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In 2002, Richard Florida became America’s best known urbanist with the publication of his book, The Rise of the Creative Class. In it, Florida posited that the “creative class,” a group which included artists, scientists and engineers, as well as educated knowledge sector professionals such as lawyers and finance workers, was the main driver of cultural and economic flourishing in America’s cities. The theory was enticing to many urban planners and municipal politicians, and cities across the country aimed to follow Florida’s advice on becoming “creative cities.”

It’s been 15 consequential years since urban evangelist Richard Florida first helped popularize and propel the U.S. urban renaissance with his gospel of the creative class. It held that the tech-consumed, enterprising hip young people flocking back to cities were the nation’s new economic driver, and that luring more of them to every burgh was the key to broad prosperity.

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Urban theorist Richard Florida’s 2002 book, “The Rise of the Creative Class” has been both prescient and prescriptive for many city centers in America.

Florida’s book predicted that a class of young, educated millennials who are employed in mostly creative fields would flood deserted urban cores looking for inexpensive housing, thereby changing the fortunes of these neighborhoods.

IN 2013 PROTESTS broke out in Oakland, California, directed against the private buses that shuttle tech workers from pricey homes in the city’s gentrifying areas to jobs in Silicon Valley. “You live your comfortable lives,” read a flyer that protesters handed out to passengers, “surrounded by poverty, homelessness, and death, seemingly oblivious to everything around you, lost in the big bucks and success.”

The United States is seeing a new crisis in terms of the middle class, and Ann Arbor is more at-risk than some communities, according to a University of Toronto professor and author.

Back in 2002, urban theorist Richard Florida set the agenda for numerous cities with his book “The Rise of the Creative Class.”

The book made the case that educated millennials in fields such as software design, technology, art and education were the future of cities. They would enhance prosperity and bring the middle class back into urban cores in districts such as Detroit’s Midtown and downtown.

From his office in the Miami Beach Urban Studios, urbanist Richard Florida wrote hundreds of drafts of his latest book “The New Urban Crisis.” It’s an idea that was born in a deleted post-script of Florida’s previous book, “Rise of the Creative Class.”

For over 30 years, urbanist and author Richard Florida has observed the life of cities, and has come up with solutions on how to make them work. In his new book, The New Urban Crisis, Florida argues that cities will have to turn to themselves to help themselves and to make them more inclusive for all.

In recent years, the young, educated and affluent have surged back into cities, reversing decades of suburban flight and urban decline. And yet, all is not well. The very same forces that power the growth of our great cities have generated a crisis of gentrification, rising inequality and increasingly unaffordable urban housing.

Richard Florida, whose influential ‘Rise of the Creative Class’ pegged cities’ future to their success in cultivating that group, says a new urban crisis is spreading as a few metros win almost all the marbles. But something deeper than city-level policies is at work, too.