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... has no such districts, just a very few funky venues strewn about empty streets, with nothing connecting the dots. Often, these places come and go too quickly to form a walkable enclave. People-watching is important, too -- just being out on the street at any time of the day or night, seeing life stream by, is stimulating. A city needs a vibrant music scene, art scene, film scene, nightlife scene and outdoor recreation scene. And it's important for clubs and restaurants to be open late -- creative people need to be able to get their cultural fix anytime.
Based on all of the above, Phoenix has a lot of work to do. But Florida thinks investing in a dense urban core is worthwhile. One person who craves round-the-clock culture is Cindy Dach, a former New Yorker who says one of her simplest wishes is to be able to walk to get a cup of coffee in the morning or a glass of wine after work. "Why should that be so hard?" she asks. (Caves 193) A fan of Florida's book, Dach doesn't merely pay lip service to the notion of creating a vibrant downtown. Although her day job takes her to south Tempe, where she coordinates events and marketing for Changing Hands Bookstore, Dach spends much of her time in downtown Phoenix. She is a founding member of the Eye Lounge art collective and gallery, one of the requisite stops on the downtown First Fridays art walk, and is a founding member and board member of Arizona Chain Reaction, a group of local independent businesses. With her husband, Greg Esser, who is also involved in Eye Lounge, Dach also recently established Sixth Street Studios, an artist live / work space and gallery.
As demonstrated by her various projects in the community, one thing Dach understands about the desires of the Creative Class is that it's not enough simply to have a good job. You need "Quality of Place. " Florida's book describes how the whole picture needs to include an attractive job market, since creative folks don't stay with one company forever; interesting scenes for an eclectic lifestyle; funky hangouts like bookstores and cafes for social interaction; diversity of every kind, which signifies that a place is exciting and tolerant; authenticity, which encompasses historic buildings, cool neighborhoods, and great local music; and an identity, because people want to be proud of saying they live in a certain city. In other places around the country, from Cincinnati to Albuquerque, Rise of the Creative Class has sparked public conversations about how Florida's ideas can be applied to each city's individual set of strengths and weaknesses. Earlier this year, 100 representatives of the Creative Class, including Florida and Mary Jo Waits, got together to draft the Memphis Manifesto, "the definitive blueprint for communities competing for creatives and seeking to retain their own. " (Caves 201) And in Tampa, Florida, the mayor even appointed a manager of creative industries to oversee economic development and culture. Dach thinks Phoenix has a lot of potential, but she points to north Scottsdale as an example of how local planners are still taking an old-fashioned approach. The city of Scottsdale is "giving huge grants to Lowe's, The Great Indoors, Starbucks -- and that's going to be the death of a community.
It was the death of Mill. Why would you want to go to a Gap on Mill when you could go to an air-conditioned mall right near your home?" (Caves 203) Local business owners are some of the most creative people around, says Dach, because their survival depends on it. These are the people who can give the city its character. And these are the people whom she says the city should be helping. "If Phoenix leaders could get behind saying, I'm not going to give $ 2 million to The Great Indoors. I'm going to give $ 2 million to 10 local independent businesses, ' what a great city this would be. " () A big reason Florida has caused such a stir in cities around the country is because of all the rankings in his book.
After all, nobody wants to get a bad report card. His Creative Index measures an area's creative strength and potential, and is determined by a mix of factors: the percentage of Creative Class members in a city's work force, the High-Tech Index, the Innovation Index and the Diversity Index. With a score of 909, Phoenix ranked 19 th among major U. S. regions, and 22 nd overall. The High-Tech Index is a pretty straightforward measure of the concentration and size of a region's tech economy; Phoenix ranked eighth.
But it also came in 46 th on the Innovation Index, which measures the number of patents per capita. Most controversial is the Diversity Index, also dubbed the Gay Index, which measures the concentration of gays in a region. Florida argues that the Creative Class sees a community with a sizable gay population as a diverse, tolerant place, and therefore a desirable place to live -- the kind of place that would inspire creativity. Phoenix ranked 21 st. ASU's Mary Jo Waits says that when Florida's book came out, the Gay Index got a lot of skeptical reactions because it was misinterpreted. Florida also measured the number of artists, musicians, dancers, photographers and actors in cities with his Bohemian Index, and found that it predicts high-tech industry concentration as well as population and employment growth.
Phoenix is ranked 23 rd among the top 49 regions. With all the mentioned facts being quite important, family also should not be underestimated. It has been a disappointing couple of years for many entrepreneurs across the nation, but for Ramon Alvarez things have never been better. Sitting in a cramped office at his bustling car dealership within a sprawling auto center here, the 43 -year-old Alvarez looks forward to the rest of the year, indeed the next decade, with nothing but eager anticipation. Alvarez, who bought his Ford-Lincoln agency nine years ago and added a Jaguar dealership last year, has boosted his sales from ten cars per month in the mid 1990 s to 114 a month now. He credits most of his success, and that of the other 15 dealers at the Riverside Auto Center, to the remarkable demographic and business growth that has made the Riverside-San Bernardino region of Southern California into arguably the strongest regional economy in the nation.
Since June 2001, this highly suburban region east of Los Angeles, known locally as the Inland Empire -- with a population exceeding 3 million people -- has enjoyed annual job growth of over 3 percent. (Baumol 39 - 42) No other area of the country of comparable size has experienced anything like this rate of job creation during the current soft economy. The striking success of the Inland Empire -- and the poor performance of places like San Francisco and other glamour economies of the late ' 90 s such as New York City, Boston, and Seattle -- sharply rebuts recent conventional media wisdom on the underpinnings of economic growth. In the late 1990 s, a trendy argument launched by academics and propagated by journalists held that future economic growth depended on attracting high-technology workers and affluent yuppies. It was said that this in turn would happen only in places with lots of graduate students, artists, bohemians, homosexuals, and unmarried singles packed into a vertical city with loads of nightlife.
In other words, places exactly the opposite of the sprawling, highly familial, lower-bourgeois Inland Empire. Today, economic growth is more likely to be found in areas dismissed by Richard Florida and his media supporters as barely worth living in. It's not likely that this correction will be trumpeted with anything like the fervor of Florida's original claims, however, because many journalists prefer his original perspective. In fact, a whole industry has arisen over the last decade to promote the premise that economic growth directly follows "quality of life" factors that appeal to singles, young people, homosexuals, sophists, and trend oids. What really matters are dance clubs, cool restaurants, art museums, and hip shopping districts, many writers agreed. If you go to today's new growth hot-spots, however, you will find few of those supposed prerequisites of prosperity. (Stiglitz 102) Instead, in a land like the Inland Empire you will see single-family homes, churches, satellite dishes, and malls.
These are places where households, not singles, dominate the economy. These are cultures attractive to ordinary families. And therefore to business people. Family is the key factor here. The places high on Florida's Creativity Index, such as San Francisco, Boston, and Seattle, also tend to be the parts of the U. S.
with the fewest number of children per capita. In contrast, thriving places like McAllen, Boise, Fresno, Fort Worth, Provo, and the Inland Empire have among the highest percentages of children in the nation. And the reality is that family strength has a much longer and deeper track record as an indicator of economic health and entrepreneurial motivation than homosexuality or bohemianism. (Baumol 76) America's new growth spots tend to be economies centered around basic industries like construction, distribution, retail, and low-tech manufacturing. This can be seen in the relative success of such diverse economies as Portland, Maine; Sioux Falls, South Dakota; and McAllen, Texas. Some tech centers -- like Boise, Raleigh, Austin, and Provo -- also rank as family-friendly locales, with well-above-average rates of married-with-children households. (Nakamura 26) In addition to being much more family friendly places, today's growth regions tend to differ from fashionable but economically lagging parts of the Northeast and coastal California in another way: they have different attitudes toward business and enterprising.
Places like the Inland Empire are very friendly toward founders and builders of business establishments. In these places, expansion is regarded by citizens, local government, and regional media much more as a good thing than as a source of problems. That attitude is reversed in many more culturally liberal regions -- and in the national media. (Baumol 111) Shifts in the logistics of business have also helped many of these regions succeed. Rather than being forced to locate their plants, storage warehouses, and distributions centers near major cities and entry ports, businesses now often set up in less congested areas with good air, rail, and freeway links, hardworking labor pools, and pro-enterprise attitudes.
This explains much of the rapid growth in places like McAllen, Texas -- which has become the key shipping location in the Rio Grande Valley, and thus the hub for half of all trade between Mexico and the United States. Buoyed by a strong increase in distribution and manufacturing employment, the McAllen area enjoyed job growth of 2. 5 percent over a recent 12 -month period when the rest of Texas suffered a stagnant economy. (Baumol 120) The successes of communities like McAllen are not flashes in the pan, but the culmination of many years of steady growth. Their solid growth patterns merely become more visible when other splashier industries and regions fall back to earth. The region grew in population by nearly 50 percent during the 1990 s, to a current total of over 500, 000 people. Over the last two years, McAllen recruited firms that added over 4, 500 new jobs, mostly in call centers, distribution, and manufacturing. (Baumol 126) Nowhere are the new patterns of job and population growth more evident than in the Inland Empire. The area has steadily increased its share of southern California's rail, truck, and air-transport business activity.
An astonishing 70, 000 logistics and manufacturing jobs were added during the ' 90 s. In contrast, the coastal counties around Los Angeles lost over 43, 000 such positions. (Baumol 133) Once-obscure Ontario Airport on the outskirts of L. A. has now become a major air shipment hub, with six direct non-stop cargo flights to China daily. It now serves as the West Coast headquarters of UPS. The conjunction of these transportation nodes with cheap space -- industrial and warehouse square footage costs roughly half what it does in Los Angeles -- has made the intersection of Interstate 10 (the link to L.
A. ) and Interstate 15 (the north / south route between Las Vegas and San Diego) the busiest truck route in the nation. But being a trucker's heaven tells only part of the story behind the Inland Empires relentless growth. Even more important has been the stimulus provided by continuing migration of families to this region. Roughly 50 miles east of the southern California coast, people come here seeking affordable homes, a less urban environment, and room to grow. These things are hard to find in congested and pricey L.
A. Since 1990, more than 660, 000 people have moved into the San Bernardino-Riverside area. (Baumol 171) The bulk of this growth comes from family-minded ethnic minorities, predominantly Latinos, but also some Asians, who increasingly see the Inland Empire as the one place in southern California where their entrepreneurialism and hard work can be rewarded with a middle-class lifestyle. In the face of such enormous in-migration, it's remarkable that unemployment in the area has dropped by almost half since 1995. (Baumol 179) New families keep coming as prices for homes rise throughout the rest of southern California. Today, only 36 percent of families can afford the median price of a home in Los Angeles County; less than 23 percent can do so in neighboring Orange County. (Stiglitz 160) In contrast, nearly half of all families in the Inland Empire (where housing is roughly 50 percent cheaper) can afford the current median price of a home. Not surprisingly, the region boasts one of the highest percentages of "married with children" households in the nation. Few observers think the growth of these familial, suburbanized cities will slow anytime soon.
The metropolitan region is expected to gain more population than any but five states. Yet this growth and prosperity has done nothing to enhance the reputation of the Inland Empire among Los Angeles fashion-setters. Therefore, although Creative Class has a lot to do with economic growth, family is also quite important to this very growth. Words Count: 4, 689. Bibliography Baumol, W. The New Economy: Broad Perspectives.
Princeton University Press, 2002. Caves, K. Creative Industries: Contracts between Art and Commerce. Harvard University Press, 2000. Florida, R. The Rise of the Creative Class: And How Its Transforming Work, Leisure Community and Everyday Life.
Basic Books, 2002. Nakamura, L. Economics and New Economy: the Invisible Hand Meets Creative Destruction. Business Review, p. 15 - 29. Stiglitz, J. Globalization and its Discontents.
W. W. Norton, 2002.
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Research essay sample on Los Angeles Economic Growth
