Richard Florida - The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class—and What We Can Do About It

Any city, however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich.

P LATO, T HE R EPUBLIC

Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.

J ANE J ACOBS, T HE D EATH AND L IFE
OF G REAT A MERICAN C ITIES

I was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1957, back when it was a thriving city, bustling with iconic department stores, morning and evening newspapers, libraries and museums, a busy downtown, and a large middle class. My parents both came of age in the citys Italian district, and they still lived there when I was born, in an apartment near the citys verdant Branch Brook Park. My father had left school in the seventh grade to work in a factory alongside Italian, Polish, Irish, German, Hispanic, and black laborers. Except for his stint in the military, when he stormed the beaches at Normandy and fought in some of the great battles of World War II, he walked through its doors every working day of his life, starting as a laborer, climbing the ladder to foreman, and ultimately becoming one of the plants managers.

My parents, like millions of other Americans, moved to the suburbs when I was a toddler. They chose the small town of North Arlington, about a fifteen-minute drive from Newark. They did so, as they often reminded me, because of the good schools the town offered, particularly the Catholic school, Queen of Peace, which they believed would prepare my brother and me for college, putting us on a path to a better life. One of my mothers sisters, my aunt Lonnie, already lived there; her husband, my uncle Walter, put himself through night school at Newark College of Engineering for both his bachelors and masters degrees in chemical engineering, and then rose through the ranks to become a senior executive at Colgate Palmolive. Blue-collar families like mine and more affluent ones like my aunt and uncles still lived side by side in the same neighborhoods. Despite our different economic circumstances, we were all part of the same American Dream. Even though we had moved out of Newark, we still visited the old neighborhood on most Sundays, joining my grandmother and the rest of the family who still lived there for large Italian suppers.

I didnt realize it at the time, but I was witnessing the unfolding of what would come to be called the urban crisis. For all of my life up to that pointand, as I would later learn, for all of modern historycities had been centers of industry, economic growth, and cultural achievement. By the late 1960s and 1970s, that was no longer the case. Middle-class people and jobs were fleeing cities like Newark for the suburbs, leaving their economies hollowed out. By the time I entered high school in the early 1970s, huge stretches of Newark had fallen victim to economic decay, rising crime and violence, and racially concentrated poverty. The year I graduated, 1975, New York City teetered on the brink of bankruptcy. Not long after, my fathers factory closed its doors forever, putting him and hundreds of others out of work. Hope, prosperity, and the American Dream had moved to the suburbs.

These stark realities haunted me. What was causing people, companies, and stores to abandon Newark? Why had the city exploded into racial turmoil and entered into such a steep decline? Why had the factory where my father worked closed down? My early experience of that original urban crisis left a deep imprint on me.

When I went off to Rutgers College that fall, I found myself drawn to courses about cities and the urban issues of race, poverty, urban decay, and industrial decline. When I was a sophomore, my urban geography professor, Robert Lake, gave us an assignment to tour Lower Manhattan and chronicle what we saw. I was transfixed by the incredible urban change that was under way in SoHo, the East Village, and surrounding areas, captivated by the energy of the streets and of the artists, musicians, designers, and writers who lived and worked there. Old industrial warehouses and factories were being transformed into studios and living spaces. Punk, new wave, and rap were electrifying the areas music venues and clubsthe first tender shoots of what would later become a full-blown urban revival.

But it was in Pittsburgh, where I taught for almost twenty years at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), that I began to sort out the main factors acting on Americas cities. Pittsburgh had been devastated by deindustrialization, losing hundreds of thousands of people and considerable numbers of high-paying factory jobs. Thanks to its world-class universities, medical centers, and corporate research and development units, as well as its major philanthropies, the city was able to stave off the worst. Its leaders were working hard to change its trajectory, and as a professor of economic development I was involved in the thick of it. Yet, for all its leading-edge research and innovation potential, the talent at Pittsburghs universities was not staying in the region; my computer science and engineering colleagues and my own students were leaving in droves for high-tech hubs like Silicon Valley, Seattle, and Austin. When the Internet pioneer Lycos, which had its roots at CMU, abruptly announced that it was moving from Pittsburgh to Boston, all at once a lightbulb seemed to go off in my head.

The traditional thinking that people followed companies and jobs, it seemed to me, was not working. Following the established economic development wisdom, Pittsburghs leaders had attempted to lure companies by offering them tax breaks and similar incentives; theyd poured money into subsidized industrial and office parks; theyd built a state-of-the-art convention center and two gleaming stadiums. But companies werent looking for those things, and neither were my students or the other talented people who were leaving. Boston had not offered Lycos any tax breaks or other bribes; in fact, the costs of doing business in Boston, from rents to salaries, were much higher than in Pittsburgh. Lycos was moving because the talent it needed was already in Boston.

The key to urban success, I argued in my 2002 book,