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Above, I examined the creative capital thesis advanced by Richard Florida who connects innovation, creative occupations, and a region’s level of tolerance . He calls it the Three T’s: Technology, Talent and Tolerance. Reasoning that gays, bohemians and foreign-born immigrants signal diversity and tolerant spaces, creative types will be attracted to regions with these communities in visible abundance. As innovative rule breakers themselves, the Creative Class prefers to work, live and play in these tolerant spaces. Cities across the country are putting Florida’s theory into practice, forming gay districts to overcome bad reputations such as crime, unemployment, race relations, etc. Other cities incentivise large loft developments in the hip, cool areas of downtowns, possibly resulting in the displacement of minorities. Does Florida’s theory support these policies?

As the results above show, creatives gravitate to regions where diversity concentrates. However, the Creative Class does not live with diversity in any significant numbers. Rather, diverse spaces are merely the ‘country clubs’ of knowledge workers, suggesting that creatives only network or play in enclaves. Building loft style developments or mixed-used spaces in places where diversity is located may have the opposite affect desired. It could displace a longstanding enclave with a rich social movement history that led to perception of tolerance in the region.