Joel Kotkin vs Richard Florida

Suburbs, cities, regions

Jon Boyd, Sep 28, 10.

Urban theorists Joel Kotkin and Richard Florida are at the center of a debate over the future and shape of economic development in the United States. Two recent articles - one by Jesse A. Hamilton, former Washington bureau chief for The Hartford Courant, and the other by Bruce Katz, director of the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institute - present and critique this debate about the roles of suburbs, cities, and regions.

“America’s Future: The Heartland Versus The Coasts,” an article in the National Journal, “chronicles the ongoing ‘war over the future’ between urban gurus Joel Kotkin and Richard Florida: a contest between suburbs and cities, sprawl, and density, Middle America and the coasts, the metropolis and the megaregion,” writes Bruce Katz in the New Republic:

On one level, Kotkin and Florida are still wrestling over traditional urban planning turf, trying to discern housing, transport, and location preferences of a society growing ever more complex with each passing decade. Brookings’ State of Metropolitan America report released earlier this year showed a nation in the throes of demographic transformation, simultaneously growing, aging, diversifying, and splintering along new cultural and educational fault lines. At the same time, the U.S. economy is slowly restructuring in the aftermath of the Great Recession, tilting gradually away from excessive consumption towards more productive activity.

Against this backdrop, it is simple folly to believe that one “American trend” (e.g., Florida’s urban-like density or Kotkin’s suburban-like sprawl) is predetermined by the complicated mix of individual and firm choices, overarching economic and environmental imperatives, varied policy interventions, and ever evolving technological possibilities.

The future of places will be more “multi-dimensional’ than Florida and Kotkin imagine; and Florida’s mega-regions are too geographically expansive and Kotkin’s suburbs are too geographically restrictive, says Katz.

Kotkin believes that cities of opportunities in middle-America will drive the nation’s economy, claims Hamilton in his National Journal cover story:

In Kotkin’s theory of resurgence in “the heartland,” cities such as Omaha; Fargo, N.D.; and Iowa’s Des Moines and Sioux Falls will surge. “The Great Plains may be one of the most critical areas in the next 20 to 30 years,” Kotkin says. He believes that Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio—“really dynamic”—are also on the right track.

Charm is not the attraction. “People aren’t moving to Houston and Dallas because of the climate and the topography,” Kotkin said. “They’re moving there for opportunity.” Besides the lower cost of living and the bounteous space, it’s technology that makes him bullish about these cities. The Internet “has broken the traditional isolation of the rural communities,” Kotkin argues in his book, and that will speed the movement of companies to the hinterlands.

Another reason behind the heartland’s rise, he says, is simply greater desire. Cities such as Seattle are incapable of the explosive growth that drives a nation’s economy, Kotkin contends, because real expansion happens only where people want it. In a city with a well-developed and prized identity, proud inhabitants are reluctant to tear up the past.

Most of the development will take place, he believes, not in the midsection’s cities themselves but in their suburbs and exurbs. He foresees the rings around each landlocked city shining like a charm bracelet, a chain of hubs with distinct personalities. “The basic pattern of the future metropolis will be built upon a predominantly suburban matrix dominated by cars, road connections, and construction such as is familiar to the denizens of contemporary Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Houston,” he writes in his book. “These dense zones will be ad hoc, constantly shifting and ethnically diverse.”

Richard Florida believes the future will favor dense, urban areas and the “mega-regions,” according to Hamilton’s characterization:

At least one well-established East Coast city belies Kotkin’s Great Plains vision. The biggest winner from the Great Recession, by futurist Florida’s lights, has been the nation’s capital. But not for the reasons you’d think. Government work has helped, but more important is that metropolitan Washington has become a center for high technology, media, entertainment, and the creative density that Florida savors.

D.C. is the southernmost link in Florida’s eastern behemoth, Bos-Wash, one of a dozen mega-regions that he sees already spreading like gray amoebas on satellite images of the nation. Also taking shape are the Midwest giant of Chi-Pitts; Char-lanta, which includes Atlanta, Charlotte, and Raleigh-Durham, N.C.; and So-Flo, encompassing Miami and Orlando. Residents may call their home terrain by different names—Santa Monica, Pasadena, Long Beach. But the satellites see no borders in greater Los Angeles—or So-Cal, in Florida’s parlance.

Unlike Kotkin, who anticipates a more decentralized America, Florida celebrates density. “The places that thrive today are those with the highest velocity of ideas, the highest density of talented and creative people and the highest rate of metabolism,” he writes. As he sees things, “We’re going to have to become denser. If we don’t have density, we don’t grow.”

This future could call for lifestyle changes that drill to the marrow of American identity. Florida argues for a U-turn in the country’s bond with cars, through policies that charge for road use and remake suburbs for walkability. He champions an advance in public transportation. ” ‘Velocity’ and ‘density’ are not words that many people use when describing suburbia,” he wrote. “Older suburbs, especially those on transit routes, are being reorganized and rebuilt into denser communities offering more condos and town houses.”

More provocatively, Florida believes that homeownership should be detached from the American Dream, because it has shackled too many workers to distressed mortgages and kept people from chasing jobs. “Older manufacturing firms, jobs, and industries are being destroyed, and new industries, occupations and firms are being created,” he contends. “In this kind of situation, it’s much harder for workers, particularly low-skilled ones, to find jobs where they live.”

Florida, an American who owns a home in Toronto, wants the U.S. government to end the tax deduction for mortgages, which has “outlived its usefulness and massively distorted our economy.” He hopes for a stronger market for rental housing that is run by highly professional organizations operating in multiple locations, making it easier for job seekers to move.

He also calls for a government commitment to transit that would knit each mega-region together, and high-speed rail to link one mega-region to another. Shifting to public transportation, though, wouldn’t be easy. Even in Washington, with its relatively modern subway system, only one in seven workers commutes by public transit. The national average is one in 20; in sprawling Phoenix, it’s one in 42.

Function, Form, and the Metropolitan Future
America’s Future: The Heartland Versus The Coasts