The Stability of Cities in Economic Collapse

This month's Atlantic magazine has an article by Richard Florida called How the Crash Will Reshape America. Florida says that the effects of the crash will be felt differently in different places across the country. He predicts the losers are more likely places like Las Vegas and Phoenix (cities built on real estate development) and the Midwest rust belt cities like Cleveland and Detroit (built on manufacturing and already in decline.)

Florida argues that the most successful areas to emerge from this economic downturn will be the places where creative and educated people are clustered most tightly together. So, although NYC has lost 17,000 financial sector jobs, he predicts it will do well because of the close packed talent base available in the region. One statistic in the article that jumped out at me was "Thirty years ago, educational attainment was spread relatively uniformly throughout the country, but that’s no longer the case. Cities like Seattle, San Francisco, Austin, Raleigh, and Boston now have two or three times the concentration of college graduates of Akron or Buffalo."

It seems to me that the cultural value placed on post-secondary education is not uniformly distributed in our country. I am a close reader of the web forum College Confidential. I have read posts from parents in suburban Texas whose children have taken a high school course load with 1/4 of their credits in Drill Team. (This is so the Football Team can practice for a double period during the school day and thus satisfy that cultural value.) And there are parents in Massachusetts and NYC whose kids have taken 11 AP classes including multi variable calculus. The priorities of school districts vary widely, and urban school districts usually do not compare well to their suburban counterparts. But the most highly educated people end up working in urban areas.

From a Row House point of view, this was the most salient point from Florida's article:

Suburbanization—and the sprawling growth it propelled—made sense for a time. The cities of the early and mid-20th century were dirty, sooty, smelly, and crowded, and commuting from the first, close-in suburbs was fast and easy. And as manufacturing became more technologically stable and product lines matured during the postwar boom, suburban growth dovetailed nicely with the pattern of industrial growth. Businesses began opening new plants in green-field locations that featured cheaper land and labor; management saw no reason to continue making now-standardized products in the expensive urban locations where they’d first been developed and sold. Work was outsourced to then-new suburbs and the emerging areas of the Sun Belt, whose connections to bigger cities by the highway system afforded rapid, low-cost distribution. This process brought the Sun Belt economies (which had lagged since the Civil War) into modern times, and sustained a long boom for the United States as a whole.

But that was then; the economy is different now. It no longer revolves around simply making and moving things. Instead, it depends on generating and transporting ideas. The places that thrive today are those with the highest velocity of ideas, the highest density of talented and creative people, the highest rate of metabolism. Velocity and density are not words that many people use when describing the suburbs. The economy is driven by key urban areas; a different geography is required.