President Jennifer Gale and Progress Plus Chairman, Bruce Bairaktaris, attended the Greater MSP June Partners meeting at the JW Marriott in Bloomington to hear from Best Selling Author Richard Florida. 

In recent years, the young, educated and affluent have surged back into cities, reversing decades of suburban flight and urban decline. And yet all is not well. Richard sheds light in his new book, The New Urban Crisis.  Florida demonstrates how the same forces that power the growth of the world’s superstar cities also generate their vexing challenges: gentrification, unaffordability, segregation and inequality. If this crisis is urban, so is its solution.

Cities remain the most powerful economic engines the world has ever seen. The only way forward is to devise a new model of urbanism that encourages innovation and wealth creation while generating good jobs, rising living standards and a better way of life for everyone. We must break down the barriers separating rich from poor and rebuild the middle class by investing in infrastructure, building more housing, reforming zoning and tax laws and developing a new national urban policy.  Progress Plus plans to discuss how our first ring suburbs can reshape how our communities view the cultural tiers.