Metro Pulse/Cover/The Creative Class

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Is Knoxville a Creative City?
The "creative class" is the hot new topic in chambers of commerce across the country. So where's the buzz in Knoxville?

The Interviewees

Julie Belcher and Kevin Bradley, owners of the nationally known downtown printshop business, Yee-Haw Industries

Bill Pittman, vice president of marketing for DeRoyal (based in Powell), which develops a broad range of innovative health-care and medical products

Scott Colthorp, owner of Atmosphere Pictures, Inc., a "full-service creative house, production, advertising, commercial arts production company"

Michele Dotson, writer/producer for Scripps Productions, a division of Scripps Networks

Art Carmichael, creative services writer/producer, Home and Garden Television

Eric Ohlgren, owner of Heuristic Workshop, Inc., an Old City business that specializes in custom-designed furnishings and components, and Tina Rosling, family nurse practitioner, knitting teacher, and potter

Lee N. Vanden Heuvel, manager of incident investigation and training services for Houston-based ABS Consulting, whose Risk Consulting Division is located on Pellissippi Parkway; they specialize in development and application of, and training in, methods of analyzing the safety, reliability, and efficiency of complex engineered systems.

None are native Knoxvillians.

(At Least a Few of Them Do)

"It's the crazy thing about Knoxville; there's all kinds of stuff going on, there's little pockets of people doing stuff, but nobody knows about anybody else."

That's what Kevin Bradley, co-owner of Yee-Haw Industries, says. Among the small sampling of "creative class" individuals Metro Pulse interviewed, that perception was widespread. This little group of creative individuals is in no way intended to represent all opinions of Knoxville's creative class. But several common desiderata, which generally coincide with those ascribed to the creative class by Florida, emerged from the interviews: a lively downtown, a need for a creative center, affordable living, quality people, and the need for local government to encourage developments attractive to the creative class. More varying were their thoughts about what needs to happen in Knoxville for it to proceed creatively into the future.

A lively downtown

One of Florida's prime tenets for attracting the creative class is a thriving urban scene. With so many developments downtown of late such as new restaurants, the new Sterchi Lofts residential development, and the new headquarters of the Brunswick Boat Group, Knoxville's urban core seems to be on the verge of becoming the sort of place Florida says the creative class likes to be. With all this activity, it would seem downtown should soon be buzzing. Most of our interviewees feel there is much to be at least hopeful about.

Art Carmichael
"We've already got everything I need downtown, personally. The one thing I think we are severely lacking is retail. But we have residential and the ball is starting to roll on retail. The one thing I do still miss downtown is there's still not a lot of foot traffic, and you don't have that constant flow of people from one place to another, in and out.... Having lots of people on the street, that hustle and bustle.... It's energizing."

Michele Dotson
"I absolutely feel positive things are going to happen [downtown].... As someone who has sort of a magnifying glass on it and knows a little about what's going on...seeing this progress, I just couldn't have imagined it getting this far and being this good."

Bill Pittman
"Knoxville's creative class congregates downtown now and their numbers are growing. The resurgence of downtown Knoxville has been very organic in nature; it has not occurred by civic planning or as a result of efforts from the city's traditional leaders...rather, it is due to...several young and creative people such as David Dewhirst, Leigh Burch, Buzz Goss, and Cherie Piercy-Goss, just to name a few."

Scott Colthorp
"This town has really been in a lull for the last five years. The fact that the Old City is dead, due to lack of government support or whatever, just saddens me. You're sitting on a whole gold mine of architecture, blocks with lamps where people can walk and run into each other—it's got all the things that bring people together, it's got the setting, but it not happening."

A Creative Core

Although Florida emphasizes the appeal of concentrated areas of creativity, such as comes with an active urban core, he also writes "What people want is not an either/or proposition. Successful places...provide a range of quality of place options for different kinds of people." Perhaps that's why the common theme of responses here was that Knoxville seems to lack such a core. Then again, it may just be forming now.

Julie Belcher
"We were just saying yesterday, there are a lot of little satellites [of creativity in Knoxville], but there's no planet they're revolving around."

Carmichael
"Knoxville is a creative city. There's a lot of stuff going on here, you just wouldn't ever know. The problem is...Knoxville just doesn't know it."

Dotson
"You have to be looking for [creativity]. I'm a very active person, and I make my own fun. If I need activity, I'm going to find it. I think a lot of people, that may not be their thing, so they don't find it."

Lee N. Vanden Heuvel
"I see it as a dual thing. [The Technology Corridor] is a central core, [as] an attraction to engineers and scientists. It's why I came here. That [technological concentration provides] the kind of income stream that can support an arts center, the things downtown."

Affordable living

Cost of living is the one thing Florida doesn't emphasize that our creative Knoxvillians did (although Florida acknowledges that affordable living is important to some members of the creative class in The Rise of the Creative Class).

Kevin Bradley
"A friend said Knoxville is like a big iron lung, it keeps blowing you out and sucking you back. It's just cheap enough here to come back and start over."

Dotson
"It's affordable.... It's very, very cost-effective. If you want a different type of city, a bigger city, they're an hour's flight away."

Vanden Heuvel
"I don't know how you can find a place more affordable than Knoxville. The people on the West Coast or in the Northeast living in their $250,000 shacks look at what you can get for that here and they say, 'Look! You can have a yard, a big house...all those things.'"

Quality people

Florida says that creative people are drawn to places where they can "validate their identities as creative people." Although he cites many other attractions for creative people, it isn't too much of a stretch to suggest that the people of a given city or region form part of its attraction. Our interviewees certainly thought so.

Eric Ohlgren
"People are saying, 'I chose to move here, and I like it here.' Until four or five years ago, it was always, 'I was forced here, then I got stuck here, and I feel like I'm in a time warp...but I kind of like it here.' But you know what it is? It's the people. I couldn't replace the people I know here."

Bradley
"The people are the main thing the city has to offer; good quality of people."

Colthorp
"When you come into a city, do you say, 'Wow, this is a great Wal-Mart parking lot, and Home Depot, and strip malls! Well, rock my world! Let's stay around here!'? No...you look for the people. The people make the town. People are the ones who make the small shops, people make the neighborhood, people have the conversations, people are what attracts people."

Local government encouraging developments attractive to the creative class

In a sense, the entirety of The Rise of the Creative Class is a call to cities to stop spending money on mass-culture attractions and to invest in things that will attract human capital to city cores. Knoxville's government has recently taken the initiative to develop an alternative building code and the CityLife Program, which offers qualifying projects a tax freeze through a payment in lieu of tax program, a construction loan program, reduced development fees, and parking assistance. These new programs have assisted some development downtown, but that's not enough for our group of local creative people.

Colthorp
"The government is the natural thing to look to for leadership, and they need to be creative in bringing people together; they need to make people feel good to be a citizen of this town.... There are plenty of creative people in this town who could make a difference, but without the assistance of the city government, they can't do it."

Carmichael
"The city should be making it easier for small businesses to open up.... If a small business wants to come in and renovate one of our buildings downtown, it should be, 'We'll help you get through it. We'll explain, we'll hold your hand, and we'll walk you through all the red tape.'"

Ohlgren
"The people who make the decisions around here [must not] travel. They don't see what makes an area tick. Or if they do, what is it they don't understand when they come back from a more pleasant, viable, cleaner place? What don't they get about that? [The mayor] spent his first two terms out of the country and always expounds on [where he has visited] when he gets back...but nothing ever changes."

What's needed

Of building toward a creative city, Richard Florida, contacted via cell phone as he awaited final boarding call for a flight to yet another creatively challenged city, had this to say: "It has to be a grass-roots movement, even if there are people and politicians who are ready to start. Those of us who are the creative class must recognize the obligation to organize ourselves and to work towards that transformation.... [But] we must make sure that the other 70 percent benefit from what we do."

The folks we spoke with also had ideas on how we can move ahead, from very specific complaints to general ideas for or observations about improvement.

Tina Rosling
"Make the downtown connected. Make it pleasant for us to walk downtown. Make it pleasant for Old North Knoxville [residents] to walk downtown. Put lights under the interstate overpass, fix the sidewalks.... Easier bike access."

Carmichael
"Having a new mayor could make a difference. Mayor Ashe is finally coming around to how to do things the right way. But that may have a lot to do with term limits finally bringing his tenure to an end."

Vanden Heuvel
"The KMA's a pretty neat place. And the convention center, I hope it brings more than just bowlers. And [the renovation] of the Tennessee Theatre is great. But I don't see Knoxville distinguishing itself from other, comparable regions. Chattanooga and other cities have an identity. Knoxville has no identity."

Dotson
"There are a lot of people who are talking about having a festival for Knoxville, a lot of downtown people, a lot of diverse people... I'm telling you, I'm the first person to jump on that bandwagon."

Colthorp
"It's not that difficult. You have to bring people together, they have to meet, they have to have conversations, they have to commune...and yet, it seems like [the attitude] is, 'people are scary, let's take away all the sidewalks and put miles of asphalt between us.'"

Pittman
"Knoxville has all of the pieces to be [a]...creative city. Several existing assets such as...historic buildings, downtown's adjacency to UT, the proximity of ORNL and the various marketing talents within Knoxville need to be guided so that the sum of the whole is greater than its parts."

Excuse Me, Do you Know If I've Been Here Before?

The next opportunity for Knoxville to make a major course adjustment toward a creative future may be this year's mayoral election. For the first time in 16 years, someone new will sit in the mayor's seat at City Council meetings. Two mayoral candidates, Rogero and Haslam, are familiar with Florida's work. They both use his terminology. They cite many of the same examples—Oak Ridge, Whittle, UT, video production companies—as resources for a creative blossoming. Both say they find merit in some of Florida's ideas. Both see the possibility of Knoxville taking great strides forward under their leadership.

With development still proceeding on Market Square and in downtown generally, various arts groups coming together under the one roof of the Emporium Building, and the recent rush of support for historic preservation, the next mayor is poised to catch a wave of enthusiasm, depending on the agenda he or she sets. Will the next mayor, whether embracing Florida's particular approach or not, take heed of his overall concept for creative cities?

Many people interviewed for this article, despite varying reservations, felt optimistic about Knoxville's creative future. Some even expressed it in terms of inevitability. But most also acknowledged that "it's happened before." That is, that Knoxville previously has appeared to be on the cusp of a magnificent creative flowering—such as when Whittle was seemingly in full bloom.

This time could be different. Given all the positives referenced above, perhaps there is reason to believe that Knoxville's future will be successfully, profitably, creative. Still, even Edwards acknowledged that the city must still work hard to attract businesses and people. In addition, he says, "We have to get away from this 'just us' doing it. We have to involve a whole lot of people. This has got to be a group effort."

Bill Pittman may put it best when he says, "By attracting the creative [class], economic viability is more sustainable; the creative bring with them ideas. These ideas result in more start-up firms that multiply and create greater economic diversity [in] the local marketplace.

"Knoxville must do a better job of attracting the creative class.... Value is created when ideas are conceived; Knoxville's leaders would be wise to understand the collateral value that can be captured and retained by attracting the creative class."