Take That, Richard Florida.
Old, stable populations are a good thing. Richard Florida doesn’t agree. But then, he’s an ass.
Lots of people question my vehement, personal enmity toward the man. Why do I take him so personally and waste so much energy hating him? Several ideas come readily to mind:
- His dog and pony show reels in public officials who change our cities and waste our tax dollars chasing his dream. He makes money off this and we get less livable cities in the bargain.
- He spent the past decade telling Sun Belt cities how to become hip and happening like New York and San Francisco, and telling people to embrace the high-resource lifestyle of conspicuous consumption and 30-dollar martinis. Now he innocently declares that the Sun Belt is finished and it’s time for New York to retake its place in the sun. Go figure.
- He’s obsessed with transient youth. They are not our future. This is our future. We need to focus on eliminating retirement, improving health care, and addressing basic human needs; not bike paths, high-end bars and rootless mobility.
Richard Florida needs to apologize for the horrors his philosophies bestowed on our cities. My generation was following his lead, and now they’re all in debt up to their ears, infected with STDs, dysfunctional alcoholics, or some combination of these, all while having no practical living skills for a return to the medieval socio-economic model we’re about to undergo. If he wants to keep spewing out the trash he talks, he needs to first start prefacing it with the statement: “I was wrong. I screwed you over, but here’s what I think now…”
When someone’s ideas create the conditions which can destroy your society, they are just as guilty of that destruction as the bankers, financiers and government bullies that committed the actual crimes. Karl Marx could be a case in point. He didn’t commit Soviet purges, but that doesn’t make him any less guilty for their commission.
Posted: March 5th, 2009 under Economics, Pittsburgh, Urbanism.
Comments
Write a comment
Attention Spammers: All comments are moderated and will not appear until approved!
Please don't waste your time and mine by posting here if you aren't making a tangible contribution to the post (or to civilization, for that matter).
Comment from Otherstream
Time 6 March 2009 at 6:01 pm
It’s beyond me how anyone will have much chance to be “creative” if they’re spending all their time and energy moving from one rental unit to the next as Florida seems to want.
Stability bad, transience good? Maybe so, if you’re a landlord in a city with rent control that allows you to bump up the rent each time someone moves out. But that’s a pretty specific and limited group; I don’t think rootlessness is really such a great thing for most sectors of the population or the economy.
It’s obvious that suburban sprawl and overbuilding (apartments included, by the way) are major factors in the current meltdown. Even more of an issue is the trend toward living beyond one’s means. But to suggest that homeownership itself is the culprit is just plain nonsense. And his claims would be laughable if people didn’t take this particular ass so damned seriously.