'The New Urban Crisis' and the High Line

A PBS NewsHour two-fer: an interview of urbanologist Richard Florida conducted in a walking tour of New York's famed High Line in the gentrifying West Chelsea neighborhood, a fitting backdrop for his new book, "The New Urban Crisis."1

Watch economics correspondent Paul Solman’s report on urban revival and the crisis of success

I have lived in and around cities and observed them closely my entire life, and I have been an academic urbanist for more than three decades. I have seen cities decline and die, and I have seen them come back to life. But none of that prepared me for what we face today. Just when it seemed that our cities were really turning a corner, when people and jobs were moving back to them, a host of new urban challenges — from rising inequality to increasingly unaffordable housing and more — started to come to the fore. Seemingly overnight, the much-hoped-for urban revival has turned into a new kind of urban crisis. ... Although two of its core features — mounting inequality and rising housing prices — are most often discussed in relation to rising and reviving urban centers such as New York, London and San Francisco, the crisis also hits hard at the declining cities of the Rustbelt and in sprawling Sunbelt cities with unsustainable economies driven by energy, tourism and real estate. Other core features — economic and racial segregation, spatial inequality, entrenched poverty — are becoming as common in the suburbs as they are in the cities. Seen in this light, the New Urban Crisis is also a crisis of the suburbs, of urbanization itself and of contemporary capitalism writ large.