Richard Florida’s latest, published in ULI’s Urban Land, where he takes on the issue of the class divide in rejuvenating cores:
The comeback of the urban core is a striking reversal of long-term trends. Brookings Institution demographer William Frey summarized this reversal in dramatic terms: “Last year, for the first time in more than nine decades, the major cities of the nation’s largest metropolitan areas grew faster than their combined suburbs,” he wrote in the summer of 2012, adding that “this puts the brakes on a longstanding staple of American life, the pervasive suburbanization of its population—which began with widespread 
automobile use in the 1920s to the present day when more than half the U.S. population lives in the suburbs.” …
In today’s economy, the critical resource is talent—and it gravitates to dense, safe, and exciting urban areas. Skeptics like to cite the proverbial chicken-or-the-egg dilemma, saying talent follows jobs, but the reality is a two-way street. Good jobs attract talent and great talent also lures investment and jobs. Quality of place, as I wrote here previously, is the key factor that connects the two …
Maps (developed at the University of Toronto’s Martin Prosperity Institute)
also illustrate something else—the striking class divides in our cities. The purple creative-class clusters are surrounded by veritable seas of service-class red. And these maps contain very few working-class areas (blue specks)—the neighborhoods that once provided good, family-supporting jobs—even in traditionally working-class cities like Detroit.
Even as the urban core has rebounded and regenerated, large swaths of poverty, concentrated disadvantage, and urban distress continue to exist in a hidden, almost parallel dimension that is ignored by or invisible to many politicians, developers, and new urbanites. …
The next and perhaps greater urban challenge is to extend the benefits of rejuvenating cores to a far broader swath of people and neighborhoods. We need to put equal if not greater effort into ensuring that the people and communities that are falling behind—still a clear majority in most cities—can participate in and benefit from this ongoing urban transformation. …
America’s urban comeback will not be complete until we build from and extend the ongoing resurgence of the urban core to all of our city neighborhoods, enabling a broader, shared prosperity for all.
UPDATE: Tom Durning also recommends another piece by Florida in in Atlantic Cities: Homeownership Means Little to Economic Growth, referencing work by Robert Shiller and others.
