It's bad enough Pittsburghers spend so much time worrying about our talented youth leaving town. Do we now have to worry about the potential exodus of the middle-aged guy who studies talented youth?
We had a story last week suggesting that Richard Florida, the Carnegie Mellon University professor who authored "The Rise of the Creative Class," may launch a research institute someplace else.
The gist was that Florida is a prophet without honor in his adopted hometown, which is nuts. Florida has probably gotten more ink than any economic development professor in the history of economic development professors.
A computer search of the newspaper library turned up 91 stories mentioning "Richard Florida" since December 1990. That's not as many as, say, 1950s disc jockey Porky Chedwick has (153), but Pittsburgh is an oldies town and Florida is all about what's new. Being mentioned an average of once every seven weeks, as Florida has been, still amounts to a big bucket of ink.
Losing Florida would not exactly be like losing Jonas Salk, but it would arguably be worse than losing Dennis Miller or Bobby Bonilla. So I called Florida at his home in Oakland and we spoke for an hour. I came away impressed with his unwavering enthusiasm for his work, the power of his arguments and his love for this city.
"I have no plans to leave Pittsburgh," said Florida, 45, who moved here 15 years ago. "I don't have an offer. I'm not cultivating offers."
But when he speaks around the country about his dreams for a research institute, a "Center for Creativity and Innovation," he says he hears, "Would you build it here?"
People are saying if Florida left town, it would symbolize our continued decline, but he should not be confused with the Carrie Furnace, which is much taller. We're talking about an idea man. Ideas are transferable. If another city ponies up the millions of dollars it would take to get Florida to set up his thought shop elsewhere, we could still draw from him as much -- or as little -- as we do now.
"The Rise of the Creative Class" -- or, as I like to call it, "The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth" -- is a best-seller that offers America a broader take on arguments that Florida and some of his Carnegie Mellon colleagues have made here for years. In July 2000, for instance, I wrote a column about Gary Gates, a Carnegie Mellon doctoral student working with Florida who found that the higher the concentration of gay couples in a region, the more likely that region is to be a high-tech mecca.
Florida found a similar correlation between high-tech jobs and artists, writers and performers. His conclusion is in the preface of his book:
"Economic growth was occurring in places that were tolerant, diverse and open to creativity -- because these were places where creative people of all types wanted to live."
This Newark, N.J., native still considers Pittsburgh one of the most beautiful cities he's ever seen, but he says we're letting our assets "leak away." Chief among those assets are the tens of thousands of college students in the region. He'd like to see more of that talent tapped as the city rethinks the future of Oakland. He sees us still tied to a post-war model of top-down planning, but the days when an industrialist like Richard King Mellon and a machine mayor like David Lawrence could plot this city's future aren't coming back.
"After five decades of decline," he said, "maybe it's time to really embrace a new direction."
Actually, the city is moving in some directions Florida favors. Mayor Tom Murphy has never sat down with him, but he is stringing bike paths along the rivers. Murphy has moved, albeit reluctantly, to a more gradual and organic transformation of Downtown. Getting more people living Downtown is the sort of ground-up approach that Florida touts in his book and to anyone who will listen.
Which way we go from here is a bigger question than which way he goes.
Brian O'Neill can be reached at boneill@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1947.
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