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According to New York Times columnist David Brooks, socioeconomic segregation is ruining America.
“Housing and construction rules that keep the poor and less educated away from places with good schools and good job opportunities…have a devastating effect on economic growth nationwide,” Brooks wrote in a much-derided July 11 column. (Derided not for the sentiment outlined above so much as the evidence, which involved Italian cold cuts as a restrictive cultural signifier for the American upper middle class.)

Fifteen years ago Richard Florida, one of the world’s leading urbanists, urged city leaders to make urban areas more attractive to the creative class; college-educated millennials, entrepreneurs and artists.

In his book, The Rise of the Creative Class, he argued that these people would help revitalize blighted urban areas and help under resourced communities.

orty years after the decline of the steel industry, Pittsburgh has emerged from the ashes of deindustrialization to become the new Emerald City. Its formidable skyline gleams with homegrown names—PPG, UPMC, and PNC. Touted as the “most livable city” by the likes of The Economist and Forbes, its highly literate and educated workforce has contributed to a robust and diverse local economy known as a center for technology, health care, and bio-science. It is a leader in startup businesses. Uber and Ford’s announcement in 2016 that they would base development of their self-driving cars in Pittsburgh, rather than in Silicon Valley, is a telling example of the power of high-tech image and low costs.

NEW HAVEN – Inequality is usually measured by comparing incomes across households within a country. But there is also a different kind of inequality: in the affordability of homes across cities. The impact of this form of inequality is no less worrying.

The first interpretation is that Florida responding to his critics that the secret to urban prosperity is to focus on attracting creative class employees and employers. The book is something of a mea culpa that Florida overestimated the ability of cultural amenities to drive urban success, and underestimated how the growth of urban knowledge economies can serve to drive economic inequality.

Inclusive prosperity is the idea that the opportunity and benefits of economic growth should be widely shared by all segments of society. Most cities fall well short of that ideal. While urban areas continue to afford new opportunities to employees and businesses from all walks of life, they are increasingly split between wealthy, high-skill knowledge workers and low-paid service workers.

Author, thought-leader and researcher: Richard Florida is one of the world’s leading urbanists. He is a researcher and professor, serving as University Professor and Director of Cities at the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto

Professor Richard Florida has studied the geography of the tech industry for decades and sees a crisis in “winner-take-all” urbanism happening in tech-friendly cities. The tech industry can fix this problem, though, with several key strategies.

Last week, the San Jose City Council voted to start negotiations with Google to sell the company 23 acres of city owned land near the Diridon Caltrain Station. The purchase is part of Google’s plan to build a massive transit oriented village that would include six to eight million square feet of office and retail space and bring up to 20,000 Google employees to the city. Community activists are concerned about pressures the development may exert on wages and housing prices and the overall impact it may have on San Jose’s culture. In this hour, we’ll learn about Google’s possible San Jose campus and we want to hear from you — if your town is home to a large company — what are the benefits and drawbacks?