Where Did The Creative Class Go?

http://www.citylab.com/2014/10/where-does-the-creative-class-move/382157

New York City
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Hello Everyone:

Happy Cyber Monday.  Today is the day to crash your favorite retailers's websites.  Not really.  More important, we hit 20,000 page views.  Woo Hoo.  Thank you so much from the bottom of my heart.  This is a pretty remarkable achieve in less than two years. You all are the best audience anyone can ask for.

Today we are going to revisit the creative class.  Specifically, we are going to look at a recent article by Richard Florida for CityLab titled "Where Does the Creative Class Move?"  Presumably, the creative class follows similar migratory patterns as other immigrants have-go where the jobs and other opportunities are.  Despite what the screaming heads in government tell you, according to Mr. Florida,

America's economic and social fabric has been remade over time through a series of great migrations: settlers heading west; farmers and new immigrants to great industrial centers; blacks from the rural South to the urban North; the middle class from the urban centers to the suburbs; and more recently, from the ongoing dual migration of the skilled and less skilled I dubbed 'the means migration.'

Boston, Massachusetts
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Richard Florida asks, "But which metros have proven best at attracting the creative class, the roughly 40 million workers (a third of the U.S. workforce) whose occupations span science and technology, arts, design, media and entertainment...?"  The most likely answer is major metropolitan areas such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, New York, and Boston.  However, a 2013 study for the United States Census Bureau, conduted by geographer Charlynn Burd titled Metropolitan Migration Flow of the Creative Class by Occupation using 3-year 2006-2008 and 2009-2011 American Community Survey Data

 (http://www.census.gov/hhes/wwww/poverty/publications/aag_2013.docx) brings to light important information on where the creative class actually migrates to.  Ms. Burd used detailed data from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey to follow the migratory habits of the creative class for different time period between 1995 and 2011.

Comparison of Movers and Respective Knowledge Bases by Age
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Charlynn Burd traces the patterns according to race, age, and the three major categories of creative class workers: "synthetic" knowledge-based workers (scientists, computer and software, mathematicians); analytic knowledge-based workers (engineers and architects); "symbolic" knowledge-based workers (those who work in the arts, media, and entertainment fields).

Let us first look at age.  The creative class is often conflate the creative class with younger workers.  The truth is that the creative class spans all age groups.  However, the younger members are more likely to to move than older members, more in line with broader trends.  A little less than half of the creative class members moved between 1995 and 2000.  This pattern holds for all three groups of creative class workers.  The analytic creative class branch demonstrated the largest number of movers (613,251), while the synthetic knowledge branch were had the lowest percentage of movers (12.4 percent) during the study period.  In general, the United States has historically attracted creative class workers from across the globe.  Ms. Burd's study presented evidence that showed that America pulled in 38,035 Asian creatives and 14,313 European creative between 2007. Where is everyone going?

Leading Metros for Creative Class Migration
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Charlynn Burd plotted creative class migration, then broke it down by category of worker across American metropolitans, comparing the years 2006-2008 to 2009-2011 in the table shown on the left.  Washington D.C. came up the big winner, attracting a greater share of creatives during both time frames; leading the country between 2009 and 2011.  Other metropolitan areas such as: Boston, San Jose, Los Angeles, Seattle, Dallas, and New York also attracted a fair number of creatives.

Breaking this down by category, our nation's capital was the leading destination for the analytic creatives, followed by San Francisco, San Jose and Seattle (naturally), New York, Atlanta, and Houston.  Houston was the metropolitan of choice for synthetic creatives.  Yours truly supposes it might have something to do with the developer-friendly environment.  Austin was the top vote getter for synthetic creatives-designers, media, and entertainment field.  Las Vegas was also the favored place (no big surprise) as were Portland, Dallas, New York and Los Angeles (again, no surprise).

Leading metros for creative class migration
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Breaking down the creative class migratory patterns further, we can look at the flow of creatives according to type.  The greatest flows occurred between adjacent metropolitans-i.e. San Jose and San Francisco; D.C. and Baltimore; New York City and Philadelphia.  The anomaly in this are the migration trends of the synthetics. There was an appreciable flow of artists, designers, media and entertainment workers moving from East to West Coast; Miami to New York City.

We can now look at intra-metropolitan moves, by the creatives, which make up the largest amount of moves.  Ms. Burd followed the creative class intra-metropolitan moves, including moves within larger areas with at least two core cities-i.e. Washington-Baltimore or San Francisco-San Jose.  Ms. Burd concluded, "Large metros tend to have more moves simply because they have more people.  So it is not surprising that New York and L.A. have large numbers of creative-class moves across all three types of workers." Interestingly Chicago, America's third largest metropolitan does not make the top five for synthetic creatives.  Similarly Dallas, the fourth largest metropolitan area does not score a top five finish for the analytic creatives and Houston, the fifth largest, fails to place with symbolics and analytics. Smaller metropolitan areas: D.C. (7th), Boston (10th), San Francisco (11th), and Seattle also finish in the top five for each category; while Miami (8th) registered major gains in the symbolic category.

Pike-Pine Streets
Seattle, Washington
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Four metropolitan areas: Washington D.C., Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle presented significant statistical gains in the attracting the analytical creatives during both study time frames-2006-08 and 2009-11.  Los Angeles and Houston demonstrated statistically important increase in the synthetic creatives.  While Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Miami had statistically significant gains among the symbolic creative class.  Los Angeles was the only metropolitan area to register significant gains across the board, a fact that should make civic cheerleaders jump for joy.


Richard Florida concludes, "Generally speaking, creative-class workers are much more likely to move within metros or to adjacent metros...than they are to make long-distance moves."  The lone exception to this is the symbolic creative class, for whom cross-country moves are more likely to occur.  Further, "Maybe Moby and David Byrne were right-maybe higher housing prices are pushing artists and musical creatives away from New York."