Real Estate discussions

[GenWhy?]

"For example, Toronto’s urban futurist Richard Florida, who in 2002 became famous for his book The Rise of the Creative Class, touting the power of young tech entrepreneurs to power up a local economy, reversed course. In 2017 he published a second book, The New Urban Crisis, saying that unfortunately his “creative class” was actually supercharging inequality in globally-attractive cities — driving a big income wedge between high-tech workers and their Uber drivers and baristas."

I'm quite frustrated with this read so I wrote way too much...

Well that's interesting to read today as I just listened to Florida on a podcast (released in 2021) talking about the "creative class" as the driving factor for strong tier-2 cities and the power of remote work where people no longer need to work in big cities.

In the 2017 podcast on is "New Urban Crisis" book, he mentions underpredicting the urban revival and cities inability to react to that success, and the book was to tell cities to acknowledge it's a real event and to invest in things for people and not "casinos and stadiums". He said he was optimistic that small cities would take the weight off big cities.

He cites Rob Ford as a crux to the "backlash" of the urban revival to start into his 2017 book. He also mentions that gentrification isn't a direct displacement, the problem he does mention is housing prices and how that pushes this group around an urban metro - what he mentions as "economic segregation" where areas with the most... everything for economic progress of our urban capitalistic society is a danger to itself. The success of cities and the drivers of that economic growth are also hurting cities.

He didn't "reverse course", he did some research of what happened / was happening and wrote a book on it. He speaks to helping the service jobs for better minimum wages and education and supports (internal career ladder, unions, etc).

Condon also intertwines the "creative class" and the capital coming here buying housing. To him they're the same, or as I read it in his opinion piece.

He calls the Broadway Plan area the "innovation corridor" from Commercial Drive to UBC and a catalyst is the subway "running under Pacific Spirit Park"?

"Finally, be extremely careful about unbalancing our infrastructure expenditures in the misguided belief that highly expensive infrastructure (e.g. subways to UBC) will serve the common good by catalyzing global economic development investment. The evidence seems to indicate the opposite. Such projects accelerate wealth and class divides and favour the wooed newcomers, rather than enhance the health, safety and welfare of our current citizens."

I thought we were building a subway because the 99 is over crowded?

I'd recommend listening to Florida's words directly in his Strong Town interviews instead of getting an interpretation from Condon, who crafts Florida's words to support his own perspective.