we left cincinnati for a number of reasons. besides the logistical ones, we also had some personal reasons that made moving seem all the sweeter when the opportunity to do so came.

over the past couple of days, i’ve been participating in a little argument on the cincimusic.com message board…not about music…but about cincinnati and it’s declining ‘creative scene’. i have no idea why i keep going back to it…and i have no idea why i decided that i should even post to begin with. but i did…and it has gotten me thinking a lot. i think it has been a combination of a number of things…kind of having the blinders taken off. when you live with something for so long, you kind of forget that it’s there…and when it’s gone, it’s only then you realize how large of a problem it was…and in this case, appears to be.

thinking on this a little further, i believe maybe the spark was started when i had a conversation with my previous boss. sean was talking about not having enough technical resources (interactive developers) in cincinnati…that all of the businesses competing for interactive work in the cincinnati area were basically dipping into the same pool that has been around for a while, and were ultimately just stealing from each other rather than finding good new talent.

then i read the post on the board i was mentioning, and…yeah…i think it snowballed from there.

i won’t get into what the entire post was about…but the gist of it brought the same topic mentioned above under the light of the creative community rather than developers.

my stance ends up being that the creative class in cincinnati is at the beginning of a decline, and with the loss of the creative class comes the economical decline of a city. i think the ‘creative class’ is more important than ever in this particular time, considering that we’re on the verge of another technological boom….especially when we stop to consider that the term ‘creative class’ encompasses more than just the traditional ‘artist’…

to set the stage of what the ‘creative class’, check this out: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0205.florida.html

specifically, i think this particular paragraph gives the most definition:

“The distinguishing characteristic of the creative class is that its members engage in work whose function is to “create meaningful new forms.” The super-creative core of this new class includes scientists and engineers, university professors, poets and novelists, artists, entertainers, actors, designers, and architects, as well as the “thought leadership” of modern society: nonfiction writers, editors, cultural figures, think-tank researchers, analysts, and other opinion-makers. Members of this super-creative core produce new forms or designs that are readily transferable and broadly useful—such as designing a product that can be widely made, sold and used; coming up with a theorem or strategy that can be applied in many cases; or composing music that can be performed again and again.

Beyond this core group, the creative class also includes “creative professionals” who work in a wide range of knowledge-intensive industries such as high-tech sectors, financial services, the legal and healthcare professions, and business management. These people engage in creative problem-solving, drawing on complex bodies of knowledge to solve specific problems. Doing so typically requires a high degree of formal education and thus a high level of human capital. People who do this kind of work may sometimes come up with methods or products that turn out to be widely useful, but it’s not part of the basic job description. What they are required to do regularly is think on their own. They apply or combine standard approaches in unique ways to fit the situation, exercise a great deal of judgment, perhaps try something radically new from time to time.”

reading the above, i think we can safely assume that the ‘creative class’ is probably a couple of things. one, they are younger..probably 20’s to 40’s or so…and two, they are are educated.

with that said, let’s take a look a brief look at cincinnati:

1. cincinnati has a shrinking general population. this is according to these two articles from the cincinnati enquirer: article one | article two

the 2005 census seems to confirm this here.

to summarize….between 2000 and 2005, cincinnati lost almost 23K people. that’s a whole hell of a lot of for metropolitan area.

why? there seem to be a lot of general economical factors. there’s a negative job growth (-4%), home/property owners, on average, have has lost almost an entire 1% on their investment over the past year, conservative government policies that leads to no action…the list could go on and on.

2. if the creative class is educated…then we can probably assume that they are drawn to places where education is highly valued. cincinnati is not on a top 50 most educated cities list. http://money.cnn.com/2006/08/29/real_estate/brainiest_cities/index.htm

also, if the creative class is young, then cincinnati has a problem. according to the enquirer, more than 7,200 people born between 1966 and 1975 left hamilton county in the 1990s - a nearly 6 percent loss. Only nine of the nation’s 75 largest metro counties lost young people at higher rates. that number continues to increase in the 2000s.

3. a higher gay population, a more open gay population, is the sign of a more thriving creative economy. check this site out: http://www.urban.org/toolkit/issues/gayresearchfocus.cfm

if you don’t want to read the whole thing, read the below:

“Hundreds of American towns bear gay markings in thriving urban businesses, suburban cultural offerings, and revitalized holiday venues. Increasingly, cities are trying to attract gay and lesbian residents to enliven the culture by diversifying it. Cities have also figured out that gay people are often more willing than others to move into and devote income to improving distressed neighborhoods, which attracts other people and sets a cycle of improvement in motion.

Diversity enhances innovation and creativity by allowing different perspectives and ideas to be heard. The creative and innovative people driving the tech economy seek places high in cultural and racial/ethnic diversity–and so do gays and lesbians. It is likely not a coincidence that high-tech centers like metropolitan San Francisco, Washington, Austin, Atlanta, and San Diego also have large and visible gay populations.”

cincinnati is not in the top ‘gay’ cities. and the gay population that cincinnati has is pretty darn small. while the data here focuses on gay couples, i think that with a certain margin of error we can pretty safely say that the cincinnati gay community is fairly small and not very open.

5. branching off of something above…diversity is not exactly something cincinnati is well known for. let’s look a little more closely at this line: “Diversity enhances innovation and creativity by allowing different perspectives and ideas to be heard. “

go again to the us census stats for 2005…and you’ll see that the majority of the population is either white or black…and not a whole lot of in between. there’s a small hispanic population…about 1.5%…a very small asian population. yes, there is a margin of error…but the point is that it’s not enough to say ‘cincinnati is more diverse than we think’.

with some of these GENERAL statistics, i think we can draw a general trend line which shows you that the creative class in cincinnati is shrinking. in a time when we are experiencing massive changes in the landscape of technology and art and culture…its convergence and how it’s being distributed, consumed, created…this is a bigger problem than one might think.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 17th, 2007 at 8:02 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.