but first a double-edged sword of urban revival even if some cities are becoming
ever more popular and desirable they're also becoming places where the middle
class and lower-income residents are getting priced out of the market
economics correspondent Paul Solman has the story it's part of his weekly series
making sense
looking down on Manhattan's old meatpacking district the High Line a
mecca for more than 7 million eager tourists a year astride a once derelict
spur of the New York Central this was an old broken-down abandoned rail line
elevated rail line a rail line shrouding the buildings beneath as a result rents
were cheap in the cutting edge marginalized moved in much of this area
of Chelsea was historically a gay neighborhood and they were gay men and
wanted to do something which celebrated the the history of the old gay
neighborhood noted urban ologist Richard Florida there's one of the old buildings
still with the rainbow flag a remnant of the past that proved a harbinger of
gentrification to come once they built the park it became a draw not us people
but for real estate developers and they never anticipated that no one
anticipated the High Line would be a place that luxury towers would grow up
around but have they ever for nearly a mile and a half the elevated walkway now
winds through towers full of luxury condos over the top testimony to the
urban revitalization that Florida famously championed in his 2002 book the
creative class we're going through I think one of the greatest economic
transformations in history from an old industrial ii corporate based vertical
economy to a new knowledge economy but the twist i try to add is it's also
urban its its city based its clustered in cities florida's twist became gospel
attract members of the creative class and they in turn will create jobs which
will in turn renew and rebuild and it happened just look at the High Line but
what Florida now sees is the double edge of the advice he gave and that so many
followed a bigger denser city in general increases the rate of innovation
increases the rate of star increases the rate of productivity at
the same time the bigger the denser the more knowledge intensive increases the
rate of inequality increases the rate of economic segregation makes housing less
affordable so it's a two sided monster those unintended consequences of urban
revival are the real world twist Florida wrestles with in his latest book the new
urban crisis people want to park money in real estate artists the best art
galleries in the world commercial companies real estate development firms
financial headquarters heck companies startups and companies like Google so
the second dimension is I kind of call it a crisis of success these places now
become terribly unaffordable for anyone who's not either a knowledge worker or a
techie or a member of the super rich as a result pressure on most of the city's
residents now facing apartment rents and prices soaring as high as the buildings
that house them many actually unoccupied because they are assets for foreigners
parking their money as Florida puts it in real estate you stop stocks you stop
bonds now owning real estate in a superstar city becomes another class of
asset rents in this building roughly thirty five hundred dollars a month for
a one-room studio apartment forty-seven hundred for a one-bedroom seven thousand
for two bedrooms I could not live in a decent Manhattan apartment by myself I
might be able to live in Queens or maybe outer skirts of Brooklyn these days
because it's gotten very expensive there to sarah hawk rad a 31 year old speech
therapist who works nearby lives across town with roommates was hoping to move
somewhere close with her boyfriend how much money would you and he have to earn
just to get to be able to afford a $4,700 a month apartment maybe 150 170
like and that's to really cut down into the bare bones of what how you live at
least a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year it was testimony like
this that triggered Florida's aha moment the gradual displacement of all but the
most successful types he long urged cities to attract we did an analysis
which looked at the amount of money these three groups the knowledge
creative class but working blue-collar class and the
service workers had left over after paying for housing the creatives had
like 80 or 90 grand left over the blue collars had 30 and the service workers
had like 15 I realized that this urbanism winner-take-all urbanism it was
benefiting one group much more disproportionately than the other two
and with ballooning rents low-income workers are being squeezed out entirely
banished to the once desirable suburbs it's a crisis that's metastasizing of
poverty concentrated poverty economic distress in our suburbs it's been
happening for decades of course the inexorable pinching of America's middle
class the move towards what's been called an hourglass economy with the
prosperous in the top half the less well-off in the bottom and fewer and
fewer Americans in between if the old urban crisis was about the middle class
flight from the city to the suburbs yes the new urban crisis is about really the
disappearance of middle-class neighborhoods from our society what
tragic about that is the middle-class neighborhoods were really our launch
pads for upward mobility in the American dream thus Florida's first epiphany the
growing divide within cities between the rich and the rest who are being forced
out of town though we also had a second insight that divide between cities
winner-take-all urbanism the winners San Francisco New York the losers cities
like Detroit Milwaukee Memphis and even in these stressed cities creative class
clustering is beginning to segregate the rich from the rest but wait a second the
winning cities simply followed Florida's own advice suggesting a pointed question
about what he calls the new urban crisis did he help caused it I think I really
wanted to help cities understand that urban revival but that urban revival you
know according to the data we now have it's 2002 now where that the urban
revival goes into full bore and I think I was not only surprised shocked by the
speed of it and and shocked by the way it put pressure on cities but then what
if anything can to close the gap
well one answer building public transit to connect the lagging outskirts to jobs
in the booming urban core and hey the 34th Street and Hudson Yards subway
station just opened in 2015 it's spectacular
but if you look at most of the subway stops and transit hubs Penn Station
they're falling apart Penn Station New York's key commuter hub is evermore
haunted by delays and cancellations the result of aging infrastructure but if
you really modernize a city's transit system you run back into the
double-edged sword of Florida's advice the better the transit the denser and
more productive the city the less its lower end workers will be able to afford
to live in it the more of a rich Enclave it becomes well yes that may be true
Florida acknowledges and so he says that today's cities have to start insisting
you want to build a tower like that if you want to get the rights to create
height and density we're going to make a trade
and a trade we're going to make and what are you for you to go up like that
you're going to make affordable housing affordable housing the only real way to
try to close the gap says Florida so why not muscle developers to offer workers
in their projects cheap rents good wages why not have your tenants be the ones
that are creating better higher-paying service jobs that are creating a family
supporting job so we can have an inclusionary prosperity in cities can
say we'll trade density for good things that developers will do in order to get
the density they want the height they want they've got to build affordable
housing and they've got to build a more inclusive community but if they don't
we're left with the two faces of Florida's present creative class advice
that's the great contradiction of today's urbanized capitalism you know if
we want to have a productive city and innovative city a country that innovates
and creates good jobs we need them but at the same time that the very thing
that is driving our economy forward is creating these divides for the PBS
Newshour this is economics correspondent Paul Solman reporting from and below the
High Line in New York City