Our most recent issue features a profile of Who's Your City author Richard Florida written by Alec MacGillis. Over the holidays, TAP contributor Ryan Avent wrote a response to the piece. Here, MacGillis writes back.
As a regular reader of Ryan Avent, I was glad to see him weigh in on my feature on Richard Florida. Avent defends the successful salesmanship that netted Florida a small fortune during the past decade, as he pitched hundreds of towns on his "creative class" theories for rescuing their economies. Avent also endorses Florida's argument that many parts of the country have been hit so hard by the recession that they're no longer worth trying to prop up.
I can see where Avent is coming from, though I don't think his points ultimately hold up. But what really caught my attention is that he leaves unaddressed my main argument: Florida has been delivering his pricey sales pitch to the very towns he now declares hopeless. There's a case to be made for helping people move from depressed areas to more prosperous ones -- it is one side of a long-running debate over whether it's better to invest in people or places. But it's a bit rich for that argument to come from Florida, who got wealthy telling these places that they could be saved if they only followed his advice on attracting the all-hallowed young creatives. Many people in these places took Florida at his word and have been spending a great deal of money and time on following through with marketing campaigns, bike paths, loft development -- you name it. Now that same person, the best-known urban development guru in North America, declares them goners. I find it curious that Avent doesn't seem troubled by this.
To address some of Avent's points, in turn:
1. "I don't have much time for the quasi-accusations of hucksterism leveled at Florida. … [M]ajor American cities aren't exactly naive old grannies being suckered in by Florida the conman. … If those cities can't make a good judgment about what they ought to do next, that's not Florida's fault."
Florida's successful sales pitch alone was not my main concern, since "it's a free market and the cities were willing buyers." It was the pitch in conjunction with his latest declarations. That said, Avent seems a bit blithe here. For one thing, many of the cities shelling out money to him were not "major American cities" but smaller ones like Elmira, N.Y., featured at the top of the article. And in many cases, Florida didn't simply leave cities to make their own judgments: He did all he could to turn his $35,000 speeches into $250,000 consultancies, in which he and his assistants spent months working with the cities, giving out specific advice such as to "identify and amplify organically evolving nodes of creative energy." Finally, it seems to me that there are other occasions in which we find reason to object to salesmen taking cities for a ride, even if the cities are willing buyers -- say, when investment firms sweep in to promise bigger gains for the local pension fund. Last time I checked, it's journalists' job to help inform cities and their residents what they're getting for their money.
More after the jump.
--Alec MacGillis
(Phillip Jeffrey)
