The urbanization of the intelligent
Wednesday September 13, 2006
I'm not sure if you need a subscription to read it, but I'm hoping not. I'm talking about Richard Florida's piece in The Atlantic noting the huge demographic shift over the last 30 years, in which the most educated people...
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About Crunchy Con
Rod Dreher is an editorial columnist for the Dallas Morning News, and author of "Crunchy Cons" (Crown Forum), a nonfiction book about conservatives, most of them religious, whose faith and political convictions sometimes put them at odds with mainstream conservatives. The views expressed in this blog are his own.
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I was worried after graduating from aerospace school that I would have to move to Alabama, St. Louis, or Houston. Seattle sounded good, but luckily I found a job that allowed me to stay in Austin. I can t speak for everyone, but what kind of urban culture a city has a big effect on many young people.
Little story
My band was playing a show in downtown Dallas a couple of weeks ago, and there was this neat loft condo thing across adjacent to the club we were playing at. Anyway, it was selling for an amazing price, what would be going for half a million in Austin, or 4 million in New York. My wife and I flipped out and started fanaticized for a second about buying it and how cool of a place it was. We talked about all of the fun coffee shops, restaurants, bars, and clubs it was surrounded by and then turned to each other in unanimous agreement: to bad it is surrounded by Dallas, oh well.
The funny thing is that Dallas is actually a really vibrant place, with a ton of job opportunities. It might even be in the process of becoming one of the next hip places to be, but it just goes to show how picky some people are (including me). Some cities do have a fun stigma attached to them because they have developed their urban culture over a long period of time, and young people desire to live in such places.
Although I believe that it is healthy for a city to attract artistic people, and promote itself as a creative and unique place to live, I do think Kotkin is right. Infrastructure and economic growth are first and foremost. How cool a city becomes is merely an effect of a healthy economy, not the cause. It wont be to long until Austin has out cooled its way into being absolutely unaffordable to live in .Dallas here we come!
Thanks for letting me blabber.>
Hey Rod,
"developing hipster arts districts"???
Is that code for being open to diversity, specifically (GASP!) gay people?
"hipster"??? How old ARE you exctly, Rod?>
>the most talented and ambitious people need to live in a means metro in order to realize their full economic value.
And we all know that economic maximization is the *summum bonum* of Life on Earth...in a world where anyone passing through Technocratic Training Institutes (higher training, er, "education") is ipso facto *educated* (see, e.g., Albert Jay Nock, Jacques Barzun, Wendell Berry, &c.)...
One of our country's most enchanted writers (Berry) lives in Henry County, KY, pop. 15,000...
The county in Michigan's Upper Peninsula in which I plan to live shortly
http://www.findyourspot.com/images/reports/pdfs/HancockHoughtonMI.pdf
has a population of 36,000, a topnotch university, dozens of local and touring beaux-arts events annually, housing prices in the low $100ks and apartments priced c. $375/1br., widely-reported world-class outdoor recreation year-round, farmers' markets and world-grocery stores, one of the lowest crime rates in the country and the nation's epicenter for the historic and linguistic preservation of one of the most charming and best-kept-secret immigrant cultures (Finnish-American) the world has ever seen...
With all that, plus interlibrary loan for the books you can't find at arm's length - not to mention the lion's share of our parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles within an hour's drive - a few of us paladins of the (narrowly-defined) "creative" class don't miss the "interstatial" Spaghetti Junctions of NY/Fairfield County/Boston, and the fishbowl lifestyles they encourage, for a heartbeat. The fact that some of us in such settings have yet to break $20k per annum on the Great "Success"-O-Meter is neither here nor there...>
Scott, stop! Don't give away the secret of the beauty of Finnish-American culture.
(my pen name is a clue)>
Good for you, Scott. I have this hope that technology and homeschooling will free a significant number of people from having to live in urban areas, and will allow them to resettle small towns and rural areas, and make their living either telecommuting or running their own small farms and businesses, which they can conduct using Internet mail order.
And re: Curiouser, good grief, can you detach anything from homosexuality? Can you conceive of a world in which something can exist without reference to gayness? Because you know, that's the world most people live in.
In Dallas, we don't pay our cops enough, we have lots of infrastructure problems, big problems in our public schools, etc. -- but we sure are going to spend many millions on building a fancy downtown arts district and Calatrava bridges. Hey, I'm all for spending money on the arts, and beautiful architecture, and if I were unmarried and childless, I'd probably be more enthused about it. But I'm not for spending that kind of money when the city can't even meet its more basic obligations to the middle-class homeowners and families who make up the broad economic base of this and any successful city.
Funny that Steve brings up Austin. I love Austin, and go down there every chance I get. Recently we were considering the possibility of a move down to Austin, and started looking at the housing prices. It was absolutely insane! My brother-in-law works in high tech, and lives with his wife in a very small shotgun house he renovated in a transitional neighborhood. Young marrieds, in their mid-twenties. They were looking for a bigger place recently, and were so depressed by the cost of housing that they gave up. When they start a family, all the cool stuff that makes Austin such a pleasure to be in when you're young is not going to matter nearly as much to them as the boring stuff that makes a city livable for people in that stage of their lives. Happened to me. We loved loved loved Brooklyn, but partly because of 9/11, and mostly because we couldn't afford to live there anymore, we moved. Versus NYC and Austin, Dallas is not such a great place to visit, but you sure can raise a family here in a decent manner, without having to make a huge salary.>
Aren't tech-savvy professional the people who are least likely to need to live in a particular place in order to maximize their value, or whatever the jargon is now?
I mean, in order to work at a steel mill (or teach in a university, for that matter), you need to live in a particular place. But an awful lot of tech-oriented work can be done by telecommuting, or so I would think.>
Scott,
You are going to have difficulty finding anything over $20,000 a year in Houghton, unless you work for the university. The big joke up there is everyone knows where the unemployment office is. Last time I was up there, about 4 months ago, they were working hard to attract applicants so that someone would put a call center up there so people could earn $8/hour.
There are nice things up there such as the university and the views. It is a college town. There is a ton of sub $100K housing. But there are very, very, very few jobs. Now this maybe b/c I'm looking at land north of Hancock, but I would say one is a fool if they think they are going to make a career up there. Best of luck to you on it.
pikkumatti,
Your pen name unfortunately doesn't give me an idea where you live. I'm 40 minutes SE of Green Bay.>
Austin expensive?
We consider it downright cheap out here. What do people consider to be expensive housing?>
In my experience, 'intelligent' isn't always interchangeable with either 'educated' or 'intellectual.'
The 'intellectuals' may well have drifted to the big cities, but I doubt the intelligence has followed at the same pace.>
What SiliconValleySteve said. About a year ago, after comparing housing prices in Austin and my relatively very affordable city in California, I had an itch to become an equity refugee.
But back on topic: There are more than twice as many college graduates, as a share of population, in 2000 than there were in 1970. Since the map shows colors as a share of the national average, the curve has grown much steeper.
To take my impoverished, backward California hometown, only 23.7 percent of adults over 25 (slightly different measurement than the map gives) had bachelor's degrees in 2000, verus 27.2% nationwide and 29.5% in California.
I'm not quite savvy enough to look up the 1970 numbers quickly, but I'd hazard that the relatively undereducated parts of 2006 America are still better educated (on paper, at least) than even fairly well-educated areas 30 years ago.
"Drained much of the rest of the country pale"? Nope.>
Having grown up in Arizona, i saw many towns get to be the "hip" place to live. The cool and hip moved in, fixed the place up, and then drove the cost of living into the sky. Local people become essentially a servant class in thier own home town. these people might make a place look good, up the 'coolness" meter
, but often have little long term stability, bring young, and mobile. As for being "educated, and intelligent" much of the social chaos of the last 40 years was pushed by this bunch, with little wisdom shown.
All a big shot degree means, is you know one subject, computers, medicine, etc, very well. It dosn't mean anything else.>
Work that can be done by telecommuting is being done in India and Ireland. Teaching in a university can be done remotely and is being done. Interpreting X-Rays is being done abroad. But taking the X-Ray is still done locally.>
And re: Curiouser, good grief, can you detach anything from homosexuality? Can you conceive of a world in which something can exist without reference to gayness? Because you know, that's the world most people live in.
Spoken like a true heterosexist.
I love when chrunchyboy shows his true colors... especially when he goes out of his way to make sure EVERYONE knows *pink* isn't one of them.>
>one is a fool if they think they are going to make a career up there [Michigan's Keweenaw Peninsula - SL]. Best of luck to you on it.
With sincere thanks, I shall for those disinclined to brew the coffee my posts threaten to demand, allow a 1950 passage from the great postwar humanist weekly MANAS to conclude as my cat's-paw in felling the well-intended sparrow above:
"One of the strongest motivations in human behavior is the desire to disprove statistics in other words, to be the exception. This is a good desire, and not a bad one. It is rooted in the urge to transcend the ordinary. When you tell a person not to do something because it is dangerous, with the odds against him, you are not necessarily restraining him. You may be challenging him."
This is the sort of thread that gets the anti-"economism" Blakean prophet in me stoked to a pitch of ecstatic fury (I love it).
With the do-over only hindsight affords, I'd have followed through full-bore with my flirtation as a high-schooler in toniest Fairfield County (CT) with my desire not to attend university, in favor of learning a "non-intellectual" trade (see also the "Shop Class as Soulcraft" thread elsewhere Chez Dreher du Crunch). As it turned out, full (extracurricular) immersion while in high school, and then at Hillsdale and NYU, in the reductionist (and as seductively "scientistic" as their socialist bugbears) imperatives of libertarian economics a la Mises and Rothbard and Harry Browne, mingled in creative tension with a deeply classicist traditionalism in culture fortified by such *cultural* (deeply nonideological) libertarians as Albert Jay Nock and H.L. Mencken.
By the time of my post-B.A. blink-of-an-eye stint as a NATIONAL REVIEW essayist (e.g., "Homepage", below), my compulsion to forsake the prime high-density real estate of modernity was clear, and I left the Fishbowls of Fairfield for the mid-coast of Maine (Belfast; "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive/But to be young was very heaven" - Wordsworth), fortified in part by the example of my ex-Manhattanite editor at NR, Chilton Williamson, whose salt-of-the-sagebrush path in Kemmerer, Wyoming breaking wild horses *and* polishing essays floodlit for me the joys of the strenuous life off the "main track".
Over a succeeding decade elsewhere as a bookseller inside the Beltway (and back in Maine), I saw the derangements of mainstream latter-day careerism etched daily in the sense of entitlement and condescension of those *stratusfied* desk jockeys for whom we booksellers were clearly a lower form of "help" - while discovering meanwhile the dirty little secret that many of the coolest, saintliest, most educated and most liberated souls in our midst just happen to make $16,000/yr., have no desire to "rise" into that dee-luxe apartment in the sky called Management (my failure to apply for such slots when opened saw heads scratched bald by the reductionist many), relish the art of feeding themselves for $60/month, and see *all* work with their hands as deeply satisfying and sanctified in ways their ancestors took for *granite* - from the engraver-poet William Blake to the long-lived forebears whose headstones in a Long Island cemetery, and presumed diet, found Berton Rouech waxing philosophic in THE NEW YORKER back in 1990:
"It was plain fare, simple fare, and probably a bit monotonous. It was also a diet that the National Institutes of Health, the American Heart Association, and the American Cancer Society would consider not much short of toxic. So what was different? One thing came immediately to mind. These were for the most part men and women who worked with their hands; their work was physical labor. Even the shopkeepers cut firewood, dug gardens. And they all walked."
No curmudgeon or spiky individualist among us is blind enough to assert that our *dissentarian* ways are those of the Promised Land - merely that in a world afflicted by what Ortega y Gasset called the "spoiled-child" syndrome, by the post-coital *tristesse* of modern affluence evident in every other headline, it's good to be reminded that the dominant centralist ways of Power, Prestige and "Progress" (C3PO) are not by any stretch the only ways. In his 1990 review in THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS of the life-work in progress of Wendell Berry, Bill McKibben brought to cameo refinement the charismatic and wholesome prophetic effect of seeing what and how things are (and were) done elsewhere:
"He makes one believe that the good life may not only be harder than what we're used to but sweeter as well."
Bill "Front-Porch Anarchist" Kauffman, you have a call on Line One...>
Scott -
I guess I have very mixed feelings on this issue, and I only wish life in rural areas would be a matter of heroic choices rather than the cold calculus of depressed economies. My wife and I moved to rural northern Maine to try to begin a rural life, and we hoped real estate would be cheap. I landed a job at a small state university in an area with an influx of well-educated summer retirees who crow about the Maine way of life and then (for most) drive out of town come September. The flood of retirees (who cashed in on the real estate boom around Boston and New York) had prompted a local real estate boom, which priced us out of housing. My salary was high for the area (high 30s!), but not enough to allow for buying a house, and my wife discovered that there simply are no jobs other than seasonal fishing, a few minimum wage service jobs, and narcotics sales (which are a real scourge in Maine as in much of the rest of the US, and even more unfortunately, bring in way more income than most other area jobs). Why this is the case is a matter of giant debate, but certainly Maine's high taxes have a bit to do with it. Then we discovered that adoption would be the only way to have children for us, and that led to the need for more money once we had a good handle on how state adoption worked.
The new settlers we met kept boasting of how they quit the rat race for the Maine life, but of course that very rat race allowed them to afford to live in Maine without having to worry about scratching away a living from the meager opportunities available. I cannot count the times I met people who groaned about the horrors of their old suburbs and the wonders of their new organic gardens, and then jumped into their 30K and up cars. Meanwhile, locals struggle to get by with less than 25K annual household income on average, and most 18 to 30 year olds leave the region. We gave up after a year and a half and moved to a college town on the borderlands of a big sunbelt city.
I'm no class warrior - more power to the people who managed to make such a giant change in their lives by starting afresh in Maine, even though their presence ultimately made it impossible for people like me to get in on it - but there are a lot of reasons why the educational divide will become even more steep than it already is in many rural areas. And a declining younger population combined with limited economic options leads to low town bugdets, schools unable to keep up with new technological changes, and an out-migration of those younger people who choose to enter the military or go to college out of many rural areas.>
The cities don't exactly spend money developing hipster arts districts, the hipsters move into the ghetto and spend their own money developing the district. It's not until a few years after the hipsters have made it fashionable that the yuppies move in. The yuppies move in and they start to bring in those middle-class concerns that you are talking about, and THEN the city starts putting money into developing it. It's already a hipster arts district and on it's decline as such by the time that happens. In New York the timeline is about 5 years from the time of it being a vibrant hipster area to it becoming too bourgeois for the artists to be able to afford the rent any longer, and the older ones stay where they are and have children and start caring about the middle-class things while lamenting the loss of their culture, meanwhile the younger ones looking for that excitement move to the next industrial neighborhood where they can get a giant loft that they can have their band practice/rave in.
I like the idea of a burbclave within a burbclave.
You want a bit of an idea of how this century is going to play out, read "Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson.>
Jeremy -
No doubt about the subjective element - one man's Rx is another man's X with alas-Poor-Yorick perched atop it...you pay a price for everything good, and, as media discussions of post-feminist womanhood often assert, Having It All is a dream open only to the few...and truths lived and hard-won are often the best. When adapting to a chosen locale proves too exacting and to too little reward in life's composite spheres above and below the bottom line, no one can gainsay when it is time for a change...
No sooner did I discuss conditions in Michigan and Wyoming, respectively, than I found myself tripping over the following item from the Most-Emailed list at THE NEW YORK TIMES:
Flush With Jobs, Wyoming Woos Rust Belt Labor
Labor-starved Wyoming is vigorously courting workers from Michigan s struggling auto industry.
http://tinyurl.com/zlw4s
The Moving Finger of Economy writes/And having Writ, moves on...>
Steve,
There's always Pflugerville.>
"Curiouser, good grief, can you detach anything from homosexuality? Can you conceive of a world in which something can exist without reference to gayness?"
Fair question, Rod.
And the quick answer is an emphatic "NO!" Gay people ARE part of "your" world. Just because YOU don't happen to like it doesn't mean it isn't true.
Until gay people are seen as and treated as FULL, EQUAL, HUMAN beings with the exact SAME rights as YOU, then it is not possible. Mr. Florida's excellent research touches on the subject that major centers that WELCOME ALL people are enriched by the diversity they embrace - and that includes gay people.
Hey, I've got an idea:
Treat us EQUALLY and the "issue" will go away.
Howzabout it? Oh, and YOU could start.>
Is that code for being open to diversity, specifically (GASP!) gay people?
Homophobic to the core. There are a few gay people who aren't flamboyant artistes you know.>
Spoken like a true heterosexist.
Yep - it's part of the ReKKKonstruKKKtionist plot to send you all to homo-Aushwitz! Arbeit Macht Straight!!!>
I have to defend Austin a bit here. Yes, the hip neighborhoods near downtown have stratospheric prices, but out in the southwest part where I live, it's not so bad. Well, 3,000 sq ft houses in the $250,000 range, which is about the same as Dallas. Additionally, Austin's schools are quite good -- Mills Elementary, next door to my house, has been recognized for its test scores since the day it opened -- and the crime rate is very low. Our traffic is one real serious downside, as are our property taxes, but those things really don't detract from Austin being an amazingly cool place to live. Also, there really are lots of cheap things to do with kids around here, so even us parents don't feel left out of the cool vibe.
Rod, tell your relatives also to look at some of the near-northeast neighborhoods. They're considerably less "tony" than the near-downtown stuff, but enormously cheaper. (That's one area where the schools stink, so the property values have stayed low. If they don't have kids, however, this might be an option.)
I also have to echo the person upthread who said that cool places aren't made that way be municipal governments. Austin became a high-tech center mostly because UT is here and produces thousands of graduates every year who don't want to leave. Human capital made this a nice place to live, not municipal investment.>
Karen,
What you say is true, but it reflects the fact that Austin is really two cities, inexcusably segregated by AISD line-drawing (which, as you probably know, only a few years ago re-drew boundaries to make the high schools even more segregated than they had previously been--a disgraceful maneuver that one can't imagine happening in, say, San Antonio, where the Hispanic community has real political clout) and by the Great Wall of I-35.
Thus it's true when you say "Austin's schools are quite good," but add "That's one area where the schools stink." Yes, the city on the east side of the interstate, where housing prices are low, crime rates are high, and the schools are lousy; as opposed to the west side, where housing is unaffordable, crime rates (at least violent crime) are low, and the schools are reasonable.
Your solution--buying up property on the east side (and presumably homeschooling or using private schools or transferring to a decent public school)--is increasingly popular, especially as the city gets ready to do something intelligent (we hope) with the area around the old airport. Which drives up property costs, and property taxes, which aren't staying as low as you seem to think. Already our parish's St. Vincent de Paul society (which straddles the freeway) is seeing more and more people who can't afford to live in the houses their parents paid for because of the rising taxes. An Anglo friend who bought a house just east of the freeway actually had neighbors showing up on their porch, telling them they weren't welcome in the neighborhood.
The southwest isn't that bad because the area south of the river used to be the blue-collar part of town (at least it was into the Eighties), until people started buying houses there for exactly the reason you recommend buying property on the east side. It's now so gentrified that people are having to look east.
I love Austin, too; but it's not an exception to Rod's claims. It's just two cities close together.>
My two bits. Portland is an example of the city government working to create a yuppie magnet district. We call it the Pearl District, and it used to be warehouses and train tracks. It's now condos, boutiques and two Starbucks per block. The people living there get a huge break on property taxes, although they are well enough paid that they don't need the subsidy. The people living there are now whining about the noise from the train tracks, which, strangely enough, are still there. Meanwhile, a 1050 sqaure foot house in an undistinguished suburb is asking for $239K, and will probably fetch it. Lower-middle and middle-middle class folks with children are fleeing the city, because they can't afford the housing and also because our PC-ridden schools are mediocre. The young and the restless love Portland; the older and settling-down are bailing out. City government's solution? Approve construction of narrow houses that look like a two-story single-wides on tiny lots. That'll work. We left Portland four years ago, and would have been willing to stay, but it's clear to us that we are not cool enough to live there anymore.>
curiouser writes:
Gay people ARE part of "your" world. Just because YOU don't happen to like it doesn't mean it isn't true.
Good grief! Exactly how did Rod using the phrase "hipster arts districts" lead to this? Is his opposition to using public funds to renovate bridges instead of funding education also homophobic?
You guys fighting for "the cause" may want to tone down the name calling a bit and concentrate on the real battles. Labeling everyone who doesn't always have gayness on his mind a "heterosexist" is a bit of a joke.>
Thanks Bruce. These commentators here think that when they type some version of "You hate me! You hate me!" that they've made an actual argument instead of had a hissy fit.>
o.h.
Really? Someone actually did that to your friend? I know that eastside gentrification is kind of a touchy issue, but that is pretty harsh. I just bought a house on eastside as well. All has been good so far. Some times I do feel a little guilty about being apart of the demographic that is causing property values to rise in traditionally poorer neighborhoods, but what can you do. Oh, by the way I spent a year in round rock Round Rock, and I think I will just have to live with my guilt in east Austin and McMansion, someone had to say it.>
This suggests brain drain from non-"hip" areas. Regional talent is siphoned away. Potential elites are absorbed into the technocratic class, which they otherwise could challenge if they just stay put.>
Interesting anecdote about the gated community within a gated community. Obviously the 700K class don't face any real threat from their 300K neighbours so it's about distinctions of status rather than safety. This raises the question of how much gated communities in general exist to provide status rather than security. Are the gates and security guards just a form of conspicuous consumption?>
Steve,
I agree with you about the tax breaks for the Pearl, they are absurd. But the so called tiny houses are hardly limited to the city, they build them becauae that is all people can aford, check out some of the new developments out in East Vancouver, row houses and zero lot lines make sense in the city, they look pretty ridiculous flopped down in the middle of otherwise empty fields. surrounded by strip malls.
And as for the schools, saying the problems are becasue they are PC is ridiculous, Oregon Schools are not substantionally different in that regard from any others. The problems in Oregon are funding, it has been messed up ever since the CA style tax revolt passed years ago and neither party has had the guts to attack the problem (they just tap dance around it with different band-aids)>
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