I have a new post over at BNET responding to Mike Mandel and a BNET piece earlier this week. The gist of my post is that when you look at real income levels and housing values, creative metros that score high on the 3T’s outperform others.
While we’re at it, The New York Times has a nice piece today on the rise of Boulder, Colorado, as a mecca for new high-tech startups. Here are some stats:
From 2007 to 2009, venture capitalists invested $1.9 billion in 275 Colorado start-ups, up from $1.6 billion in 247 companies from 2004 to 2006, according to the National Venture Capital Association. The money is coming from Colorado venture firms — including the Foundry Group, a prominent firm in Boulder — as well as from Silicon Valley and New York.
This comes on the heels of BusinessWeek ranking Boulder as America’s best city for startups. Vivek Wadwha provides a nice enumeration of the reasons behind Boulder’s high-tech evolution.
My own hunch, as I told the Times, is that: ” Boulder has reached this beautiful sweet spot, where it has many advantages of a university town — tech and talent and openness — but without many of the costs and traffic and congestion that may disadvantage incumbent centers of innovation.”
I also mentioned that Boulder has a general orientation toward excellence. It has long been a center for world-class athletes. It’s athletic scene is not just about big teams but individual excellence as well, in track and field and cycling. Centers of world-class athletes reflect an underlying commitment to individual excellence, execution, and performance that can work to attract excellent and ambitious people across the board. In this way, athletic scenes may reflect similar dynamics as world-class music scenes: Both reflect underlying community DNA that is oriented to excellence, diligence, and meritocracy that can and does attract and motivate all sorts of talented and forward-thinking people – like techies and entrepreneurs. Come to think of it, some of these places, say like Austin, have all three: cutting-edge music scenes, world-class athletes, and innovative and entrepreneurial high-tech clusters.
If truth be told, Boulder has been on my radar for some time. In the mid-2000s it started to top our lists in terms of the percentage of creative class workers and its scores on the 3T’s – technology, talent, and tolerance – coming in among the very top regions in the country. The 3T’s measure was originally designed to be a leading indicator of rising, highly innovative, affluent regions – and I’m proud to see it working so well in this case.
And of course college towns, from Austin and Boulder to Raleigh-Durham and Madison, continue to be among the most resilient regions across the Great Reset. Boulder surely made the most of its natural and local assets to propel its ascent. It leveraged its university, knowledge, and creative assets across all of the 3T’s, seeing the university not just as a generator of technology, but as a talent magnet and a source of open-mindedness and tolerance – a place where different-thinking and different-looking kinds of people can fit in and thrive. It has long ranked highly as a place for gay and lesbian people. It’s time that college towns and even big cities with abundant university and college talent realize the true economic assets they have.
May 14th, 2010 at 7:32 pm
Richard
As a resident of Boulder I greatly appreciate the positive review but wonder if the picture may in fact be somewhat more complex. From a real estate perspective the market is only healthy here if you look at the price data, but God help you if you want to sell anything!
It would seem to me that as such a desirable place to live we have been able to attract people from all over and combined with the restrictions upon supply (geographical and political) this forced prices up. What is happening now however is that the volume of transactions has dropped off so much that, as is common with many similar markets across the country, there really is only a market for either the exceptional or the exceptionally cheap. Anywhere in the middle is just not a place you want to be. So prices are holding up perhaps less these days because we are attracting inbound migration but because there is an absence of forced selling. This effectively leads to market constipation, that could go on for years.
Surely we have all learned that economic fundamentals matter and that the surge of credit that ran through the economy during the last decade was the number one factor in driving prices. As it has been withdrawn so have the valuations, it is just that in places such as Boulder there are fewer people who are forced to sell and so, for now, we have a chasm between buyers and sellers.
Perhaps the lesson to be gained here is not just to move to an extraordinary town, but to buy an extraordinary house when you get there!