A Creative Crossroads

By Richard Florida
Sunday, May 7, 2006

No more a quaint government town with a reputation for Southern sleepiness,

today's Washington is a booming, far-flung region that's a key node in what I call

the Creative Economy. Now if it could just act like a grown-up metropolis.

The region's economy is riding high . . .

The Greater Washington region is already one of the largest economic units in the world, cranking out nearly $80 billion in annual output. That makes it the sixth-largest regional economy in the world, bigger than London or Seoul .

It has everything it takes to be a major global player . . .

Washington has become a hub of the Creative Economy, which spans science and technology, the arts, culture and entertainment, as well as medicine, finance and law. Today, about 40 million Americans are employed in this rapidly growing sector, which pumps more than $2 trillion in wages and salaries into the economy. Greater Washington is a standout on all three factors driving the Creative Economy.

TECHNOLOGY

Even longtime residents are often surprised to learn that the biggest sector in the local economy is not government, but technology. The region is second only to San Jose in high-tech electronics industries and ranks third in total software employment. It's a player in the biotech industry, and a growing media center.

TALENT

Home to 1.2 million creative workers, Washington boasts the largest creative class concentration -- 40 percent of the workforce -- in the country. It's first in the percentage of people with advanced degrees, and first in the number of scientists and engineers, with double the number of those in Silicon Valley.

TOLERANCE

Open and diverse, the region has long been a bastion of great black thinkers, writers, musicians and business people. It's a lure for recent college graduates and young singles; 25- to 34-year-olds make up 15 percent of the population. New immigrants are flocking to outlying suburbs in Montgomery, Arlington and Fairfax counties.

. . . and people love it here.

CULTURE

Greater Washington has great symphonies, credible theater and a re-emerging music scene. It scores very high on my Bohemian Index, an aggregate measure of working artists, entertainers and musicians, as well as designers, editors and media types.

WORK AND PERSONAL LIFE

The region also does amazingly well on major dimensions of life satisfaction, according to a recent Gallup poll. Residents boast the highest level of satisfaction with their work of any city or region surveyed, and the second-highest level of satisfaction with their personal lives. About three-quarters of area residents cited the region's physical beauty and the availability of parks, open spaces and trails as its greatest assets.

. . . as long as it doesn't let its success undermine its future.

Emerging problems with traffic and housing threaten to erode the very quality of place that brought people, companies and jobs here. The region has already reached the threshold where it doesn't have the roads and infrastructure to handle more outward growth.

Half a million exurbanites now make the commute to offices around or inside the Beltway. A recent study by the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments found that the region's major commuting routes are virtually choked off at rush hour. Imagine what things will be like in 25 years if regional employment grows by 50 percent as forecast.

The lack of affordable housing close in means that more workers face long commutes, businesses have to pay premiums to attract certain kinds of workers, and young people and others may be getting priced out of the region.

Here's where the creative thinking comes in. When a region reaches the point at which Greater Washington is today, it must develop differently if it wants to continue to grow. American cities such as New York and Chicago and major European centers such as London and Paris confronted this reality a century ago -- and they moved toward denser, more vertical, transit- and rail-centered modes of development. This is the only road to maintaining our quality of place and of life and to generating lasting economic prosperity.

The region needs to stop its pell-mell scramble toward more sprawl and start expanding Metro and increasing density around existing Metro stops. It should bring Metro to Tysons Corner and come up with a visionary urban development strategy for that area, which could be transformed into a real city with walkable streets and mixed-use development.

Density is also the best way for the region to maintain its tolerance, and here it confronts the great paradox of diversity in the creative age. Even as Greater Washington has become more diverse by ethnicity, race, sexual orientation and age, it has become more homogeneous and stratified by income, education and class. Higher-income households are pushing out lower-skilled ones. This is why the District can grow in wealth while losing population, as smaller, wealthier households replace larger, less affluent ones.

This gentrification may be good for the tax coffers, but when the rich get richer, a place becomes unaffordable for critical service professions such as police officers, firefighters and teachers. And if only the people who have already made it can afford to live here, it reduces the creative friction and synergy that come from having all types of people rub shoulders in a great urban center. As the late urbanist Jane Jacobs once told me, "When a place gets boring, even the rich people leave."

The answer to this is a better integrated region. Even as Greater Washington competes at the global cutting edge, it continues to think of itself as a relatively minor economic player, an awkward amalgamation of disparate population pockets and a political center rather than a broad economic force to be reckoned with. The region needs to develop a shared vision of sustained regional prosperity. As well off as many of them are, the area's various bits and pieces can no longer thrive by going it alone.

It's also time to expand our vision of the region, which already encroaches into West Virginia and parts of Pennsylvania. But the real opportunity lies in making our neighbor to the north -- Baltimore, a city with great urban neighborhoods, huge revitalization potential and cultural assets -- part of an integrated regional solution.

And finally, taking a lead from the area's residents themselves, its leaders must find a way to foster the more intangible -- but most important -- assets of the modern creative economy: openness, aesthetics, diversity and accessibility.

florida@gmu.edu

Richard Florida is the Hirst professor of public policy at George Mason University and the author of "The Flight of the Creative Class: The New Global Competition for Talent" (Collins). Jesse Elliott assisted with this article.