Lots of people are puzzled about how Joel Kotkins can get away without "doing the math."

Living as I do in one of the bluest cities in America -- Seattle -- I wonder what Joel Kotkins means when he  writes :

Cities must return to a progressive focus on fixing their real problems--that is, the problems of the majority of the people who live there--not serving the interests of artists, hipsters, and their wealthy patrons.

Who can disagree with the basic point? i.e. fixing "real problems."

But who can support the underlying assumption -- that cities don't try to do just that, albeit imperfectly, fumblingly and with many idiocies, as is so with any political process? Can Joel offer any support for the idea that cities, any of them, are in fact focused on serving "artists, hipsters, and their wealthy patrons." It's just too bizarre a claim for me to take seriously without some serious supporting financial analysis of city budgets.

One specific which might be offered is the squandering of money on Rem Koolhaas' flashy Seattle Central Library design (assuming he was able to squeeaze a starchitecture premium out of the Library Board). Yes the design fee could have been better spent. But building a new library was totally consistent with Kotkins' urging, at least for those of us who think that public libraries are an essential, core city service which serves, if any group, the middle class family.

If you read Kotkins' article even remotely carefully, the first thing to notice is that there are no facts in it -- some vague anecdotes, to be sure -- but no real analysis based on "doing the math." The article seems to me to be a somewhat misleading one. Take his long paragraph on using gays to attract development. How does it start? "Spokane and Oakland, for instance, have considered projects to lure gays." They "considered" but presumably they didn't follow through or else Kotkins would have seized on it as a foolish action (and I would agree). But Oakland and Spokane didn't do anything - they merely considered. The rest of his paragraph, however, is built on something which didn't happen. I call that shabby.

Matt Yglesias is also puzzled.:

I continue to be puzzled by the implication that the real problems here have something to do with the massive political clout of "hipsters" who, in my experience, are all for better transportation infrastructure and tend not to be the ones pushing massive public subsidies for sports arenas.

Comments

[JRoth]

I suppose I shouldn't comment without reading Kotkins' piece, but TNR's paywall pushes me away (even if this one's free). Anyway, I would imagine that what he's writing about is (in some part) a reaction against Richard Florida's idiotic "Creative Class" concept, which actually does propose tailoring city policy to attract gays and hipsters. But it seems that Kotkins' mistake is to think that Florida's recommendations are already in place.

One other thing: Florida's specific rationale is dubious on several levels, but the specific recommendations are pretty uniformly good urban planning - emphasis on transit, walkability, and city comforts vs. big development. Indeed, the most frustrating thing about Florida is that I'd be happy to see cities doing much of what he recommends, but horrified to see them actually using his arguments.

[David Sucher]

That's the odd thing about Kotkins: I get the feeling that he understands very well the arguments of Florida or New Urbanists or whatever but he seems to willfully misconstrue them when he writes in order to score political points with his own intellectual constuency. That's the only explanation I can fathom because he is a smart guy but just seems to keep getting it wrong.

[Bill Seitz]

I think Kotkin is right that urban bosses tend to look for a silver bullet to avoid the hard work and political prices associated with fixing the nasty underlying problems in cities.

And the CreativeClass stuff is just one of the more recent fads that these chuckleheads are chasing.

But more money is going into the older fads (stadiums) than the newer ones, so his point falls apart there.

A more generous interpretation of Kotkin's crude framing of Florida's thought is that he simply thinks Florida is totally missing the point. And, as a standard marketing approach, it's not unusual to compare your own thoughts to someone else's that (a) you disagree with and (b) is better known than yours.

[Chris Arkills]

The article is great as is your take on it. However, one of the more amazing things about the new library is its relatively inexpensive cost. At about $165/sq. ft it is a bargain. This was one of the key driving factors in the design. What a novel concept--low cost, grand design, and functionality to boot...

[David Sucher]

Chris.
I reckon a different number.
The announced construction (only?) budget was $165.5 million.
(These things are never precisely explained so who knows what it really cost.)
The library is 363,000 SF
That's $455/SF.

No bargain anywhere except in terms of publicity for a small coterie of officials who will dine well (in the sense of being feted, no graft implied) on this project for years.
These numbers are not from a skeptic like me but from from a KoolFan, Randy Gragg at Koolhaas designed $165M Seattle library to open today.

[figmo]

David, though the number you pulled for your calculation come from the beginning of the article cited, the very end of that same article says, "Though it only cost $270 per square foot, in contrast to San Francisco's $480, the Seattle library seems a more agile advancement of the library form."

It wasn't $455/SF.

[David Sucher]

Maybe Gragg can't do arithmentic either?

There are several facts which seem to be accepted:
• The structure cost about $165 million.
• The structure is about 363,000 Square Feet.

My calculator tells me that that is about $455/SF

363,000 X $455/sf = $165,165,000

Am I doing the math incorrectly?