Remember how the creative class of writers, artists, urban cheesemongers, professional tricyclists, novelty button manufacturers, food truckers, and artisan mustache-growers was supposed to supplant crumbling blue collar industries in economically stagnant cities? Remember? Well, according to Richard Florida, the editor-at-large for The Atlantic Cities, the creative class was totally going to work all those miracles, propping up cities like Detroit and Cleveland with pale, keyboard-cramped hands. It's just that, um, well, that's not at all what has happened.

Joel Kotkin, one of Florida's sternest critics,sounded off (a little too gleefully) on the creative class's many economic failures today in the Daily Beast. It's been a trendy line of thinking over the last couple of years among urbanists, journalists, and academics, explains Kotkin, that an influx of "hip" young residents into urban areas would benefit those areas. The new arrivals would help build wonderful little independent bookstores, coffee shops, and tapas restaurants. Everyone would prosper as a result of such glittering monuments to urban hipsterdom — property values would go up, downtrodden blue collar workers would be enlightened, and there would be locally sourced produce for everyone.

The only hitch in all this optimism, as Kotkin notes here and others like Tulane sociologist Richard Campanella have have noted elsewhere, is that all these wonderful new creative class businesses benefit only one group of people: members of the creative class. In his thesis about the rise of urban creatives, Florida pointed to cities like San Francisco and Seattle as bastions of highly-educated, creative residents. With just a few more bike lanes and liberal arts majors, El Paso, for instance, could become a bustling hub of creative activity and not merely a glorified urban hipster playground.