Joseph Bottum reviews Richard Florida’s latest book for the Washington Free Beacon.

It’s tempting to mock Richard Florida: the hipster urbanist with the hipster name, the new day’s heir to yesterday’s Jane Jacobs. In 2002, he wrote a book that just everyone with an ounce of hipness bought and read—a book about how hipsters were saving the nation’s cities. And now, 15 years older and not quite as hip anymore, he’s written a follow-up that says, in essence, whoops.

But the temptation to mock Florida for his change of heart should be resisted. Over the past decade, his writing has shown a growing worry about the condition of urban America, a growing unease with the thesis he put in The Rise of the Creative Class. With his latest volume, The New Urban Crisis, he comes as close to repudiation of his 2002 work as he can manage without believing he was actually mistaken about the central point. …

… Unheard was the old warning, Be careful what you wish for. Or, in St. Teresa of Avila’s version, More tears are shed because of answered prayers than because of unanswered prayers. Many of the second-tier cities that tried to use the creative-class model found that they couldn’t attract enough members of that class for Florida’s synergistic fusion-reactor to become self-sustaining. Even worse, in many ways, was the fate of the cities that did become Florida’s kind of hipster paradise.

The rise of the creative class in such cities as New York, Washington, and San Francisco did produce economic growth—but mostly just for those who were already wealthy. The poor, and especially the working class poor, were right out of luck. They were priced out of the city and driven out to the suburbs, where they created the kind of urban problems known only to the cities. The modern city is the greatest economic engine the world has ever known, but these days it seems to run only for the aid of those who need its benefits least. When the rich, the young, and the bohemian revitalized Austin, Boston, and Seattle, they induced a cycle of soaring prices and class replacement. The creative class brought an income inequality that hadn’t been predicted. Florida could call them a new class all he wanted. They proved to be merely the children of the old white-collar meritocracy, grown doubly rich from the rising tide of urban renewal.

So, in The New Urban Crisis, Richard Florida takes a long second look at the nation’s cities.