RETHINKING AGGLOMERATION?

I'll never lack for stuff to reflect on.  Now comes Richard "Creative Class" Florida, perhaps coming to terms with bid-rent curves fostering de-agglomeration.  "When the rich, the young, and the (mostly) white rediscovered the city, they created rampant property speculation, soaring home prices, and mass displacement."  When "Captain Ed" Driscoll picks up Jacobin, there's something going on.

I'm not surprised.  It's likely there will be more reaction, particularly as Professor Florida's latest book comes to the stores.

He argues that the creative classes have grabbed hold of many of the world’s great cities and choked them to death. As a result, the fifty largest metropolitan areas house just 7 percent of the world’s population but generate 40 percent of its growth. These “superstar” cities are becoming gated communities, their vibrancy replaced with deracinated streets full of Airbnbs and empty summer homes.

Meanwhile, drug addiction and gang violence have spread to the suburbs. “Much more than a crisis of cities,” he writes, “the New Urban Crisis is the central crisis of our time” — “a crisis of the suburbs, of urbanization itself and of contemporary capitalism writ large.”

Or, as I have been characterizing Chicago, as fifteen square miles of privilege surrounded by the Third World.  But in Chicago, at least there's a pop tax.