While Richard Florida — author of The Rise of the Creative Class, among other books — is a controversial fellow among some of my friends and colleagues, his new piece in The Atlantic is worth reading.
Essentially Florida argues the following:
- Many of the hardest-hit formerly industrial (e.g., Detroit, St. Louis, etc. ) cities over the last few decades will be hit even harder
- Sun-belt fake cities, like Phoenix and Las Vegas, will pay the price for their nonsensical existence
- Mega-regions will rise higher
- Exurbs will become like the abandoned settlements of the Anasazi.
Here is an excerpt:
Sadly and unjustly, the places likely to suffer most from the crash—especially in the long run—are the ones least associated with high finance. While the crisis may have begun in New York, it will likely find its fullest bloom in the interior of the country—in older, manufacturing regions whose heydays are long past and in newer, shallow-rooted Sun Belt communities whose recent booms have been fueled in part by real-estate speculation, overdevelopment, and fictitious housing wealth. These typically less affluent places are likely to become less wealthy still in the coming years, and will continue to struggle long after the mega-regional hubs and creative cities have put the crisis behind them.
The Rust Belt in particular looks likely to shed vast numbers of jobs, and some of its cities and towns, from Cleveland to St. Louis to Buffalo to Detroit, will have a hard time recovering. Since 1950, the manufacturing sector has shrunk from 32 percent of nonfarm employment to just 10 percent. This decline is the result of long-term trends—increasing foreign competition and, especially, the relentless replacement of people with machines—that look unlikely to abate. But the job losses themselves have proceeded not steadily, but rather in sharp bursts, as recessions have killed off older plants and resulted in mass layoffs that are never fully reversed during subsequent upswings.
More here.
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