Don't let creative economy grow stagnant, stifled

“Creative economy” has become the mantra of the mayoral campaign, a vein of gold that we strike merely by uttering the words. Even our most stodgy City Hall bureaucrats and Chamber of Commerce boosters are catching on.

As someone who appreciates creativity and interesting artistic expression, I should feel encouraged to see the city and its leaders validate and champion creative the creative values I care about. So why does all the hype and salesmanship around the creative economy idea only fill me with dread?

Probably because there’s no surer way to kill real creativity than by commodifying, hyping, and relentlessly marketing how “creative” we think we are.

Gregory Souza gets it spot-on in this month’s Bollard when he laments the big new concert hall that’s been proposed to replace his low-rent practice space on Thompson’s Point, “home to many fruitful chance encounters with musicians.”

The new arena and concert hall “is not going to bring fresh air into our creative community,” he promises. “It’ll just siphon money to... MTV-approved bands from away.”

Meanwhile, in my own neighborhood at the base of Munjoy Hill, the billionaire hedge-fund manager Donald Sussman is looking to spruce up the buildings he’s bought near his Hampshire Street apartment.

Details are sketchy, but it’s being pitched as an “arts-focused” development. “The idea is we want artists to be able to afford to live here," said Tom Federle, a lawyer working as Sussman’s gofer on the project, in a recent story in the Portland Forecaster.

Hampshire Street today is not particularly pretty, and it doesn’t have a lot of yuppie amenities. At one end is Sangillo’s, the city’s friendliest dive bar; at the other is the day-labor agency. It’s one of the rare neighborhoods that survived the ravages of 1970s urban renewal, and it feels to me like an authentic scrap of working-class Portland, a place that reflects the best characteristics of our city’s egalitarianism: the kind of place where fishermen can get drunk with their friends across the street from the billionaire's house, and immigrants can live within walking distance of downtown jobs.

In other words, Hampshire Street is still a place where creative people can still interact with people from different walks of life, and thereby stimulate the creative process with new ways of looking at the world.

If we turn Hampshire Street into a polished new dormitory for “artists,” we’ll be kicking out the people who make the neighborhood authentic.

Then there’s the irony of having a billionaire hedge fund manager and his attorney (both of whom, it hardly needs to be said, are solidly embedded in the state’s political machines) as cultivators of “creativity,” which is inherently anti-establishment.

What kind of an artist would let a hedge fund manager dictate to us the forms of our creative spaces, much less the forms of the neighborhoods we call home? Isn’t real art supposed to challenge wealth and power and remake the world - or at least our ways of looking at the world - according to its own idealistic terms? Would real artists be welcomed on the new Hampshire Street, or will it only be open to those who avoid challenging the tastes and sensibilities of the wealthy landlords?

I don’t doubt the good intentions of Mr. Sussman. For all I know, he might indeed be planning to build something that will make room for working-class families and teachers and day laborers and all the other people who might not be making art per se but nonetheless contribute to making our city a real, functioning community.

Nevertheless, the experiences of dozens of other formerly-creative boom towns ought to make us careful that the authenticity of our functional neighborhoods won’t get trampled in the creative economy gold rush.

In 1999, I set off to go to college in Portland, Oregon — then known only as a rainy mid-sized city with scenic parks. In the five years I spent out there, I saw the city morph into a self-satisfied model of progressive hedonism. But, as I found after graduation in 2003, and as thousands of other young people have found since then, it’s awfully hard to land a decent job there, and it’s getting harder all the time to find an affordable place to live.

I moved back to Maine because our Portland has a good mix of economic diversity, egalitarianism, and creative activity. These are rare traits to have in coexistence, but it’s precisely that coexistence that allows creativity to thrive here.

At the end of the day, it’s hard to be creative when it’s a struggle to make ends meet, or when a conformist aesthetic of hipness stifles cultural innovation. Dozens of other cities have discovered, too late, that increasing wealth and decreasing diversity have exiled the creative people, ideas, and enterprises that had made their cities interesting in the first place.

Don’t let it happen here.

(Christian MilNeil is a blogger at "The Vigorous North: A field guide to the wilderness areas of American cities," www.vigorousnorth.com.)