Richard Florida on what America can learn from Tulsa
Plus, a new issue of the Washington Monthly.
The April/May/June 2025 issue of the Washington Monthly is here.
Richard Florida on what America can learn from Tulsa, Christian Caryl on why Guam might be the next Pearl Harbor, book reviews from Jonathan Alter, Zephyr Teachout, Alan Ehrenhalt, and much more inside the new issue, out now!
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What America Can Learn From Tulsa
In Oklahoma’s second-largest city, a new vision of economic development is being born.
by Richard Florida
Read this article online at washingtonmonthly.com
In March 2019, I arrived in Tulsa for the first of what would become a long series of visits. A local philanthropic foundation, the George Kaiser Family Foundation (GKFF), had invited me to see their urban revitalization program, which they hoped would bring people and investment back to the post-industrial city reeling from the decline of its energy industry. Having studied and worked in economic development for four decades as an academic and consultant, I expected to be shown the standard playbook for community leaders who want to encourage growth. I would be walked through an incubator that lured tech companies to Tulsa. I would be ushered through new arts centers and parks. I would hear about the foundation’s successful remote worker program and about investment in local industry. All of these programs serve a traditional model that seeks to build by attracting new money and people from outside.
As it happens, the Kaiser Foundation is doing all of those things. But I was wrong about our first tour stops, and about the foundation’s vision as well—wrong in a way that would forever change my understanding of the field that I have devoted my professional life to.
I was greeted by Brandon Oldham, a dynamic young program officer at GKFF and a native Tulsan who was the first in his family to attend college. To my surprise, our first destination wasn’t the foundation’s offices or the site of one of its economic development initiatives, but the historic Greenwood neighborhood, once known as “Black Wall Street” because of its extraordinary number of Black-owned businesses. Then we visited one of the foundation’s early childhood development centers, where we were joined by GKFF’s executive director, Ken Levit, and others. As they told me, early childhood development was GKFF’s original mission. The more recent, more conventional economic initiatives—the ones I had expected to see? Those came later and evolved from that guiding star.
Although I did not realize it at the time, I was seeing the glimmerings of a new model for economic development in the American city. This new approach overcomes the long-running divide between “economic development,” which focuses on things like business recruitment, talent attraction, and job generation, and “community development,” which emphasizes equity and helping the least advantaged. GKFF has joined these seemingly incompatible goals by building a more balanced knowledge economy that also bolsters the fabric of the community.
When the nickel did drop, I saw that they were responding to the same paradoxical development I’d first noticed a decade or so ago—that the unbridled pursuit of innovation and economic growth for their own sake was undermining communities and stoking the flames of social division. In my 2017 book, The New Urban Crisis, I wrote about the trend of deepening economic inequality and unaffordable housing that was doing damage to superstar cities like New York and leading tech hubs like the San Francisco Bay Area, and that would later spread to Sunbelt boomtowns like Miami and Austin. GKFF was trying to build a more inclusive economy that could spare Tulsa from this fate.
While observing and advising GKFF over the next six years, I would develop a profound appreciation for its approach to what I have come to call “community-enhancing economic development.” It will take more time to refine this new paradigm, but the Kaiser Foundation has begun to move the economic needle, improving Tulsa’s track record in attracting talent, adding population, growing jobs, and reducing economic divides. Other communities can learn from this pioneering model and adapt it to their own conditions. This will be especially important as the Trump administration reins in spending across the board, including in the area of economic development.
Keep reading this article online at washingtonmonthly.com
Richard Florida is a visiting distinguished professor at Vanderbilt University and Professor at the University of Toronto. His many books include The Rise of the Creative Class and The New Urban Crisis. Thanks are due to the team at the George Kaiser Family Foundation, where the author is an adviser, and to the dozens of people in Tulsa who generously participated in interviews, as well as Arthur Goldwag for assistance with research and editing.
Also in the April/May/June 2025 print issue, out now:
FEATURES
Will Guam Be America’s Next Pearl Harbor?
Donald Trump’s neocolonial foreign policy could invite a surprise Chinese attack on an underprepared American island in the South Pacific.
by Christian Caryl
What Happens to Antitrust Under Trump?
From tariffs to deportations, Trump’s policies are inflationary—but enforcing antitrust laws could help working families.
by Diana Moss
What America Can Learn From Tulsa
In Oklahoma’s second-largest city, a new vision of economic development is being born.
by Richard Florida
Finance industry recruiters are starving critical fields of talent and steering an entire generation into soulless jobs.
by Zach Marcus
Kathleen deLaski on how college isn’t right for everyone—and what to do about it.
by Ben Wildavsky
COVER
The Meager Agenda of Abundance Liberals
What the Democratic Party’s most buzzed-about policy movement gets right—and wrong.
by Paul Glastris and Nate Weisberg
ON POLITICAL BOOKS
How Khrushchev Underestimated Kennedy
A veteran correspondent’s memoir reveals the humanity and misjudgment of the Soviet leader who sparked the Cuban Missile Crisis.
by Jonathan Alter
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson argue that a world of plenty awaits us if we reform zoning and environmental rules and everyone moves to San Francisco. But that can’t be the whole plan, right?
by Zephyr Teachout
A Tech Billionaire Attacks His Own Kind
Alex Karp, CEO of the digital military contractor Palantir, thinks other Silicon Valley behemoths waste their time chasing clicks rather than bad guys—and that the decline of college Western Civ classes is to blame.
by Kainoa Lowman
Why We Need a New Tennessee Valley Authority
In the 1930s, public power agencies like the TVA forced private utilities to electrify rural America. Today, the same strategy can challenge the investor-owned electric utilities that are blocking the spread of renewable energy.
by Shelley Welton
The Long Shadow of Robert Moses
How popular blowback to the New York City planner’s excesses led to generations of distrust in government.
by Alan Ehrenhalt
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