Shoot the Suburbs

Imagine the economy is a giant bunch of stuff and we are literally trying to pick up all this stuff, to lift it. We can’t quite get all of it, and some of it slips out of our hands as we start to walk, and it’s heavy and we have to keep putting it down and then we can’t get it all gathered up again.
That’s the image economic geographer Richard Florida has created in his essay How the Crash Will Reshape America. Sprawl has distorted our economy. Whatever we can’t get our arms around we need to let go, or we’ll be scurrying about trying to gather the pieces for decades.
Florida says suburbs were the right answer to industrialization. He says 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. It will not be easy to achieve. A lot of people may not like living in apartments and sharing washing machines with their neighbors, the way they do in Hammarby Sjostad in Sweden (see halfway down this Bill McKibben piece).  But it seems like intellectuals may be coalescing around a much different direction for government stimulus. The markets don’t like watching Obama try to gather up everything and lift it.

Perhaps this plan to grow by shrinking makes sense.