The Tiny Footprint Of Urban Cool In The Rust Belt
We were just talking about this the other night, a few of us, vis a vis what's happened to my hometown and Gregg's, the Motor City. There, there's the Heidelberg Project. The WSJ quotes demographer Joel Kotkin, writing at the Daily Beast on the failed "Soho-ization" of Rust Belt cities:

Perhaps the best that can be said about the creative-class idea is that it follows a real, if overhyped, phenomenon: the movement of young, largely single, childless and sometimes gay people into urban neighborhoods. This Soho-ization--the transformation of older, often industrial urban areas into hip enclaves--is evident in scores of cities. It can legitimately be credited for boosting real estate values from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Wicker Park in Chicago and Belltown in Seattle to Portland's Pearl District as well as much of San Francisco.

Yet this footprint of such "cool" districts that appeal to largely childless, young urbanistas in the core is far smaller in most cities than commonly reported. Between 2000 and 2010, notes demographer Wendell Cox, the urban core areas of the 51 largest metropolitan areas--within two miles of the city's center--added a total of 206,000 residents. But the surrounding rings, between two and five miles from the core, actually lost 272,000. In contrast to those small gains and losses, the suburban areas--between 10 and 20 miles from the center --experienced a growth of roughly 15 million people.

The smallness of the potentially "hip" core is particularly pronounced in Rust Belt cities such as Cleveland and St. Louis, where these core districts are rarely home to more than 1 or 2 percent of the city's shrinking population. Yet the subsidy money for developers is often justified in the name of "reviving" the entire city, most of which has continued to deteriorate.

Kotkin's original article is here. Richard Florida's response is here.