It’s The Middle Class, Not The Creative Class

Urban Legend

The craze over coffeeshops and condos won’t revive American cities. Improving urban life for the middle class will.

Cities have always served many functions: as centers of religion, political power, and commerce. But one of their most important tasks has been to serve as engines of upward mobility and aspiration. Nowhere has this been more true than in American cities. From the earliest period of American settlement, European observers were often struck by the remarkable social mobility found in America’s urban centers.

The average nineteenth-century American factory worker, whether native-born or an immigrant, enjoyed a far better chance–and his offspring an even better one–of rising into the middle or even upper classes than his European counterpart.

by Joel Kotkin

Full Story: http://www.democracyjournal.org/article.php?ID=6483