From Randal O'Toole:

In a review of Richard Florida’s recent book, The New Urban Crisis, left-wing writer Sam Wetherell says that cities that have followed Florida’s “creative class” prescriptions “are becoming gated communities” for the rich, “or at least the college-educated children of the rich.” They suffer from increased inequality, gentrification pushing the poor out to the suburbs, and a disappearing middle class...

Florida certainly admits that the “superstar” cities he favors have “increasingly unaffordable housing prices and staggering levels of inequality.” He points out that, 40 years ago, New York City was quite affordable (as were San Francisco, San Jose, and Los Angeles). 

He even cites Matthew Rognlie's research showing that unaffordable housing is the primary cause of growing inequality. But Florida never comes close to saying that any of his prescriptions have made housing unaffordable or increased inequality...

...Florida loves to point out how successful his “creative class” cities have become. “Just six metro areas–--the San Francisco Bay Area, New York, Boston, Washington, DC, San Diego, and London–--attract nearly half of all high-tech venture capital across the entire world.” 

But he may be confusing cause and effect. It is likely that cities that attract this capital also attract the people who give the cities a high “Bohemian” index, not that the density and other factors that Florida favors are what attracted the venture capital.

Neither San Diego nor San Jose really meet Florida’s ideas of what a city should look like. Neither have really dense downtowns and their transit systems are little more than show pieces that few people use. Fifty years ago, they were the epitome of sprawl. 

San Jose got rich because of its proximity to Stanford University, and the urban-growth boundaries it adopted in the mid-1970s made the area dense. While overall densities today are high, those densities are spread out, not concentrated like San Francisco or Manhattan.

It is really hard to say San Diego and San Jose have anything in common with New York and San Francisco except that all of them have adopted policies that made housing expensive and pushed out the poor. 

There is no better way to increase average incomes than to exclude low-income people from the average...