On a sweltering Thursday evening, Chip Taylor and
Carrie Rodriguez are singing to a crowd of several hundred
outside at Shady Grove, an Austin
institution.
Get me back to
Austin, oh, damn, I miss that
town.
I got them
sweet tequila blues coming down
Waitresses hustle through the crowd taking drink and
food orders, even delivering to people standing in the back. A
bartender wearing a "Keep Austin Weird" T-shirt sells
longnecks from a tub of ice.
On the rear lawn, families sit on blankets, strollers
nearby. Up close there are a few pony-tailed men who were fans
when Taylor wrote, "Wild Thing," a
Sixties hit for The Troggs. Scattered throughout are
fresh-from-work twentysomethings in khakis and short sleeve
shirts or skirts and blouses, here more for the beer and
conversation than the free
concert.
The concert is sponsored by KGSR-FM, one of the highest
rated stations in town despite playing a ridiculously eclectic
list of artists -- British popsters Coldplay, bluesman Chris
Smither, folkie Patty Griffin, hometown boy Lyle Lovett – in a
business usually rewarded by generic repetition. (The
station's collection of in-studio recordings is regularly the
top seller at Waterloo Records, another independent, homegrown
Austin
product).
This free concert, believe it or not, is an example of
what helps make Austin an emerging economic
powerhouse.
Just ask Richard Florida, a professor of economic
development at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and the author of
"The Rise of the Creative Class," the hottest book about
creating wealth to come along in
years.
If an
economic theorist can become a celebrity, Florida
has earned his star. This fall he toured like a rock 'n roll
act, appearing in Seattle, Green Bay, Copenhagen, Denver,
Raleigh, Winnipeg, Miami, Toronto, San Antonio and Washington,
D.C., among other cities. Mayors, city council members and
city managers clamor for his recipe to transform their sleepy
city into the next hot spot.
What Florida tells them turns the
conventional wisdom about economic growth upside down and
shakes hard. Talent matters. Place matters. Not corporations.
“Creative” workers, a diverse core group including scientists,
information technology workers, engineers, artists and writers
are the decisive competitive advantage driving economic
growth.
When it
comes time to decide where to settle, those creative workers
are looking for attractive cities, not just attractive
companies. "Place is becoming the central organizing unit of
our economy and society, taking a role that used to be played
by large corporations," he explains. "The way you match people
with jobs now is not the company, it's the place. The place
for a company provides a thick pool of people to dip into. For
a person, a place provides a thick labor market. So a place
really provides the organizing glue for this creative economy
by bringing people and companies
together."
Florida has created a
ranking -- what he calls the Creativity Index -- a barometer
of a region's long-term economic potential. Places that score
high on the index, he says, are the places that have been and
will be successful at generating the new ideas, new
technologies and innovations that increase living standards
and wealth.
Not surprisingly, San Francisco tops his list.
What is surprising is the city in second place -- Austin.
Austin is a smallish city in
a hellishly hot climate with a modest airport, no major league
sports teams and modest
architecture.
But
Florida says Austin
hustled to do follow two vital tracks during the 1980s and
1990s. It attracted some high tech companies but didn’t stop
there. It fostered a culture of entrepreneurship that spawned
dozens of homegrown companies, attracting hundreds of millions
of dollars of venture capital. And then it worked hard to make
Austin a vital place to live,
supporting the local arts and recreation scene. It became a
place to work for a high-tech company by day and go see -- or
play in -- an alt country band by
night.
“A great place doesn’t mean these great monuments that
so many cities have – opera halls, concert venues, magnificent
stadiums,” Florida says. “What makes a
great place is just what you saw in Austin.”
Cities that provide the amenities and atmosphere the
creative class desires -- outdoor recreation (forget that new
sports stadium), great neighborhoods, clubs, cafes,
restaurants, low barriers to becoming involved, a diverse pool
of potential friends -- attract the kinds of workers that grow
their economies.
"Access to
talented and creative people," Florida writes, "is to modern
business what access to coal and iron ore was to steel
making."
When I meet former Austin Mayor Kirk Watson the morning
after the Shady Grove show, I mention the diversity of the
crowd. Watson turns my comment around and talks about the
diversity of the city.
Within
walking distance of Shady Grove are funky Mexican and Italian
restaurants, he notes. An RV park -- that's right, a
recreational vehicle park -- sits next door. What other city
has an RV park within its limits and just minutes from
downtown? The surrounding neighborhood is mixed income with a
new upscale development across the street from older, smaller
homes. Across the street is Barton Springs Pool, a spring-fed
watering hole. Nearby is a place to rent bikes on the trail
that runs from downtown up into the hills. If you prefer water
as your mode, you can rent canoes to paddle down what the
locals call Town
Lake, the part of the
Colorado River that meanders through south Austin.
Zilker Park, which features
blues shows on Wednesday nights, is just down the
road.
Across town, the city has leased hangars for the old
airport to the Austin Film Society for a public/private
venture, which has quickly proved to be a Hollywood favorite, producing more than
a dozen films and pumping $70 million into the economy in just
three years.
And, of course, Austin bills itself as the
live music capital of the world. For the weekend ahead, The
Austin Chronicle, the city's healthy alternative weekly (135
pages this week) lists more than 215 venues featuring acts as
varied as blues band Indigenous, folkie Ellis Paul,
alternative popsters The Pernice Brothers and spastic
metalhead Ozzy Osbourne.
To Florida, that kind of
cultural and social diversity -- and openness -- is a key ingredient
enticing the creative class.
"It's not
simply bike trails and music clubs and venues and hip places
to go and restaurants," he says. "I think what people are
looking for is the ability to plug in...That's the thing about
an Austin or a Seattle or a Boston.
They're so much more open and free
form."
Tyson Tuttle, the product manager for Silicon Labs, a
homegrown Austin computer chip
maker that employs 380 people, moved from Orange County after attending Johns Hopkins
and the University of
California at
Los Angeles, partly for the job
and partly for the Austin
atmosphere.
"In Orange County, all my friends
lived an hour in every direction behind a gate," he says. "In
Austin, I love the political
diversity. I love the music scene. Things here are compact.
It's a more interactive social environment here than it was in
southern California. For both me and
my wife, that was a really important
aspect."
Another striking thing about Austin
is the lack of chains. Oh, there is a fast food place here and
there, and a few chain drugstores. But casual local places
dominate. Places like Guero's on South Congress, famous for
its soft tacos. Or Curra's on Oltorf, known for its
margaritas. Lining South Congress, just across the bridge from
downtown, are dozens of homegrown bohemian businesses,
including the Hotel San Jose, once a fleabag and now
transformed into the cool, minimalist choice of celebs when
they're in town.
"That's the kind of thing a community that gets it
does," Florida says. "It emphasizes
the authentic and the unique instead of becoming filled with
generica. That goes back to people's need for community. They
want to see that they are living somewhere, not nowhere.
That's what those authentic things say: you're living
somewhere."
The city also aggressively set aside green space,
purchasing 15,000 acres in the surrounding hills through a $65
million bond referendum during the go-go years of the late
1990s. As mayor, Watson sold the project to environmentalists
by saying it would preserve space for endangered species, then
turned around and sold it to business and real estate
interests by telling them it would attract the kinds of talent
the city needed -- and guarantee clean water for the chip
fabrication operations. Lately, Austin has been pushing
residential development downtown.
Florida’s theory had its
beginnings in his doubts about the prevailing wisdom
explaining economic growth.
As the booming 1990s came to a close, there were just
too many examples that didn't fit. The old principles were
simple. A city needed needed a great job base to grow. To
create the jobs, it needed to lure corporations. To lure the
corporations, it needed to give them tax breaks and other
financial incentives.
"There was something missing," he says. "I began to
think that maybe there was this unexplored question why people
chose certain cities."
So he started to ask why people moved. For the job, of
course, they answered. But then he asked a second question:
What cities did you look in for jobs? Did you look in
Cleveland? No. Did you look
in Buffalo? No. Did you look in
Cincinnati?
No.
Well, where did you look? The answers were often the
same: I looked at Boston,
Chicago, New York, Washington, D.C. and San
Francisco.
"Then I began to hear weird things like, 'I really want
to move to Austin'," he says. “So that
was the genesis of the theory. It just took off from
there."
The notion of a "creative class" as diverse as software
engineers and musicians driving economic development sounds
gimmicky upon first listen. Robert Cushing, a
retired University of
Texas sociologist,
didn't think much of Florida's theory when the
Austin American-Statesman asked him to look at several
theories of economic development last year. After some study,
he came away convinced that the creative class theory was the
one best at explaining why people moved to some cities -- and
those cities thrived -- and not
others.
Cushing's work for the newspaper revealed that
taxpayers moving to Austin had significantly
higher incomes than those who left. From 1992 to 2000, for
instance, he found more than twice as many people moving from
Pittsburgh to Austin
as vice versa. Those leaving Pittsburgh had a much higher
average annual income -- more than $58,000 -- than those
coming the other way -- roughly $44,000. From 1992 to 2000,
according to Cushing's work for the paper, Austin
gained $4.3 billion in income in similar trades with
cities.
Ray Gindroz, a partner with Urban Design Associates, a
Pittsburgh consulting firm that
has guided the rebirth of numerous cities including Cincinnati, Charlotte, Cleveland, Louisville and Baltimore, says he’s seen the
creative class dynamic work. “The character and quality of a
place make a difference,” Gindroz says. “He’s saying cities
should make that a part of their economic development policy.
And I think what he says rings
true.”
Florida
tells officials from cities with ailing economies that tapping
into the creative energy is hard work, but it can be done.
"The market left alone will not give you this," he
says.
Each city, he says, has the ingredients to attract
creative people. The hard part is finding the right recipe and
the right chef.
"No longer
do you need to have the work hub," agrees Watson. "No longer
do you need to be a financial center or have large quantities
of land or a large population because you can access labor and
you can access markets and you can access capital any time of
the day virtually anywhere in the
world.
“Regions that never before thought that they could be
economic powerhouses have the opportunity to be economic
powerhouses."
What Austin has been learning in
the last couple of years is how to live with growth and the
downturn in the technology industry. Real estate prices, which
soared at the century ended, have come down a bit, but remain
high. Traffic has
mushroomed. Moreover, the city exemplifies a disturbing trend
found in places atop Florida's ranking: cities
with high growth also had the largest income inequality.
Florida says cities – and
academics -- will have to address that. “My book is the first
step,” he says. “I think what we really need to do is
understand the ecosystem of
creativity.”
Cushing wonders whether workers in a down economy will
look only at the job and less at the amenities offered by a
city, dampening the advantage that Florida says places like Austin
have.
So the city is taking another look at itself, shoring
up some efforts and creating new ones. It's revamping the
economic development plan. It’s looking at removing some of
the red tape facing businesses.
And it's embraced a "Keep Austin Weird" campaign
supporting local business. Symbolic of that are the vendors at
the new Austin airport. All of them
are hometown merchants; there isn't a McDonald's or Borders
among them.
"One of my rules when I talk to other cities is it's
important to re-evaluate, let a critical eye come in so don't
start believing your own bull," Watson says. "It's part of
what a creative, smart place ought to
do.”
n
END ---
THE TOP
TEN on FLORIDA’S CREATIVITY INDEX
(of the 49 regions over 1 million
people)
- San
Francisco
- Austin
- (tie) San Diego,
Boston
-
- Seattle
- Raleigh-Durham
- Houston
- Washington-Baltimore
- New
York
- Dallas
THE BOTTOM TEN:
49. Memphis
48. Norfolk, VA
47. Las
Vegas
46. Buffalo
45. Louisville
44. Grand
Rapids, MI
42. (tie) New
Orleans, Oklahoma
City
41. Greensboro, NC
40. Providence, RI
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