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The Rise Of The Squelching Class: Maybe Next Time Read The Whole Book.
The Topeka Squelch has a name now, and Richard Florida handed it to us for free twenty-plus years before NOTO’s first gallery ever opened its doors. Call it, if you want to get fancy about it, the Squelch of the Creative Class — but we’ll get to that.
Naming the Topeka Squelch
Richard Florida wrote a whole book in 2002 that could double as a diagnostic manual for this city, and the joke is he’d never even heard of us. The Rise of the Creative Class argues that regions grow rich on three things — Technology, Talent, and Tolerance — and that the third one, tolerance, is the cheapest and most reliably squandered. He even names the disease. He calls the people who kill it “Squelchers”: overly controlling types who believe that they and they alone know what’s best for their city, who answer new ideas with “that’s not how we do things here,” “that will never fly,” or “why don’t you just move someplace else.” Say that last one out loud in a North Topeka accent and tell me it doesn’t ring a bell.
This is the Topeka Squelch. It’s not one guy with a bullhorn. It’s a whole institutional muscle memory of taking something that grew for free in the cracks of a neglected sidewalk and asking, sincerely, how fast it can be moved to a nicer sidewalk with a higher rent. Florida wrote The Rise of the Creative Class. Topeka, given enough time, could write the sequel nobody asked for: The Squelch of the Creative Class.
The Topeka Squelch, part one: not being allowed to have a mortgage
Before we get to the fun part, the receipts. Florida’s data point that actually made banks pay attention wasn’t a vibe, it was a number: the Gay Index and the Bohemian Index were, in his own words, shockingly powerful predictors of regional housing prices. Cities with visible gay and artist populations weren’t just interesting — they were about to get expensive.
The reason those populations showed up first in the ugly, cheap, disinvested parts of town wasn’t taste. It was redlining and its unofficial queer cousin, sometimes called pink-lining — the decades in which Black, Latino, and openly gay or gender-nonconforming people simply could not get a fair-priced mortgage, full stop, regardless of income or credit. No collateral, no conventional real estate, no seat at the table. So people built value out of the only capital available to them: labor, nerve, and each other. You get The Vats in San Francisco — punks jackhammering doorways into the guts of an abandoned brewery — and when the city evicted them in ’84, the evicted crew didn’t scatter. They regrouped down the block into an even more organized, explicitly political squat called HOLC and ran it for six months during one of the tensest stretches in the city’s recent history. You get Houston’s TemplO/Zocalo in 1989, co-founded by Nestor Topchy alongside Rick Lowe (yes, that Rick Lowe, later of Project Row Houses) and Jim Pirtle, later of Notsuoh — the same crew, more or less, still building and rebuilding artist infrastructure under new names decades later because the rent kept catching up with them.
None of that was a real estate developer’s idea. It was survival that happened to be beautiful, and it happened to be profitable for everybody except the people who built it.
The Rev. Max Manning and the Great Sesame Street Massacre
You remember it as a bonfire on 4th or 5th near Potwin, organized by a preacher named Rev. Max Manning, aimed at rock records, and mostly consuming Jim Nabors and Firestone Christmas compilations that terrified parents couldn’t tell from Black Sabbath. I went looking for the news clipping. I didn’t find it — small-market Kansas TV and newspaper archives from the 1980s are a graveyard, and a church-parking-lot bonfire was exactly the kind of thing that got a caption under a photo, not a headline. What I can confirm: Max Manning is a real, extremely durable Topeka evangelist — co-founder of the Topeka Rescue Mission, still leading revival crusades into his 90s decades later. So the man is real, the genre of event is very real — record burnings were a legitimate, well-documented moral-panic phenomenon rippling through small and mid-sized American cities all through the ’80s — and your memory of the fire’s actual contents is, if anything, the most plausible detail in the whole story, because that’s exactly how these things worked. Nobody vetting the donation pile could tell Ozzy from Ernie.
Confirmed or not, treat it as an early sighting of the Topeka Squelch in the wild: a full generation before Westboro picked up a picket sign at Gage Park, a piece of Topeka’s civic-religious culture was already treating youth culture as contamination to be burned rather than a resource to be tolerated. The Westboro stuff just scaled it up and pointed it at a specific target.
Forbes AFB, or: even Bob Dole couldn’t grease this pig
Here’s the part of the stagnation story that’s less about tolerance and more about plain old economic bad luck, and you called it correctly. Topeka’s population didn’t just fail to grow because of vibes — it had a real growth engine once, and that engine got switched off in 1973.
Forbes Air Force Base opened in 1942 and, through the Cold War, brought a real surge of military personnel and families — you can see it in the numbers: Topeka’s population grew a startling 4.25% a year through the 1950s. Then, right on schedule with the base’s wind-down, growth flatlined to 0.45% a year in the ’60s, went outright negative in the ’70s, and never really recovered. Here’s why: when the Pentagon announced its 1973 base-closure round — the largest since 1970 — Forbes was on the list, and the cut was brutal: 3,940 military personnel reduced to 201. The base itself closed as an active-duty installation that April, kept alive afterward only as a downsized Air National Guard wing.
And yes — Bob Dole fought it. Hard. The Dole Archive at KU has the receipts: Dole, working jointly with Senator James Pearson and Congressman Garner Shriver, personally lobbied the Secretary of the Air Force and the White House, explaining the impact on Topeka and pushing for “every possible step” to soften the blow. What did decades of Dole’s legendary pork-barrel muscle actually win Topeka? A $50,000 federal grant — to study what to do with the base after it closed. Later, in 1990 and 1995, Dole did manage to land a few million more for a medical/communications facility and a reserve center at the downsized Guard base — real money, sure, but consolation-prize money, not 3,900-troops-and-their-families money. Even the single most powerful Kansan in Washington for a generation couldn’t reverse a decision the Pentagon had already made. So no, it probably wasn’t a palm-greasing problem. This version of the Topeka Squelch wasn’t a preacher or a picket sign — it was a Pentagon budget line, and even Dole couldn’t out-lobby that one.
The Topeka Squelch on North Kansas Avenue
Here’s the part that would be funny if it weren’t also kind of heartbreaking. NOTO — Topeka’s one legitimate, homegrown arts district — sits in the same flood-scarred stretch of North Kansas Avenue as the Topeka Rescue Mission, which has operated its main shelter at 600 N. Kansas Ave since 1991 and has been serving Topeka’s unhoused population since 1953, decades before a single gallery opened next door.
So: the arts district and the rescue mission are neighbors by history, not by planning collision. And in the last few years, that proximity has curdled into exactly the “clean it up or lose the tourists” panic Florida would have recognized instantly. NOTO’s own district director put it in almost embarrassingly on-brand language: “People want to come to a place that is clean and orderly and well kept… it’s quite a distraction, actually, for people wanting to visit NOTO.” A local business owner told a TV crew she now keeps her shop’s door locked at all times with a doorbell entry because customers are scared to bring their families down, worried about their cars getting broken into. Meanwhile — and this is the part that should sting anyone still quoting Florida’s tolerance thesis unironically — a NOTO business owner who is herself a former homeless person put the actual grievance on the record: “I’m angry that nothing is being done and that instead of directing, ‘Hey, can we help you or can you teach you to do something?’ we’re being run out of our businesses.”
Read that again. Artists and small entrepreneurs — the exact population Florida’s whole book says a smart city protects — are describing themselves as being run out of the neighborhood they built, in the same breath as complaints about the neighborhood’s unhoused population, most of whom are also poor Topekans failed by the same Topeka Squelch that’s been running since Forbes closed. It’s not new-money tech bros pricing out the punks this time, like San Francisco. It’s Topeka managing to produce a homegrown, budget-tier version of gentrification anxiety without ever generating the actual economic boom that’s supposed to justify it. That takes a special kind of effort.
The Topeka Squelch gets a ribbon-cutting
If this is starting to sound like a sequel to the NOTO Music Man piece, that’s because it is one. The pattern is identical: real grassroots work happens first, quietly, without a press release — artists and small investors trickling into North Topeka’s derelict storefronts years before the “official” Heartland Visioning survey ever got run, with two of NOTO’s own founders conveniently sitting on the committee that later got to take credit for “discovering” the idea. Then the institutions arrive, not to fund the people who did the actual work, but to narrate over them. And now, a decade in, the same district finds itself litigating who’s allowed to be visibly poor on the sidewalk outside the galleries that poverty-adjacent affordability made possible in the first place.
Florida would call this the Topeka Squelch with a nice ribbon-cutting ceremony attached. He’d probably also recognize it as Exhibit A for a book he hasn’t written yet — The Squelch of the Creative Class — the one where the “chasing” part of the story finally comes home to roost.
The Topeka Squelch’s next victim: downtown rent
(Next up: “Give a Sucker an Easy Break”)
The next chapter of this is the one that actually made me want to write this piece: watching a downtown that never generated Lawrence-sized foot traffic nonetheless expect Lawrence-sized retail rents, without lifting a finger to build the walkability, density, or tolerance that made Lawrence’s rents justifiable in the first place. Topeka wants Massachusetts Street’s price tag with Potwin’s parking lot. That’s a whole essay on its own, and it’s coming. Consider this the trailer.
And somewhere further down the road: The Squelch of the Creative Class. You didn’t hear it from me. You heard it from Richard Florida, forty pages ahead of schedule.
Sources consulted
Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class (2002/2019); Nat Eliason’s book notes; FoundSF (M.D.C./Vats and HOLC Squat entries); HIVE Houston / Texas Monthly (Nestor Topchy profile); WIBW-TV (Max Manning profile); population.us and biggestuscities.com historical Topeka population series; Lawrence Journal-World (Forbes Field 40-years-later retrospective; NOTO/Lawrence incentive comparison); Robert J. Dole Archive & Special Collections, University of Kansas (1973 and 1990/1995 press releases); Wings Over Kansas and 55th Wing Association (Forbes Field history); dystopeka.com (NOTO origin history); Kansas Reflector, KSNT, and Topeka Capital-Journal/AOL reporting on NOTO homelessness tensions (2023).
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