The Rise of the Creative Class... in Virginia

Clarendon Ballroom, Arlington County. Don't let anyone kid you, Clarendon offers tough competition to DC entertainment centers. It's a little less gritty, maybe the acts aren't quite as pathbreaking, but there's a lot of activity, a lot of nightlife, and by comparison it's much cleaner and a night is much less likely to end in violence compared to places like Adams-Morgan or U Street.

The Civic Tourism website alerted me to this story from the Falls Church News-Press, "'Rise of Creative Class' & Its New Political Clout in N. Va. Was Area's Top 2005 Story," which attributes the victory of Democratic candidate for Governor Tim Kaine to "the rise of the creative class" in Northern Virginia, which may have reached the point of critical mass to change the political dynamics of that state. From the article:

The margin of victory for Governor-elect Tim Kaine was achieved entirely in the tiny enclave of Northern Virginian jurisdictions, which on a map look like the veritable “tip of the iceberg” of the large and unwieldy Commonwealth of Virginia.

The contiguous jurisdictions of Fairfax and Arlington counties, plus the independent cities of Alexandria, Falls Church and Fairfax provided Kaine with 102,663 of his total 113,340 statewide margin of victory, or 94% of the entire margin. Kaine won the entire rest of the state by only 10,677 votes, and that margin was more than accounted for by the City of Richmond, alone, where he’d served as mayor. The same Northern Virginia jurisdictions brought the Democratic lieutenant governor and attorney general candidates within a hair’s breadth of victory, statewide, as well...

But it was the overall shift in the demographic makeup of the Northern Virginia enclave over the last four years that was most responsible for Kaine’s victory, and the prospect of turning Virginia “blue” once and for all.
The balance of political control in Virginia has shifted away from the lairs of two of the nation’s most powerful institutions of the religious right — Jerry Falwell’s Lynchburg and Pat Robertson’s Virginia Beach — to a more tolerant, scientifically-minded and pragmatic bastion in Northern Virginia. This stunning defeat for the forces of Falwell and Robertson in their own state will also resonate nationally...

Not only was Kaine victorious in Virginia as a result of his strong domination of the electorate in Northern Virginia, but at least three candidates of the GOP’s right wing at the state legislative level were defeated, as well, and largely for their discriminatory attitudes towards gays, immigrants and women asserting their right to choice.

Central to the values of the “creative class” is tolerance and fair play, and in context of this, it repudiates the discriminatory attitudes of the rurally-based religious right in Virginia, and the business leadership of Virginia was sent a powerful message in November that if it wants to continue to growth high-tech industries in the state, it’s going to have to stand against those who have so stridently stood for discrimination in the name of their religion...

With everything else that, in terms of education and symbols, advanced the embrace of diversity in Falls Church in 2005, the area of affordable housing is where the “rubber hits the road” most acutely, and resulting in a major setback in 2005, although the bigger battles lay ahead.



After all, following his famous first book, The Rise of the Creative Class, Richard Florida wrote a follow-on book, entitled The Flight of the Creative Class, which was about the challenges to local governments to provide affordable and suitable housing and other amenities to the creative class that is otherwise forced to re-locate to more affordable regions of the country.
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When I was researching for a job interview in Prince George's County last year, I was shocked to see how little discussion there is in that county (or the state, really) about "Creative Class" issues, and this in a county that has the University of Maryland at College Park, which is ranked 48th in the nation as a top public research-oriented university.

They think of creativity as leaking up from DC, and I'm sure that's true, but they also have tremendous assets of their own that they aren't harnessing.
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A couple weeks ago, I began reorganizing the links in the right sidebar, and I created an "Arts, Culture & Creative Class" section of links. It's worth poking through. (I also added a very much work in progress section of "Education" links, focusing primarily on K-12 and lifelong learning.)

I also added a "calendar of events" section via Upcoming.org, which is where I am likely to list events that I think are interesting, important, and that people should attend. It probably means that I'm less likely to do major blog postings on such happenings.

Index Keywords: creative-class