A report prepared by New York’s Center for an Urban Future shows the Big Apple is slowly losing its creative set.

Although New York is still the “unrivaled center of the creative economy in the U.S.” (8.3 percent of all the people employed in creative industries work in New York)some NY creative industries have gradually lost market share in recent years. The major challenges to the creative sectors are:

* the high cost of appropriate work space,
* a general lack of business skills among individual creative entrepreneurs,
* pressures to conform to a traditional forprofit business model,
* creative workers’ widespread lack of benefits such as health insurance,
* barriers to reaching appropriate markets, and
* the impact of changing technology.

The report argues that creative workers that are priced out of a particular neighbourhood, cannot simply ‘colonize’ another cheap area. According to the authors:

“much of the areas where creative types were able to ‘pioneer’ space ten years ago, simply are no longer available.The
rapid escalation of real-estate prices in the late 1990s, which continues today, caused a well-known migration of creative and other businesses from their more expensive Manhattan locales to areas throughout Brooklyn, Queens and the South Bronx. The city’s decision
to rezone several longtime industrial neighborhoods around the five boroughs—from downtown Brooklyn and Port Morris to Long Island City—for residential development threatens to displace creative individuals
and the businesses whose presence initially helped transform these areas into creative destinations.” (p.18)