![]() This approach-which holds up places like San Francisco and New York as exemplars par excellence-maintains that the key to growth is to develop a hip, cool scene that will attract educated, entrepreneurial people to a city.įor instance, in a recent interview about how to turn around Detroit, Florida says, “If you want to rebuild a neighborhood, you’re a lot better off starting with stuff people eat and drink.” In other words, cities should develop the microbrewery district, the artisanal culinary scene, etc. Perhaps nothing so illustrates the long-term acceptance of second-class status than the widespread adoption of the creative class model of urban development championed by Richard Florida. Often, when national experts imbue hopelessness into the region, rustbelt leaders, no strangers to desperation, often take the bait. Of course what’s missing from this equation is that the median rent in San Francisco is much more than double that of Flint, without considering the higher cost of energy and far higher taxes. “If you are a waiter, you can make twice as much in Austin relative to Flint,” remarked Moretti. In a recent interview, Moretti hints at the prospect of federal incentives tied to unemployment benefits to motivate people to leave the Rust Belt for high-tech hot spots. Moretti believes that the winners in the knowledge economy, such as Silicon Valley, Boston, and Seattle, will be winning more, and the losers-he cites Cleveland and Detroit-will be winning less. He answers in the subtitle: “Probably not-and government should stop bribing people to stay there.” Glaeser cites Buffalo’s low levels of human capital and low housing costs as reasons to federally jump ship.īerkeley-based economist Enrico Moretti is also bearish on the future of the region. “Can Buffalo Ever Come Back?” reads the headline of a City Journal article by Harvard economist Ed Glaeser. Urban economists, particularly those on the self-satisfied coasts, tend to envision utter hopelessness for the region. “We’re just basically these little pulsating jugular veins waiting for you guys to leech off some of our nice, homey, backwards Cleveland stuff.” Brabner talked about the “MTV people” coming to Cleveland to get pictures of Pekar emptying the garbage and going bowling. “I’ll tell you the relationship between New York and Cleveland,” said Joyce Brabner, wife of the underground comic book legend Harvey Pekar, to a New York City radio host. When attention is paid to the industrial Midwest, it often takes the form of an anthropological curiosity as to how “the other half” lives. The Psychological Undermining of the Rustbelt In fact, more educated workers now leave Manhattan and Brooklyn for places like Cuyahoga County and Erie County, where Cleveland and Buffalo are located, than the other way around. After decades of decline, this is now expanding as younger educated workers move to the area in part to escape the soaring cost of living, high taxes, and regulations that now weigh so heavily on the super-star cities. The second, and perhaps more surprising, is the wealth of human capital already existent in the region. One is the steady revival of America as a productive manufacturing country, driven in large part by new technology, rising wages abroad (notably in China), and the development of low-cost, abundant domestic energy, much of it now produced in states such as Ohio and in the western reaches of Pennsylvania. Yet in reality, the rustbelt could well be on the verge of a major resurgence, one that should be welcomed not only locally but by the rest of the country. Cleveland, Buffalo, Detroit or a host of smaller cities are rarely assessed, except as objects of pity whose only hope is to find a way, through new urbanist alchemy, to mimic the urban patterns of “superstar cities” like New York, San Francisco, Boston, or Portland. For the most part, the cities of the Midwest-with the exception of Chicago and Minneapolis-have been consigned to the second, and inferior, class. Urban America is often portrayed as a tale of two kinds of places, those that “have it” and those who do not. ![]()
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