Richard Florida links to a New York Magazine piece and wonders whether gentrification is self-limiting. That is, might increasing property prices sap the city of its quirky and creative aspects, reducing the draw of the place?

Well, maybe. First thing, the NYM story is focused around the experience of Red Hook the next big thing that might not be the next big thing after all. I’m not that familiar with Red Hook, but from the description in the story, it sounds to me like gentrification didn’t fail, it just got ahead of itself. Let’s be honest, a lot of the push of gentrification stems from property prices and ease of commute. The flavor of a location matters, but it takes a lot of flavor to overcome real disadvantages in cost and location. Think about H Street, which strikes me as similar to Red Hook and yet is far more convenient to downtown and the rest of the District. People have been hailing it as the next big thing for at least two years now, and there are some really cool things down there. But other businesses have closed, and residential growth around the neighborhood is expanding very slowly. Why? Well, H Street is a huge leap from the “natural” expansion of gentrification. There’s no Metro access. It’s difficult to get there, and yet expensive. The forces of development have not aligned to produce the explosion there that’s swallowed other neighborhoods back west.

Secondly, it seems to me that New Yorkers are far less confident in their city’s position than they ought to be. Consider this, from the NYM story:

“It used to be that if you were from Okefenokee,” he tells me, “and you were the best dancer in the world, the idea was that you could come to this city to make it. You’d live three in a room if you had to. But now the three-in-a-room places are disappearing. And you need that balance or you choke the life from the city.” He worries that New York will eventually price out the people who started this cycle in the first place. “If I were a young man with a lot of money,” he says, “you know where I’d go? Buffalo.”

Well, ok. Except that’s absurd. Look, lots of other cities around the country have been able to put together thriving cultural scenes, but there’s no substitute for New York. New York may well lose the kind of people that are happy to make it in Buffalo, but those people aren’t the ones that put New York on the map. For many, many people of a certain creative inclination, there is no substitute for New York. Those people stayed there through the crack days, and they’ll stay through the gilded days.

Which isn’t to say that other places won’t benefit mightily from New York’s growth and subsequent pricing out of marginal artists. It’s just to point out that those cities are competing for the marginal artists. The best go to New York.