Tech, talent and tolerance nourish the growth of cities.

• Position: Economic Outlook - Interview with Richard Florida - Brief Article - Interview

In his new book, The Rise of the Creative Class: How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life, Richard Florida concludes that cities with lots of creative people -- scientists, architects, artists, entrepreneurs, computer programmers and the like -- prosper while other places stagnate. He ranks Raleigh-Durham sixth, Charlotte 28th and the Triad 41st among 49 metro areas with more than a million people. Florida earned his bachelor's in political science from Rutgers College in 1979, a master's in city and regional planning from Columbia University in 1984 and his doctorate there in the same subject in 1986. He is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

BNC: What's the premise of your book?

Florida: That creativity is the source of all business success and city and regional economic growth. Now, as things like access to raw materials become less important, creativity is the only competitive edge a company or city has.

How did you measure creativity?

My index is made up of four components: how many members of the creative class do you have and what share of your economy comes from the creative class; how many high-tech firms do you have concentrated in your economy; how innovative is your economy, what's your patent production per population; and -- the thing that has gotten me a lot of notoriety -- how open is your economy to new people, ethnicities, nationalities, genders and, dare I say, sexual orientation.

Gays?

One measure I use is a gay index. It's not because gay people are necessarily more creative but because places that are open to gays are open to creative people of all sorts. There are three T's to economic growth: technology, talent and tolerance. For example, 30% to 35% of all new businesses started in Silicon Valley in recent years have a foreign-born person as a member of the founding team.

Are drastic changes ahead for more socially conservative cities?

Not really. Even gay couples are adopting babies and buying houses now. It's a matter of being open to the tattooed-and-pierced set. Creative-class people want to work, and they work really hard. The point I'm making is, a job with a high salary isn't enough. The creative class is moving to some of the highest-taxed and most-expensive cities on earth, because they're willing to pay for the lifestyle, the street scene, music, active outdoor recreation. And they've got the wherewithal to pay for it. They make twice what any other class makes.

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