One Reason It’s So Hard to Become a 'Creative Superstar City'

It's worth noting that this article is written by Richard Florida (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Florida), whose 2002 book The Rise of the Creative Class (http://www.creativeclass.com/richard_florida/books/the_rise_...) introduced the idea that struggling cities could find new prosperity by reinventing themselves to become more attractive to the "creative class" -- Florida's term for the mostly young, mostly white, mostly techie types who have risen to wealth and prominence in San Francisco and New York.

And that Florida raked in tens of thousands of dollars in speaking fees per speech and hundreds of thousands in consulting fees per gig from lots of those struggling cities, all on the premise that he could show them the way to convince the members of that "creative class" to upend themselves from SF and NYC and move there. (See http://www.city-journal.org/html/14_1_the_curse.html, http://www.newrepublic.com/blog/plank/105746/gay-bars-bike-p...)

And that after all the checks had cleared but those cities failed to turn around, Florida did some turning around of his own and declared that they had really been beyond hope to begin with (see http://prospect.org/article/ruse-creative-class-0, http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114013/richard-floridas-d...).

And that after a decade of working this circuit, he eventually admitted that programs to attract the "creative class" -- the programs he'd been selling those struggling cities for all those years -- mostly just ended up making life better for the members of that class without benefiting anyone else (see http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/03/20/richard-flo..., http://beltmag.com/austin-cleveland-and-the-cost-of-cool/).

So... yeah.

Surprised Austin did not make the list.