Richard Florida's book "The Rise of the Creative Class" speculated that future growth would come, not from natural resources or manufacturing plants, but from the ideas of creative people. Austin, Texas was one of the first cities to embrace the creative class, and as a result, it has enjoyed rapid growth. Austin's former mayor, Kirk Watson spoke to the Iowa City Rotary club today, and he said "We made people the focus of economic development".

Mr. Watson described low or no cost programs that he used to support creative people. One of the simplest ideas was to give individual homeowners the same benefits as commercial developers, by waiving the property taxes on any improvements that they made to their homes for five years. In effect, their house becomes a TIF district. This simple act simultaneously fights sprawl, upgrades the housing stock, and preserves neighboorhoods.

Mr. Watson was in Des Moines yesterday, and he described their efforts to create housing downtown. He said, "If real estate is about location, location, location, then downtowns are about residential, residential, residential." In Austin, they developed a checklist of desirable urban housing attributes, and granted fast track permitting to developments that met their requirements. They wanted housing that is SMART - Safe, Mixed-income, Accessible, Reasonably priced, and Transit oriented.

Finally he commented on the recent Wall Street Journal article entitled "The Curse of the Creative Class", by saying that the author had no experience in economic development, and that the article was "an anti-tax screed".

The event was well attended, with about 250-300 people present at the University Athletic Club. There were elected officials and administrators from the county, school district and both Iowa City and Coralville. The chairman was banker Tom Cilek, who whole-heartedly endorsed the concept of the creative class.