Richard Florida: The Failure Who Wont Admit His Errors

Richard Florida: Posing by a Hip, Diverse, Creative Space of a Graffiti Wall Somewhere in a Creative City

Florida is out promoting his new book:
The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation,
and Failing the Middle Class - and What We Can Do About It.

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Richard Florida came on the scene about ten years ago. I caught on the falseness of his ideas and wrote about them then. Here are some quotes from posts I did on him following interviews he had on Television Ontario with Steve Paiken on The Agenda.

Florida, who declared half way that he was more of an NDPer then a Liberal, making him in the far left sliding scale of Canadian politics, mentioned the word "equity" several times. (Also on a Charlie Rose interview in 2004). His future village is global, where everyone works in harmony - the lion next to the lamb, as imagery goes - and where everyone is creative. In fact, his most successful book is called: The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life. The equity of creativity.

A whole city full of experimental visible minority immigrants, where his mantra - we are all equal, we all do things equally, we are all creators - can play itself out. Florida is creating his own heaven on earth, and found just the right petri dish in Toronto...

Maybe in the future he might consider an office in one of those shiny buildings rising up on the Ryerson Campus. After all, it is the same population group that attracted him to Toronto in the first place that's driving the Ryerson growth.[Camera Lucida, April 28, 2008]

And here:

[Floridas'] convoluted, unproven, idea, on which the [University of Toronto] has spent millions already, is that immigrants, especially the current type, will be part of the creative class now so necessary in the economies of countries - at least according to Florida.

The fact is that there is absolutely no empirical evidence to prove this. Toronto's high-immigrant economy has actually been on a decline, including the much touted "Hollywood North" film industry - that most creative of professions - which is losing to Vancouver, and back to the US via Detroit and Boston.

Florida talks about "20 years down the road", which is just fine with him since he is only proposing a theoretical hypothesis. After all he doesn't lose either way - right or wrong. He's just a researcher.

But, the great influx of immigrants to whom he has such an affinity - the Indians and the Chinese - started almost 15 years ago here in Toronto. So where is the data to prove, after fifteen years, that they are truly part of the "creative class"? Here is actual data from Center for Immigration Studies in the US which indicates that Asians are not the creative types Florida is banking on:

[T]he East-vs.-West pattern observed earlier for the TM* data also holds for levels of expertise, with Asians typically being hired into non-innovative jobs while more Europeans are in the types of positions that could involve innovation.
*TM stands for Talent Measure

[Camera Lucida: April 29, 2008]

About a year later, an article in The American Prospect, The Ruse of the Creative Class, echoed those sentiments, but added explicitly that such cities are failing, and that Florida's arguments didn't hold: the "Creative Class"attracting a "vibrant" city and economy was bunk.

Inspired [by Florida's message], Elmira's newly elected mayor, John Tonello, hung artwork on City Hall's walls, installed "poetry posts" around town featuring verses by local writers, and oversaw the redevelopment of several buildings downtown. "The grand hope was to create retail spaces that would enable people to make money and serve the creative class Florida talks about," Tonello says. The new market-rate apartments filled up quickly, but the bohemian coffee shops the mayor fantasizes about have yet to materialize.
[ Source: The American Prospect: The Ruse of the Creative Class, December 18, 2009]

Instead what people were doing was to set up enclaves within enclaves. Neighborhoods, and even whole cities, started to become exclusive to the wealthy or reasonably moneyed. The low-income neighbors never materialized. And immigrants were hard to find shopping in the local grocery stores and eating in the restaurants, where they were more often than not working in low-level jobs often as janitors or bus-boys. They lived way out in the suburbs in high-density high rises.

Florida is now promoting his new book: The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class - and What We Can Do About It..

The book could have well been called "The New Urban Disaster."

This was a guy who spent months promoting his "Creative Class/Cities" book with glib phrases and clever catchwords, who sat on endless urban symposia, who won accolades and prizes and book awards for his ideas, who became the uncontested expert on creatively creating creative cities. Now he's back to talk about his "failure."

Not quite. He's here to say "Well I'm only human. I missed some things. But! I have these solutions!"

So we are supposed to give him a pass? We know who he is and even where he lives. No immigrant janitor will be anywhere near his house, with the 1,945 surveillance cameras which surround his territory with direct links to the Ontario Provincial Police, the Fire Department, and the emergency Ambulance services.

You see, he now has a toddler daughter.

The "Let Them Eat Cake" French queen, which won her the guillotine, was young, naive, sheltered and possibly had limited linguistic ability (she was Austrian, after all!).


Richard Florida's Toronto home

What's Florida's excuse?

Here is an excerpt from The Houston Chronicle in The Re-education of Richard Florida:

Sixteen years after Florida published his first book, "The Rise of the Creative Class," that theory has proved half true. For many small, post-industrial cities without assets like big tech companies and universities, no amount of creative-class marketing would turn things around. Elmira, N.Y., for example, saw little return on its investment in the Florida program, as a 2009 story in the American Prospect detailed. [Source: The Houston Chronicle in The Re-education of Richard Florida]

More from The Houston Chronicle from an article in 2013:

...research revealed the conditions that create pockets of poverty, and found a downside to ethnically mixed cities: People in different groups tend to live apart. "Here's Mr. Diversity, extolling the virtues of diversity in large cities," Florida says. "And what comes back to smash you over the head is that large diverse cities also incubate a horrific level of sorting and segregation."

A pseudonymic commenter posted this comment following Charles Mudede's article The Twittering World.

Richard Florida is an interesting guy, but he's like a math equation that gets further and further away from the truth the closer he gets to it. He's smart, but he has the Futurist Disease (remember Alvin Toffler? Faith Popcorn?) of seeing patterns everywhere, even where (especially where?) no patterns exist, and he constantly mistakes slight movements among a tiny coterie of the ultra-rich for genuine social movements. Or rather, the IDEAS of a tiny coterie; his work would be a lot more valuable if he was capable of thinking about the lives of real people for even a second or two.

I agree.

Of course Florida, with false modesty, "accepts" the fallacies behind his "theories." But his solution?

Bring in more government money to let these "excluded" members of our society to enjoy the fruits of Canadian/American capitalism. Let them live alongside the wealthy but with their government subsidized condo-apartments. Anything else makes us a callous and exclusive (i.e. a racist) society.

This is what he says in his interview a week ago on at Television Ontario's The Agenda with Steve Paiken, and also what he writes in the Toronto Star (quotes proivded after the video).

Listen to the video below to the excellent (on Paiken's part) interview and Florida's convoluted efforts to regain his credibility as an "urbanist."

Paiken introduces the interview thus:

"It hasn't all been positive. I must confess this isn't the follow up to the last book that I thought we were going to read!...Things are just very very dark and gloomy here!"

What Paiken is talking about is Florida's latest book, fresh off the presses: The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class - and What We Can Do About It.



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The Toronto Star
By: Richard Florida
Tues., April 11, 2017

Toronto ranks as the ninth most expensive city in the world. Affordable housing is supposed to cost no more than three times a family’s income, yet a Toronto home now costs roughly eight times the average income.

Such rising housing prices and worsening affordability are a key indicator of what I call the “New Urban Crisis.” This is the dark-side of the sweeping back-to-the-city movement of the past decade or two, which has brought affluent, highly educated people back to the urban cores of superstar cities, such as Toronto, New York, London, Paris and others.

The New Urban Crisis is defined by a new model of winner-take-all urbanism. In a winner-take-all economy, talented superstars such as Beyoncé, Brad Pitt or LeBron James make outsized money. In winner-take-all urbanism, superstar cities house disproportionate concentrations of talent and leading edge industries.

Toronto is the 11th leading global city in the world according to my Superstar City Index. Toronto is even more dominant in Canada than New York is in the United States. Greater Toronto generates about 20 per cent of Canada’s economic output compared New York, which generates about 9 per cent of U.S. GDP. In fact, Greater Toronto’s share of Canadian GDP is equivalent to that generated by America’s five largest metros: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, and Boston.

Winner-take-all urbanism generates winners and losers within cities as well. While affluent knowledge, professional and creative workers have been squeezed, it is lower-paid blue-collar and service workers who bear the brunt of rising housing prices. Across Canada, the former have roughly $45,000 per year after paying for housing, but blue collar workers are left with $26,400 and service workers have just $11,500 to live on after paying for housing.

And here specifically:

It is imperative that the city and region act aggressively to address the New Urban Crisis across three related fronts:

-It must overcome NIMBYism by increasing density and building more housing, especially more affordable rental housing.
-It must engage the private sector in upgrading low-wage service jobs into family-supporting employment.
-It must invest in better transit infrastructure to connect more people and places to its centres of employment.