Pronetos

Abandoning the suburbs?!

Posted March 06, 2009 by Christopher Blanchard

Michael Fitzgerald riffs on Richard Florida's recent article about fleeing the SUBURBS!

From the article:

Sprawl has distorted our economy, argues economic geographer Richard Florida in his essay How the Crash Will Reshape America. Florida says moving to suburbs and then exurbs was the right answer to industrialization. But they’re exactly the wrong answer to what a knowledge economy needs.

(The economy) 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.

How do we reshape our economy?

He suggests several things:

* Eliminate incentives for buying homes; instead, create incentives for renters. For instance, offer foreclosed owners the chance to rent back their homes at the new market rate.
* Invest in areas that have the best innovation metabolisms; New York, of course, Los Angeles and Chicago, Austin and Boulder, but also regions like Silicon Valley and North Carolina’s Research Triangle.
* Abandon areas fated for decline to their fate. Not just Detroit, Cleveland and Buffalo, but also Phoenix.

Florida says the new America will look like this:

It will likely be sparser in the Midwest and also, ultimately, in those parts of the Southeast that are dependent on manufacturing. Its suburbs will be thinner and its houses, perhaps, smaller. Some of its southwestern cities will grow less quickly. Its great mega-regions will rise farther upward and extend farther outward. It will feature a lower rate of homeownership, and a more mobile population of renters. In short, it will be a more concentrated geography, one that allows more people to mix more freely and interact more efficiently in a discrete number of dense, innovative mega-regions and creative cities. Serendipitously, it will be a landscape suited to a world in which petroleum is no longer cheap by any measure. But most of all, it will be a landscape that can accommodate and accelerate invention, innovation, and creation—the activities in which the U.S. still holds a big competitive advantage.

Florida makes a radical argument. Coincidentally, he also fills in some of the gaps in Emma Rothschild’s argument against continuing the auto-industrial state. It shows a model for adding both public transit infrastructure without eliminating cars.

But it seems like some economic thinkers are coalescing around a much different direction for government stimulus. The markets don’t like what Obama’s doing now. Perhaps this plan to grow by shrinking makes sense.

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I've been wondering what population inflows/outflows are going to look like in light of the real estate collapse and the follow-on stimulus money. Might have to continue that line of thought . . .