INSIDE OUT

by Annise D. Parker

WE BUILT THIS CITY

Gay people are key to the success of U.S. burgs, says a top economist

“There are probably more gay households in Houston than Leave It to Beaver households,” New Economy guru Dr. Richard Florida told a Warwick Hotel audience on his second of three Houston visits in two years.

Except for a few knowing chuckles, the crowd sat quietly for a few seconds.

Florida made a similar Leave It to Beaver comparison during his recent Houston speech before 800 business and civic leaders at Central Houston’s annual luncheon. He also discussed his controversial “gay index” and the importance of tolerance, diversity, and quality of life to cities that want to thrive in the 21st century.

While his acclaimed, best-selling economic theories and city rankings are turning the heads of old-school business leaders, headlines about the gay index, tolerance, and quality of place are attracting attention all over the world.

Florida’s home base is Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University, where he directs the Center for Economic Development. His theories helped redevelop Pittsburgh and the Great Lakes region as well as a growing number of cities that have hired him as consultant.

His already packed speaking/consulting schedule tightened with the publication last summer of his sixth book, the best-selling Rise of the Creative Class (Basic Books).

The 38 million-strong creative class makes up about 30 percent of the workforce. They are scientists, engineers, professors, artists, writers, architects, and anyone else who is paid to think, such as professionals in the legal, health, financial, and business management fields.

This increasingly mobile and finicky class wants to move to cities that “get it.” Their parents may have settled for any city with the highest-paying job, but today’s creative class wants the whole package, a “world class people climate”:

∑ recreation and leisure amenities

∑ a vibrant arts and music scene

∑ abundant natural amenities

∑ attractive neighborhoods

∑ historic preservation

∑ cultural diversity and tolerance

A healthy business climate with low taxes and incentives used to be enough for top corporations, which could then attract top talent. But, as Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina has said, “Keep your tax incentives and highway interchanges. We will go where the highly skilled people are.”

And where are the highly skilled people? They live in cities with “Quality of Place,” according to Dr. Florida.

Can you picture San Francisco, Austin, and Boston, the top three cities in Florida’s creative index? Houston is Number 7.

The core of Florida’s theory lies in the three T's: technology, talent, and tolerance. A region needs all three to succeed as a creative center. Creativity can be artistic, economic, or technological.

To gauge a region’s creative capabilities and potential for quality growth, Florida developed a creativity index, composed of four indicators.

The strongest indicator of a region’s creative success is a large “gay” population. (Florida uses the term gay partly because that index, co-developed by Gary Gates, is based on 1990 census data of same-sex male households.) Not that there are a disproportionate number of gay men in creative-class professions, but as Florida has said, gays are the “canaries of the creative economy.” As if some of us didn’t already know, cities with large GLBT populations are far more tolerant. They are also open to innovative ideas. The five U.S. metropolitan areas with the highest concentration of gays are all among the top 15 high-tech areas: San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Austin, Atlanta, and San Diego.

As you might imagine, the gay index led to what Florida describes as an “outcry,” and it sold a lot of books.

The bohemian index, or percentage of artistically creative people, strongly correlates with a vibrant business community and forecasts creative employment growth. Ten of the top 15 “bohemian” metropolitan areas also number among the nation’s top 15 technology regions. These include: Seattle, Los Angeles, New York, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, and Boston.

The innovation index is based on patents per capita, and the high-tech index is taken from Milken. All of these measured indexes, focus groups, and interviews add up to a ranked list of 268 regions.

Will Florida’s lists ever become as important as other famous business lists (Fortune, Forbes, and now Florida?). Who can say, but his lists are having an impact. Cities that don’t score well—or want to score higher—write about the list in papers from Shreveport to rural Montana. Others hire Florida (Memphis, Pittsburgh, Buffalo). Or pay him $10,000 a speech (as the Greater Houston Partnership has done twice, once as a co-sponsor with the Chronicle and city).

I can’t help but wonder how many Houston audience members take pride in Houston’s Number 7 ranking, and how many think we need to move up on the list and are willing to invest in a better city—cleaner air, better mass transit, “planned” development and historic preservation, infrastructure, bayou beautification, more parks and libraries, a more balanced health-care system … and more tolerance for its GLBT citizens.

“Bigotry is bad for business” was one of the themes of the 1985 gay rights referendum. The GLBT community certainly understood a critical element of Florida’s economic theories long before they became best sellers. Florida uses the terms openness, diversity, and tolerance, which is fine with me. These relatively mainstream words may be the most effective terms for the business community and the general public. Despite the results in the recent Proposition 2 referendum, I believe a majority of Houstonians are at least reasonably “tolerant.” We will have to wait and see how Dave Wilson’s narrow victory on Prop 2 affects Houston’s future rankings.

Florida’s timing is perfect for Houston in other ways. More and more city leaders are at least getting used to the fact that the quality-of-life movement is finally taking root in the mainstream business community. I can only hope that each speech loosens more concrete around the gung-ho developer mindset and moves it closer to Florida’s Quality-of-Place mindset. What more effective messenger for Houston than a respected, outside economic development expert.

A Houston City Council member who happens to be lesbian, Annise Parker is serving her third term in At-large Position 1. To receive her bi-monthly email newsletter, e-mail annise.parker@cityofhouston.net or call 713/247-2014. Her web site is www.ci.houston.tx.us/city govt/council/1

FOR MORE ON THE CREATIVE CLASS

www.creativeclass.org/ci.htm

www.heinz.cmu.edu/researchers/faculty/florida.html

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