CityLab Daily: Where the Creative Class Is Growing

Get creative: Since the Great Recession, the members of what CityLab’s Richard Florida calls America’s “creative class” have flocked to just a handful of cities, chasing skill-demanding jobs in technology, education, and the arts that cluster in increasingly more expensive places. Just look at which places have the largest share of this high-talent workforce and you’ll see that the list looks much like it did in the mid-2000s. Cities like D.C., San Jose, and San Francisco lead the pack; a few other booming metros—Denver, Boston, and Seattle, for example—have shuffled places in the ranks of metro areas since then. For the most part, creative class workers concentrate in just a few cities.

But the creative class has grown in ranks, adding another 12 million workers across U.S. metro areas from 2005 to 2017. That remarkable growth has meant that places like Salt Lake City, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Las Vegas have increased their share of knowledge workers, giving credence to the idea that more affordable cities may be gaining the talent they need to get an economic boost. Today, Florida digs into the data: Where the Creative Class Is Growing