Code red
In 2004 or so, I drove from New York City to Pittsburgh to interview Richard Florida. At the time, he was a professor at Carnegie Mellon and riding high on the success of his 2002 book The Rise of the Creative Class, which thrust him into the academic stratosphere. He was living the rock star life, answering the door in a black t-shirt, evidently having just woken up (it was maybe 10am).
But there was a lot of substance to Florida’s style, and I was reminded of it this week by an article about where Americans are moving. Census data shows around 820,000 people left California and 550,000 left New York in 2022, out of more than 8 million Americans who moved states that year. Where are they headed? Florida and Texas, especially cities like Houston and Miami. Other warm-weather states like Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia were also popular, while big cities like Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, and San Francisco lost out.
So, what does all of this mean? The central thesis of Florida’s work is creativity is an economic driver transforming America, and cities that seek to actively harness and attract creative workers will win (he defines the “creative class” as including fields like programming, designers, and information workers, not just artists and writers). Ten years after the book’s publication, Florida revisited it and declared the trend he identified had “only become more deeply ensconced” (he’s more recently worried the adoption of his ideas has fueled inequality and may have contributed to the rise of virulent populism).
On the face of it, mass migration away from major cities to cheaper locations seems to undermine Florida’s theory. At least, it suggests where we live often isn’t driven by the communities created by the creative class, but dollars and cents. Yet the reality is more complex. After the COVID-19 pandemic and the sudden shift to remote and later hybrid work, a lot of people have moved—absolutely. If you can do your job from anywhere, a couple of acres upstate is, for many, preferable to a pricey studio apartment in Manhattan. Or, more to the point, Houston is more appealing financially than the West Village.
But while the census found four in ten Californias and three in ten New Yorkers were still considering moving states, I’m skeptical. The nature of cities is shifting dramatically, no question—it has to, with office vacancies through the roof and downtowns trying to figure out their future. But I’m skeptical because while living life more cheaply in a city like Houston or Nashville sounds good in theory—and can no doubt be really good in practice—you’re very much a blueberry in a bowl of tomato soup, as former Texas Governor Rick Perry once described Austin. Cities where the good jobs and compelling lifestyle meet are almost always liberal enclaves within deeply conservative states.
Florida’s Republican lawmakers are busying themselves with regulating bathrooms, banning books, and trying to control women’s bodies. Texas is doing likewise. South Carolina just introduced a law allowing doctors, nurses, healthcare institutions, and others to deny medical services based on personal belief. It’s become so outrageous—more than 75 anti-LGBTQ+ bills have been signed into law in red states this year alone—that Human Rights Campaign has for the first time declared a state of emergency.
So you can see the dilemma. Liberal cities smack in the middle of conservative states tick all of Florida’s creative-class boxes: they have the cheaper housing, live music, college campuses, and creative energy people crave. But living in Nashville, as blue as it may be, means being surrounded by everyone else in Tennessee, where the volume of Trump tchotchke stores is rivaled only by the degree of anti-woke craziness. You’re living among a heavily conservative population within a system of heavily conservative policies. At what point are you no longer helping build a liberal Austin but actively contributing to the economic success of a state enacting laws flatly opposed to your values?
I suspect over time this situation will become untenable for many. We’d all like a lower cost of living. And there’s a serious argument to be made for the benefits of not giving up on red states, and fighting for better, fairer laws and more tolerant communities from within rather than by lobbing righteousness from elsewhere. But there are reasons cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago (not to mention London, Paris, Milan, and many others) are world cities.
Are they expensive? Sure. But you get a lot for your investment. Dynamic companies and the jobs market they generate. Deep, deep creative energy. World-class art institutions, music, sports, and every cultural asset you can think of. Livability, especially in terms of genuine communities where everything you need is within 15 minutes. And, yes, there’s something that people in Tennessee outside of Nashville would decry as “coastal elites” or some other nonsense: a sense of belonging and being surrounded and inspired by people who share your values. It’s tough to put a price on that.