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Monday, July 1, 2002 |
He talked about our generally healthy economy (Madison has a very low unemployment rate), and he made a point that has stuck with me ever since. While other cities were trying to make themselves attractive to business by cutting back on services so they could offer lower tax rates, Madison had built city services. We have great parks, a good public school system, trash that gets picked up reliably, a thriving arts scene that's publicly subsidized: all the things that usually get targeted in budget measures. We get businesses locating here because business leaders recognize that they need a town that they can get people to live in, and a town where they'll want to live themselves. The kind of businesses that can locate in some low tax rate backwater with high rates illiteracy and alcoholism have discovered that it's even more profitable to move to Mexico, and you cannot shrink yourself to competitiveness anymore.
Richard Florida has written a book, The Riseof the Creative Class, about what makes for healthy cities.
Madison is the number one small city on his "creativity index", which includes factors such as the number of "creative" jobs, high-tech industry, innovation (measured by patents per capita), and diversity. You can tweak his index to move cities up or down, but what I think is important is that the overall ratings have strong face validity: we look at which cities fall into which groups and it makes sense. His top three big cities, for example, are San Francisco, Austin and San Diego, all places where friends of mine are likely to relocate; the bottom of his list includes places like Las Vegas and Memphis, which don't show up on my friends lists of places to move to.
He claims that his creativity index also captures an economic vitality, and it's certainly true for the 1990s, though it's not clear how the crash of the New Economy will affect his numbers. I suspect his point will remain: Enron and WorldCom may have crashed, but US Steel hasn't gotten any healthier; even in the steel industry, which epitomizes the Old Economy, it's New Economy companies like Nucor that are healthy.
Talented people seek an environment open to differences. Many highly creative people, regardless of ethnic background or sexual orientation, grew up feeling like outsiders, different in some way from most of their schoolmates. When they are sizing up a new company and community, acceptance of diversity and of gays in particular is a sign that reads "non-standard people welcome here."
I'm particularly intrigued by the diversity component of his index, for which he uses a measure of how many gay people there are in an area. (He got this index from fellow researcher Gary Gates, when he realized how closely his index of high tech towns correlated with Gates' index of gay-friendly towns). The creative class worker likes to move to a place that is tolerant of different lifestyles.
The Rise of the Creative Class: Most civic leaders, however, have failed to understand that what is true for corporations is also true for cities and regions: Places that succeed in attracting and retaining creative class people prosper; those that fail don't.
