most. Rather it’s the ability to forge meaningful and lasting social relationships and the quality of the place itself which have the biggest effect on the decision to stay. Here’s the abstract:

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I had a great chat with Dan Gross, one of my favorite economics correspondents, last week about resets and American adaptive capabilities. Dan wrote a terrific Newsweek story and we got to team up for a nice segment on Newsweek Radio 9.

“We are the most adaptive, inventive nation, and have proven quite resilient,” says Richard Florida, sociologist and author of The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity. If these impulses are embraced more systematically and wholeheartedly, the U.S. can remain an economic superpower well into the current century.

One thing that struck me was how my working-class father instinctively understood the power of America’s capacity to rebound and reset its economy and society. Here is how I described his words in my book Flight of the Creative Class:

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A new study (PDF) from the Bureau of Labor Statistics provides important insight on states where workers toil the longest hours and make the most money. The study by Dante DeAntonio uses data from the Current Employment Statistics – a monthly survey of more than 400,000 U.S. business establishments – to provide estimates for employment, hours, and earnings for all 50 U.S. states. Catherine Rampell summarized some key findings of the study earlier this week over at Economix.

Take a look at the map of the hardest-working states in terms of hours worked. Nevada tops the list with an average of 37 hours per week. Wyoming, Louisiana, Texas, Kentucky, and Alabama all average more than 36 hours per week. At the opposite end of the spectrum are Montana, the Dakotas, Hawaii, and New Hampshire which average less than 33 hours per week.

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From today’s The Washington Post story on how the economic crisis is shifting Americans’ attitudes toward housing and consumption:

“Our attitudes, particularly toward homeownership and housing, are changing, and they are changing quickly,” said Richard Florida, an urban studies professor at the University of Toronto, who explores the phenomenon in his book The Great Reset, which will be released April 27 by HarperCollins…

Florida is among a growing number of researchers who think that these are signs that the United States is becoming a nation of renters, and that the shift could be good for our pocketbooks, the economy and even our happiness. It’s a radical idea, one that goes against nearly a century of tax policy, not to mention the fact that owning a home has long been central to middle-class American identity.

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A headline on the Wall Street Journal’s Digits blog blasts: “Can Apple Maintain Status as Religion of the ‘Creative Class’?”

Apple’s core following has traditionally been the creative class. They are graphic designers and artists, and they constitute a “church” of sorts… Apple in a sense cultivated this “underdog” or creative-class status to successfully market its products. Consider Apple’s “Think Different” ad campaign, or its ubiquitous Apple vs. PC ads featuring a young, hip Justin Long… With the release of the iPad, the question is whether Apple can maintain this “underdog” or special status… Still, the iPad is a new kind of product for Apple, one geared not so much to its traditional creative class or “inner church,” as to a general audience merely interested in viewing media and not creating it.

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The Census Bureau’s participation map made quite a splash last week. More than half of Americans (56 percent) had completed their forms by April 5, but there was tremendous variation across the 50 states. Wisconsin topped the list with 69 percent of Wisconsinites sending in their forms. Midwestern states did well across the board with more than two-thirds of Iowans and Minnesotans completing theirs. At the opposite end of the spectrum, less than half the residents of Alaska, Texas, New Mexico, and Louisiana completed theirs; 50 percent of New Yorkers had filled out their forms and 51 percent of D.C. residents.

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We know a great deal about the clustering of human capital and of creative class jobs and how they drive regional economic growth. But only recently have economists and economic geographers begun to explore the skills that underpin the clustering of talent and creative-knowledge jobs.

A brand new paper with my MPI colleagues Charlotta Mellander, Kevin Stolarick, and Adrienne Ross examines the distribution of three key skills across U.S. metropolitan areas: physical skills, cognitive skills, and social skills.

Here’s the abstract:

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Many urban types like to portray Jane Jacobs as opposing just about any kind of new development or change in the structure and historic character of neighborhoods. But that’s not accurate according to Roberta Brandes Gratz’s new book, The Battle for Gotham: New York in the Shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs. Reviewing the book in Metropolis, George Beane notes:

And yet, as Gratz sees it, Jacobs’s message is today widely misinterpreted as favoring an anti-growth and anti-change agenda; if they could, her critics say, preservationists would embalm the city.  But Gratz argues that Jacobs’s ideas were never meant as narrow prescriptions of architectural type, or to impede new development unconditionally.  She suggests that Jacobs’s teachings are less specific design formulas than general guidelines.  They encourage the development of preexisting communities and industries, mixed uses, complexity, mutually reliant businesses, and, above all, a respect for social and historical context.

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