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Mar

16

New City vs. Old City Ideas

Filed Under Uncategorized 

Noted demographer Richard Florida has taken a look at what American
cities and “mega-regions” will rebound from our nation’s great
recession – and which won’t survive.  Check out his ideas in the March
Atlantic Monthly.

Florida looks at the ways that high tech cities, America’s magnets for
educated, skilled people, will adjust to the new economy that will
emerge from the deep recession.

“Now we need a ‘new spatial fix for the next chapter of American
economic history.’ That fix will be high-quality, dense urban spaces in
the elite mega-regions, places where ideas and innovation can most
efficiently percolate much like what were seeing take shape in
(Seattle’s) South Lake Union.”

Seattle Times business columnist John Talton and Florida argue that
Seattle needs to be more attractive and affordable for all of Americas
classes, not just the upper crust.  Urban centers must have
economically diverse populations.
Florida doesn’t believe that
suburbia goes away, but that it must be retrofitted with its own urban
centers, just as Seattle is doing.

However Talton and Florida agree that it will be “a hard sell to an
America accustomed to the age of the automobile and the illusion of
endless, wide-open spaces.“

As they predict, key improvements to Seattle’s emerging urban centers
beyond downtown continue to be denounced by an unlikely combination of
neighborhood folks and poverty activists.

A short piece in early March by John V. Fox of the Seattle Displacement
Coalition dismissed the Mercer East street improvements as a gift to
South Lake Union Urban Center developer Paul Allen – and presumably to
the other developers in the revitalizing South Lake Union.

Fox’s Seattle Displacement Coalition has also secured the gutting and
subsequent failure of the bills in the State Legislature’s current
session that would require some density around mass transit stations.

He claims that such redevelopment would displace low-cost housing
tenants.  But the bills designated stringent goals for the inclusion of
low-cost and subsidized housing in denser redevelopment around light
rail stations.  Erica Barnett in the Stranger wrote about the
irrationality of Fox’s position on transit station density.

Times writer Talton feels that successful urban centers are key to our
city’s economic future.  Florida predicts in his At
lantic piece that
the re-set of the American economy will shape cities like Seattle which
Florida includes in his short list of “elite mega-regions.”

But Talton warns, “Even many people in blue-and-green Western
Washington may have a hard time with Florida’s ultimate conclusion:
that the spread-out, suburbanizing trends of the past 60 years have not
only run their course, but played a major role in distorting the
economy and fueling this recession.”

John Coney

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