From City Nation Place via Herb Auerbach:
Richard Florida on Trump and Cities
A new book by city expert Richard Florida, The New Urban Crisis, explores the forces that propelled Trump to the presidency, and offers plenty of analysis about what’s in store for large urban centers around the globe.
You mention in your new book, The New Urban Crisis, that Trumpism is a backlash against an urban-powered growth model. How so?
I saw it first with Rob Ford in Toronto and I said if it could happen in as progressive and diverse a city as that, more and worse would follow. And it did. First Brexit, then Trump, now the surge in populist sentiment across Europe. This is a direct byproduct of the New Urban Crisis. In fact, you can’t understand Trump and the populist backlash if you don’t understand the New Urban Crisis. That backlash is the political reaction to winner-take-all urbanism—the growing gap between superstar cities and their advantaged residents, and everywhere and everyone else.
How did that work in U.S. voting patterns in November?
You can see it in the vote, which the book breaks down. Clinton took the dense, affluent, knowledge-based cities and close-in suburbs that are the epicenters of new economy. She won the popular vote by a substantial margin. But Trump took everywhere else. In the primaries, his support was concentrated in counties with larger white populations, more blue-collar jobs, larger shares of people who didn’t graduate high school, and also, according to an analysis in The New York Times, with greater shares of people living in mobile homes. In the general election, he took 61% of the vote in rural places compared to 33% for Clinton. He won 57% of the vote in metros with less than 250,000 people, compared to 38% for Clinton. He carried 52% of the vote in metros with between 250,000 and 500,000 people, compared to 34% for Clinton. All told, he won 260 metros, compared to Clinton’s 120. But the average Trump metro was home to just 420,000 people compared to 1.4 million for Clinton.
Why do some Trump supporters see our major cities as centers of corruption and violence?
While Trump poses our great cities as centers of pathology and violence, the reality is that they have become our premier platform for innovation and economic growth. Fifteen of America’s top 20 metro areas are sanctuary cities—and they account for roughly 45% of U.S. GDP. The Bay Area, Greater Los Angeles and the Boston-NY-Washington DC corridor generate two-thirds of all high-tech start-up companies in the United States. Trumpism or populism is not just about economics or inequality. It’s about geography and race. It’s a backlash against women, immigrants, minorities, globalism, and it’s a fundamental check on this urban-powered growth model and on the rising living standards of all Americans.
So Trump is a backlash against falling behind by non-city residents?
Our nation has sorted itself along class and racial lines. Trumpism is a backlash against the urban cosmopolitan creative class and its values of diversity, tolerance, multiculturalism, meritocracy and globalism. It comes from parts of the country that are falling behind economically, that are whiter, less diverse, and which feel threatened by the rise of diverse, global urban places and the people who live in them. And this is the case in the U.S. and around the world. So, the populist mind sets sees cities not as centers of innovation and growth but as the places that are undermining traditional family values. Trump gives this a unique spin. Even though he lives in New York, he is unable to see the changes that have happened there. He still sees it as the same kind of distressed city it was back in the 1970s and 1980s when he was cavorting at Studio 54.
Here is another review of Florida’s new book in Slate:
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2017/04/richard_florida_s_the_new_urban_crisis_reviewed.html
Voting patters VERY similar to Canada where even slightly conservative provinces like AB or BC vote NDP by a far wider margins in Edmonton or Calgary, Vancouver or Victoria. BC Liberals or Wildrose/PC parties too dominate in smaller to medium sized centers.
Our Trump moment in Vancouver is brewing against the New Chinese wealth, their astronaut, no-tax paying families and their real estate and farmland takeovers. Ticking Timebomb backlash if the Liberals get in again and nothing is done.
No-tax paying? Oh, brother. If you believe that dreck then you’re right about Canada’s Trump moment. Careful what you wish for…
Property taxes cover very little of the expense of maintaining the state and what it provides its citizens. Particulary schoolchildren or aged parents stashed here.
And? Immigrants – both short and long term – pay all the same taxes that native-born Canadians do. Property taxes, GST, vehicle taxes, income taxes, BC medical, payroll taxes (for those operating their own businesses with staff). If you own/rent, work, and purchase any form of good or service in Canada, you pay the same taxes whether born here or not. This myth that somehow immigrants magically do not pay taxes is childish xenophobic paranoia. Like going through life matter-of-factly convinced that Jews have tails and horns.
I didn’t realize you were so charmingly naive Dan. Google former Richmond mayor and MLA Greg Halsey-Brandt and his comments on the issue in the Thompson area of Richmond.
I did. It demonstrates nothing other than these two rocket scientists believe the same nonsense with only circumstantial and half-cocked anecdotal evidence they’ve chosen to construe to suit their prejudice. You might as well have asked me to consult The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as proof. Sure, I’M the one who’s naive.
I don’t doubt that people in the suburbs and smaller places have a different culture and see the world differently. In fact that can be expected.
What I wonder is why it’s any of their concern if there are people of colour and multimodal transportation in big cities?
“What I wonder is why it’s any of their concern if there are people of colour and multimodal transportation in big cities?”
I think that’s an excellent question. Here is my imagination of how some of the thinking goes:
Honest, physical hard work that actually produces something tangible (from an era when the auto industry was bigger than the computer industry) is obsolete. Those jobs went to foreigners. You see your community and your family crumbling around you. There is an epidemic of despair, alcoholism and drug abuse that is killing as many men as the AIDS epidemic.
Trade agreements hollowed out your economy. You paid the price; other guys got rich: like the ones who run your global company (or your old one, before you got laid off and had to take a new job for half the pay). Your way of life was not destroyed by the free market: it was a deliberate intervention by the Clinton administration. (Government? It’s the problem.) Now taxes are bleeding you dry for projects that can never benefit you. You are lectured that cars are bad and transit is good. What good does that do if you can’t get to work without a car, if you know that transit will never be built where you live?
The people who did this – cosmopolitan elites – talk about diversity and tolerance as they schmooze with corrupt foreigners, but won’t lift a finger to help their fellow Americans. Then they turn around and lecture you: you are racist, sexist and ignorant. You built this country; now they tell you that you are literally destroying the planet. You should admit your sins to the righteous.
But you’re not a wannabe. You work hard for the dream, and you are going to show it. You dress well, you have a house, a decent car. Not like those losers: the people who are worse off than you are worse off because they deserve it. Mexicans, black people, welfare bums, single moms: they are lazy. You certainly wouldn’t be caught riding a bus with them! Yet the government is taking more of your tax dollars to give to the people who least deserve it. Dollars you can ill-afford to lose; you are only a couple of paychecks or a serious illness away from insolvency.
The losers and corrupt elites are a disease infecting the country. It is a moral disease. They only succeed because the competition isn’t fair. In a free market, any honest person could stand on their own two feet, like you did. Your tax dollars should be helping people like you, building the things you need to work hard (like roads). Instead, it’s just more hand-outs for the takers.
This applies less to Canada and more to the U.S., where race is central, and where there was much more industrial decline (because more industries). It explains Trump better than Rob Ford. But the same cultural narratives and associations spill over into Canada, resulting in the same polarizations. Things like the car and transit (called “communistic cattle cars” by a Province writer during the referendum) become somewhat arbitrary symbols for whole ideologies.
“Mexicans, black people, welfare bums, single moms: they are lazy. ”
I realize this could come off as suggesting that Trump voters are “deplorables.” I truly do not believe that (some of them are, some of them aren’t: just like Clinton voters). Like much of what I wrote, this is exaggerated. It think racism has been given far too much credit for Trump’s victory. On the one hand, the U.S. has a fundamental problem with racism. On the other, I think the vast majority of Trump voters don’t think like this. But when if you believe that people get what they deserve, associations like this are bound to be made, at least subconsciously.
“Trumpism is a backlash against the urban cosmopolitan creative class and its values of diversity, tolerance, multiculturalism, meritocracy and globalism.”
I believe these words that Richard Florida is defining as the values of the “urban cosmopolitan creative class” are important to understand if we are to truly get to the heart of our human problems. Likewise, what words define the values of those outside of this group, particularly in the rural areas?
Diversity (and multiculturalism): My feeling is we have a conflicting view of this concept because diversity means more choice and variety, which is what we all want individually. But we also seem to converge into social groups of similar types, so in this case we seek less diversity. Does this indicate we are comfortable with a certain level of diversity, but not too much? Is the average person able to handle a few different cultures, say 3 at a time, but not 5 or more (John Nash did suggested less options can be more efficient)? Absorbing new cultures into our mental model requires and open mind and is a process of learning. How many of us naturally have an open mind and are proactively in the mode of learning? I liken this to our openness to try new foods. Some people love to try new things while others just stick to the usual beer, steak and potatoes. Nothing wrong with either, or is one approach truly better?
Tolerance: What does this really mean? Is tolerance simply latent hatred, like latent demand? Or dormant hatred? If i’m tolerant to something I can endure or maintain composure, but it does not mean I am accepting of that thing. I simply grin and bear it because it’s what is socially expected–what is politically correct. But if i’m a “closet racist”, my values have not changed and merely i’m suppressing it. Is there such a thing as a part-time racist?
Meritocracy: I feel this is definitely ideal and if there is a racial link to meritocracy, as an Asian growing up in this region when it was mostly Caucasian in the 70’s and 80’s (usually the only one in class), I feel it’s improved and there is meritocracy at certain levels. For example, at technical job positions I believe there is meritocracy, but increasingly up the management and executive ladder, the proportion seems to indicate meritocracy becomes sparse in “leadership” roles that seem to give more weight to “image” than “merit”. If this is the case then we value and support meritocracy universally for technical positions that require more objectivity, but for positions that are responsible for institutional culture, values, and “power”, does meritocracy gives in to political interference? In our urban cosmopolitan Metro Vancouver region, do we still have examples of “glass ceilings” and “ethnic walls” or do we have true meritocracy spanning the full vertical?
So back on topic, I do not think cities can be planned, grow vibrantly, or achieve livability until we replace words like “tolerance” with “acceptance” and ensure we are not merely giving lip-service to noble values such as diversity and meritocracy. With the technologies we have today to end the human race (and at this moment Trump is positioning his military and global agenda), I don’t think we can survive unless we evolve our collective values and redeem our core with grace, sincerity and empathy. Fittingly, is this not message of this holiday weekend?
I see now. In fact I was there in a smaller place and would have stayed there but there was no work and no future. My solution was to move to a cosmopolitan area where there was work and a future.
Being born and steeped early in the religious Wonder Bread of the deeply conservative rural and small town Prairies, spending my formative years in a United Nations extended family with its share of rebelious youth, and living more than half my life in a cosmopolitan and distinctly diverse inner city, after all that I have encountered no better guiding philosophy than the four simple words “live and let live.”
More people could move to cities but don’t as house prices too high: http://www.vox.com/new-money/2017/4/14/15289510/economic-concentration-myth
As such urban wealth as % of overall wealth not necessarily growing just in a few areas.
House prices matter as we see not only in this US centric article but also in MetroVan & Lower Mainland.