Brain Drain in Jacksonville

Duval County Public Schools produces some pretty smart kids, I used to sit next to them at Douglas Anderson School of the Arts and Stanton College Preparatory (my smarts were more modest). Some of them were bona fide geniuses. When these students graduate high school they go on to get degrees from the best colleges and universities in the country. But where do they go after they college? I suspect they don't all come back home to Jacksonville. Some of them come back for a while but then find they can't find sustaining or satisfying work and move to Orlando, Tampa or Miami. Some might even leave the state altogether. But talented people want more than to spend two hours a day commuting to and from work, leading quiet lives of desperation in the suburbs or spending boring weekend at the shopping mall. Jacksonville is suffering from brain drain.


Brain drain refers to the emigration of what economists refer to as creative human capital leaving a vacuum in the arts and sciences. Historically the term was used to refer to tech workers from countries like India to America and Europe or to Jews fleeing Europe from the oppressive Nazi regime of the second world war). As a city we've invested a great deal of money in the educational infrastructure of our human capital only to loose many of them once their brains become their most productive. This leaves us with people who are not bad or dumb, but who we have not invested expensive, high-earning educations. Those students whom we've spent tax dollars for school buildings, Advanced Placement exams or diesel fuel to bus them from the far reaches of our enormous county to spectacular magnet schools; are leaving us for Austin or Silicon Valley.


So what then, who needs them? The labor market is always a competition and people have a right to move wherever they want. What's going on here is what has always happened in America. Young people have left the farms and ranches of the heartland for the bright lights of big cities. Look what's happened to the nation's bread basket. All their talent and knowledge have fled to the big cities leaving behind a workforce unable to defend itself against the likes of big agribusiness and big oil industry that take advantage of a less educated population that tricks them into abusing their natural resources. The people capable of making our city and region better have left or are about to leave out of frustration, intolerance and boredom. What's doubly bad is the cause of brain drain is also what keeps people from moving into Jacksonville.

Jacksonville's creatives class are like panda bears. They are a rare and special species and we need a density of them for the health of our economic survival. For them to flourish they need an environment where the can survive and multiply. We have a small number of these people but we need to keep the ones we produce from leaving and lure more to move here. Panda bears are so necessary to the financial success of zoos across the world that China uses them for political leverage. All pandas belong to the People's Republic (even the ones born outside of China) and if you make China mad they will yank them out of the National Zoo faster than an excruciatingly adorable panda bear sneeze. How many of our home grown engineering and nursing students from the University of North Florida stay in Jacksonville? I can think of several who have left for Orlando or Miami. Some have even left the state altogether. What we need is a nerd breeding program that caters to their diet of indie bookshop coffeeshops and Trader Joe's Grocery Stores.


Pandas beget more pandas, geeks beget more geeks. There is a narrow tolerance for them to feel comfortable but the issue is that we've made a big investment in fostering their talent. Taxpayers should be mad that we are not a getting a return on our investment of creative class talent. These type of people generate knowledge and wealth. These people don't just pop up they are created by our community. We need to guard them closely and keep them in our company, not loose them to San Francisco or Washington DC. If the San Diego Zoo can spend millions on a habitat for beloved pandas certainly we can do the same for our talent pool.


Richard Florida calls these talented people the creative class and like many other urban theorists believes that retaining them requires an understanding of place making. These places foster creative thinking not just paychecks and allow for interaction with other creative types. The office spaces are set up to encourage the spontaneous formations or groups within the company. These great places are adjacent to amenities that refresh their minds and spirits and allow for interactions with new people; places like coffee-shop/bookstores, pocket parks, pubs. When you get artist's and engineers together you get iPods. A spontaneous meeting of lawyers and architects can yield new ideas for city zoning. But these meeting of creatives don't happen on a solo commute home to the suburbs. It happens over a glass of beer in a pub or eating a sandwich during lunch in the Hemming Plaza. So like a zoologist trying to get pandas to get it on, we need to concentrate these BFAs, MBAs and MDs into a central location and churn out profits for out fair city.


Young people if they can afford it are making the two-and-half hour trek Orlando on the weekend for the night-life. They do this because like pandas they are looking for mates. And pandas are picky they wont mate with just any old panda but one that also does yoga, listens to Radiohead and eats bamboo shoots in their stir fry. Same with the creative class.


This tortured metaphor was inspired by a Richard Florida blog post about The Density of Smart People in urban centers. Jacksonville comes in a depressing second to last out of the largest 50 metropolitan areas, beating out only Oklahoma City. Yikes! Jacksonville in all fairness is the largest city in area in the continental US primarily due to the consolidation with Duval County in the 1970s. For comparison, New York has a CDH (College Degree Holder) per square mile of 7,301 while Jacksonville has a ratio of 167 CDH per square mile. I know it's never fair to compare our city to the Big Apple, so closer to home, Miami has a density of 1,633 degree holders per square mile. That's ten time better than the river city. It's density that makes mass transit feasible. Think of it this way, as a city we spend a certain amount of money on transportation, education, utilities and other infrastructure for a fixed area; a very large fixed area. Jacksonville has the largest land area of any city in the country. The more we spread out, the more money we spend on these infrastructures making our density of talent thinner and our primary driver of economic development less in contact with each other. It's a waste of resources. Places like Miami and New York don't need to be taking anymore of our nerds and geeks away from us. They need to stay here. After all, our tax dollars paid for the building of their brains and fostering of their talent. We don't need more people, we just need a more density of people including smart people. That will lure more smart people from other places and we can breed them like pandas.

Filling in the Spaces: The Riverside Arts Market, Jacksonville

Planners and architects love talking about urban infill as one of the many cures to suburban sprawl. RAM, Riverside Arts Market is a great response to that very issue. It's about the underside of this bridge, the west side of the Fuller Warren that makes this market so exciting. Yes, it's activated by the artists, vendors and visitors, it's planned by the city and the DOT, but the placing the market under this bridge in Riverside was the key. RAM was the brainchild of Riverside Avondale Preservation’s (RAP) founder Dr. Wayne Wood. He saw a similar idea in Portland, Oregon (the new urbanist ideal) and replicated the idea for Riverside.

Bridges are a gathering of the fourfold, where the earth and sky meet. Where mortals and the immortal congregate. What makes a market like this so special is that it's under the bridge. Bridges are like the earth folded over your to protect you from sun and rain. RAM Guarantee's that it will be ten degrees cooler than your backyard or the golf course. I would guarantee that it will be ten times more fun. One of the keys to designing in Florida is dealing with sun and water. Both it's greatest assets and its greatest challenges but being under the bridge and at the intersection of so many paths is a recipe for success.

RAM is also the gathering of so many trajectories, the flow of the St. Johns River, Riverside Avenue, the new Riverwalk, Interstate-95. And then there are the cultural intersection. It's like having a little international fair in Jacksonville every weekend. It requires a bit infrastructure: some electrical outlets, a restrooms, some administrative management, police officers, etc. It's a beautiful collision of so many great places: downtown Jacksonville to the north with office towers and The Florida Times Union; The Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens right next door; and Historic Avondale contribute to the walkable nature of the Riverside Arts Market.


Highlights of 2009 - Riverside Arts Market from RAM on Vimeo.

The view from underneath the bridge is spectacular. Seeing the downtown skyline from across the St. John's River framed between the piers put the city in a whole new context. It's not seen from the highway at 60 miles per hour but through a slow reveal, that comes from walking through a crowd of people, the smell of fried food and the sound of entertainment.

The next step is to identify other great places that gather. I'm thinking it should be somewhere in Downtown Jacksonville.