Cities that Work for Business -- and Their Customers

Joel Kotkin is the author of "The City: A Global History" and is Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University in Orange, Calif. He is also a senior fellow with the New America Foundation in Washington and a senior fellow with the Center for an Urban Future in New York.

Below is review from Kiplinger on his book which argues that while high-end cities try to appeal to the "creative class," "opportunity urbanism" aims at building a broad business base and strong middle-class.

As many businesses know -- and many smaller businesses are hurt by -- there is a war on. Cities are fighting each others to attract business, often trying to lure large corporations with benefits usually not afforded to smaller companies already operating in the area. And some cities often try to attract business by making themselves attractive to the young, upwardly mobile and trained "creative class that many companies are scrambling to hire.

But such strategies mean setting up a competition that only a handful of cities such as San Francisco and Boston can really win because they cater to an elite class. Joel Kotkin, a nationally recognized expert on urban revitalization and planning, argues that building and maintaining a stronger middle-class will do far more to revive and sustain cities and the businesses and create economic possibilities.

The key, he says, is for cities to create a comfortable quality of life combined with a reasonable cost of living. "What we have found … is that most working people have more real income -- measured by what they can buy, given their average incomes -- in a place such as Houston than they do in superstar cities such as New York, Los Angeles or San Francisco," he writes. That has made Houston and other growing Sunbelt cities a destination for many of the educated and well-trained talent that businesses are hunting for. "These cities are also showing marked gains in attracting high-wage employers and educated migrants, including members of the ballyhooed 'creative class,'" he writes. "These are, of course, the very jobs and workers that are widely thought to be concentrating in more elite places."

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