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THE KANSAS CITY REGION, MERCIFULLY, HAS ESCAPED THE CONSEQUENCES OF URBAN PLANNERS' BEST INTENTIONS.
For more than 20 years, I moderated a monthly business roundtable for Ingram’s. In the early years of this century, one subject that surfaced with regularity was the need for Kansas City to recruit and nurture a “creative class.”
The movement was spawned by an academic named Richard Florida. His 2002 bestseller, The Rise of the Creative Class, inspired thousands of insecure urban planners all across America to think exactly alike, and none so insecure as those in Kansas City.
The rationale here seemed to be that other cities were recruiting these people—the young, the hip, the creative, the diverse—so we had better do the same, and pronto. Seattle, San Francisco—and especially Portland—were stealing our best and coolest and leaving us with what? Engineers? How not cool was that?
No city better captured the goal of the Richard Floridian cult than Austin, Texas, whose motto—“Keep Austin weird”—gave less creative cities something to shoot for.
Weirdness requires a critical mass of the weird. Seattle succeeded marvelously in the summer of 2020, carving out an autonomous zone for its weirder residents in the heart of the city called “CHOP,” short for Capitol Hill Occupied Protest in that district.
In its mercifully brief heyday, CHOP represented the model weird city in embryonic form: a community vegetable garden, food co-ops, free film screenings, live music, social workers instead of cops.
While the Seattle mayor lauded CHOP’s “block party” atmosphere, business owners trapped in the zone dealt with the party’s aftermath—the vandalism, the looting, the harassment. Three weeks and six shootings after CHOP’s founding, the police chief said, literally, “Enough is enough” and shut the party down. Four summers hence, Seattle has never really recovered.
At the time, I was thinking the denizens of Westport, where I office, might do something similar to Seattle, but they could never quite muster a critical mass of the weird. Then, too, the acronym for “Westport Occupied Protest” might not have played well with the Italian community.
In the early years of the century, no city inspired as much envy among our city planners as did Portland, Oregon. Portland was Kansas City-size. A magnet for creatives, Portland had light rail since the 1980s, street mimes aplenty, and enough charming eccentricities to merit a TV show in its honor, “Portlandia.”
But sure enough, the weird hit critical mass. The riots that started in May 2020 never seemed to end. The police may have been demoralized, but the perps were just warming up.
Homicides tripled from 2019 to 2022. Reports of vandalism increased five-fold. Homelessness surged. Some 700 tent cities sprang up. Businesses fled. After two years of that, 88 percent of those surveyed told the Portland Business Alliance that the quality of life was worsening.
In 2002, the city that topped every creative index was San Francisco. What was not to like about this dazzling city by the bay? Sensing its potential, Big Tech went on a recruiting drive, and the creatives came in herds.
Unlike the hippies of a generation prior, these people came to stay. They had money in their pockets and no better cause to spend it on than their precious selves. One quick result was that they priced San Francisco’s vestigial working class out of the city.
While Kansas City’s housing affordability index—meaning the percent of homes a family of average income could afford—hovered in the low 80s, San Francisco’s dipped into single digits. No one who got his or her hands dirty on the job could live in the city where he or she worked. It is the rare plumber, after all, who can “work from home.”
Like the Puritans of old, these successful creatives assumed that their outward prosperity signaled their inherent virtue. In 17th century Boston, however, Puritans played by a time-tested rule book. If they slapped someone with a scarlet letter, that person knew why he or she got it—like, say, having a baby while the old man was back in England.
The creatives, being creative, improvised their own rule book. With every passing year, they invented new offenses and new scarlet letters to shame the offenders—T for transphobia, I for Islamophobia, D for Climate Change denialism—and kept plenty of the old standbys—R, S, and H—on ready reserve.
Fearful of being branded an offender against an always-shifting orthodoxy, the creatives yielded to the crazies and enabled—sometimes even subsidized—all sorts of disruptive behavior from shooting smack in broad daylight to squatting to shoplifting. They then elected a district attorney or two who were proudly disinclined to arrest old-timey criminals.
As a further sign of their moral superiority, San Francisco declared itself a “sanctuary city” for illegal migrants in 1989, long before less creative cities thought to do the same. People from all over the world heard the clarion call, and now roughly 50,000 or so—who’s counting?—call the city home.
Many of those in the city illegally have found their way to the city’s homeless encampments and open-air drug markets. They are hardly even noticeable. “San Francisco is a dystopian nightmare,” said one prominent blogger, “and everyone knows it.”
Although Seattle and Portland mean little to me, San Francisco was my favorite city. Hell, it was everyone’s favorite. I have visited the city roughly 20 times, but it has become too painful to even reminisce.
Today, there is a nearly perfect correlation between a city’s creativity index and its dysfunction. It’s not that the “creatives” have caused the disruption in any of these cities. It’s just that they lack the moral wherewithal to stand up to it.
A couple decades after the recruiting game began, it might be time to count our chips…and to count our luck. Sure, our creatives were able to put a few toys in our toy chest—light rail most extravagantly—but we have not been able to recruit enough creatives to make Kansas City “weird.”
Jack, it’s always a pleasure to read your common-sensical commentaries on the issues of the day. Thank you for this one, and please keep them coming.
Best regards,
Tom
PS: I, like you, used to love San Francisco. Those days are, unfortunately, over…