Hipsters

Thursday 21 March 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

Hipsters are not the economic saviours of America. Color me surprised.

Among the most pervasive, and arguably pernicious, notions of the past decade has been that the “creative class” of the skilled, educated and hip would remake and revive American cities. The idea, packaged and peddled by consultant Richard Florida, had been that unlike spending public money to court Wall Street fat cats, corporate executives or other traditional elites, paying to appeal to the creative would truly trickle down, generating a widespread urban revival.

Urbanists, journalists, and academics—not to mention big-city developers— were easily persuaded that shelling out to court “the hip and cool” would benefit everyone else, too. And Florida himself has prospered through books, articles, lectures, and university positions that have helped promote his ideas and brand and grow his Creative Class Group’s impressive client list, which in addition to big corporations and developers has included cities as diverse as Detroit and El Paso, Cleveland and Seattle.

Well, oops.

Florida himself, in his role as an editor at The Atlantic, admitted last month what his critics, including myself, have said for a decade: that the benefits of appealing to the creative class accrue largely to its members—and do little to make anyone else any better off. The rewards of the “creative class” strategy, he notes, “flow disproportionately to more highly-skilled knowledge, professional and creative workers,” since the wage increases that blue-collar and lower-skilled workers see “disappear when their higher housing costs are taken into account.” His reasonable and fairly brave, if belated, takeaway: “On close inspection, talent clustering provides little in the way of trickle-down benefits.”

The winners in the pussification hipsterification of America? A select few hipsters and legions of tax-leech urban real estate developers who thrive at sucking on government teat. The losers? EVERYONE ELSE. Taxpayers have lost billions on “urban renewal” projects, and many of the people who have lived in these neighborhoods for generations have been chased off because their rent and other costs of living in newly renewed white people fairly tale urban neighborhoods where “artisanal” shops that charge $7 for a ridiculously small jar of fucking mayonnaise and places where you can buy tulips and an overpriced can of Pabst abound are not fucking affordable.

2013-03-21  »  madlibertarianguy