Austin’s attracting creative talent

The NY Times article by Emily Eakin about Robert Florida (via Gustav Holmberg; in Swedish) interviewed several people who were skeptic about whether the last of the “three T’s”, tolerance, had anything to do with the attractiveness of a city to creative talent. Then they mentioned Austin.

“Texas is not a state generally thought of as a bastion of tolerance or technological innovation. But three Texas cities – Austin, Dallas and Houston – rank among the list’s top 10.” Eakin continues to quote Florida as saying, “Austin is a growth miracle. It has a great university and has long been a lifestyle mecca for gays and bohemians. But 10 to 20 years ago, if anyone said ‘Austin,’ you would have said, ‘Huh?’” So here’s a city that apparently has become more tolerant in a short time, as well as experiencing strong economic growth.

Mark Zandi, an economist working with tracking regional growth explains: “It’s no surprise that Austin came up in the last 10 to 15 years. The University of Texas got all that oil money and invested it in technology.” But the newspaper Austin American-Statesman, in an attempt to find out the reason behind Austin’s growth, Eakin writes, “asked Robert Cushing, a retired sociologist at the University of Texas in Austin, to test several academic theories”, among these Richard Florida’s. “To his surprise, the creative-capital theory turned out – at least after preliminary testing – to provide the best explanation for Austin’s high-tech transformation.”

I googled and found the newspapers website, and a page with all the articles in their series “Cities of Ideas”, and there’s lots of them.