A Sense of Place

If you want to feel optimistic about Pittsburgh's future, check out this profile of Heinz Endowments' Grant Oliphant, by Pop City's Abby Mendelson. Both Grant and Abby nail it.

Pittsburgh Leadership

Republican Mayoral candidate Mark DeSantis finally took the gloves off earlier this week, accusing incumbent Luke Ravenstahl of being the human equivalent of Gertrude Stein's Oakland: There's no There there. Rich Lord's P-G coverage of DeSantis's policy team intro is representative.

Ho-hum. The intro was okay as far as it went, but it went wonky. DeSantis will have the money to make the race entertaining. As long as he's likely to go down, he should go down really swinging. Talk about the future of Pittsburgh, Mark. Give the people what they need as well as what they want. No one cares if Luke Ravenstahl is a star-struck, ethically-challenged celebrity chaser. He's a publicly pleasant guy and a Democrat in a city where that's almost all that matters.

What Pittsburgh needs is leadership. It could come from the Mayor's office or from City Council or from any number of other sources. (If I sound for a moment like I've watched The American President one too many times, it's because I have.) Luke Ravenstahl's problem isn't just that he's done nothing. His problem is that he has failed to lead.

What does that mean?

In my book, the biggest test of leadership is the ability to attract good and talented people to the cause. A leader inspires people to follow. If you're Mayor, that means that good and talented people should want to work for you and for the City that you represent. Look around city government right now. The P-G reports: City Hall Hobbled by Brain Drain. The official line is that budget constraints hobble hiring, but that explanation hides a deeper problem. Folks who staff municipal government don't do it for the pay (which is low) or the hours (which are long). Those managers and directors do it because at some level, they believe. Right now, the believers are fleeing. That's a bad sign. Eventually, it's not just the staff that will turn their backs. Eventually, the rest of the City will turn their backs, too.

If you want to change things -- if you're running for office (Mayor, say) -- what do you do? Go beyond pointing out the lack of activity. Go beyond putting out a conventional platform (which DeSantis is preparing to do). On top of that: Put something out there that people can rally behind, both your future staff and your prospective supporters in the electorate. Inspire them. You may lose (DeSantis almost certainly will lose), but inspire someone to pick up the banner and carry that momentum forward. There will be another election before we know it.

How about this? Declare that the following five things should and will be *the* major priorities of the City, and that the Mayor should and will collaborate with the County Executive, County Council, City Council, the School Board and Superintendent, and other regional leaders to make them *the* major priorities of the region. The specifics are important, and those have to be worked out. Inspiration, though, arrives via the vision.

(1) Business and jobs creation.
(2) Public education.
(3) Equitable taxation for individuals, families, homeowners, and businesses.
(4) Ethical, effective, and responsive government.
(5) Safe and clean natural and manmade regional infrastructure. A clean environment, in other words; safe bridges and roads; and sensible public transportation.

It doesn't have to be the Mayor or Mark DeSantis who puts this out there. Mike Tomlin could do it (after he wins the Super Bowl, at least). Or John Murray. Or Astro Teller. Or Jared Cohon or Mark Nordenberg. Or Glen Meakem. I'm not interested in political affiliation and I'm not necessarily interested in politics. As Ben Stein said in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, "Anyone? Anyone?" *Someone* needs to start talking this way; someone needs to build a new way of thinking about Pittsburgh's future. If you build it, people will come. They will most definitely come.

At the least, they'll stop talking about whether UPMC should have bought Luke a ticket to a golf outing.

Pitt's Bytes 8.29.07

A couple of days late, I'm sorry to say. Jim Berardone reports a nice win for local company Landslide Technologies. As described by CEO Razi Imam:

"The CRM Magazine 2007 Market Awards were held tonight in New York City. For 15 separate categories, two awards were given, one for the "Category Winner" and one for the "Vendor to Watch". While SalesForce.com won the "Category Winner" award, I'm very proud to announce that Landslide was chosen as the "Vendor to Watch" in the Sales Force Automation category that included companies such as Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, Sugar and many others. Following on the heels of recognition from Gartner, Frost and Sullivan and Selling Power, this is yet another independent validation of our positioning."

Link to the magazine's announcement

Aren't We Special?

On another blog, I was asked to respond to this question: What makes Pittsburghers special?

Here's what I posted:

As a non-native and nine-year resident of the Pittsburgh region, I'll answer [the] "What makes Pittsburghers special?" question with some skepticism. I'm not persuaded that Pittsburghers are special, at least not in the sense that Pittsburghers generally possess some quality or set of characteristics that isn't widely shared in Cleveland or Providence or Tampa or San Diego or Des Moines.

I'm a native Californian, and I learned from a very early age that California is the American Shangri-La. There is no happier, sunnier, or more prosperous place than that anywhere in the world, and there is nowhere else that a person could live and be truly happy.

Of course, this is bunk.

Instead of asking "What makes Pittsburghers [or Californians, or Iowans, or Bostonians] special?," I'd ask "What makes Pittsburghers distinct?" That's a question that I can sink my teeth into, if only preliminarily.

-- A very unusual geography: The hills, the natural resources, the densely populated urban center (now not quite so dense), the quick transition to suburbs and rural areas

-- An unusually strong core demographic and sociological narrative over the last century: Most urban areas are blends of different narratives; Pittsburgh really only has one.

-- The diasporan connection: Partly because of the economic implosion of the 70s and early 80s, a giant distributed population of former Pittsburghers.

That combination, together with other things that I'm not thinking of right now, gives Pittsburghers a pride-of-place that is unusual in this country, even among cities and other places that are extraordinarly proud of who and what and where they are.

The Spirit of the Manifesto

Three of our students at the Pitt law school are the energy behind tomorrow's Walnut Street Sweep.

Finally, we're going to have fun street sweeping together. The work won't be strenuous, and we'll be doing it with other fun, young Pittsburghers -- students, professionals, and artists alike. We're not just calling on activists, the politically savy, the "green," or the volunteers -- we're calling on everybody. As young people in Pittsburgh, its time that we quit waiting for the City to fix our community, and its time that we start fixing it and expanding it ourselves. In that spirit, we're all going to go to a local bar after our volunteer efforts to meet each other, share our clean-up war stories, and, have some drinks to help reduce our sense of smell after an hour of our force cleaning up garbage...

The pitch:

* Come: help clean up your City and save its rivers on Sunday, August 26th at 10AM.
* Meet: at 5707 Walnut Street
* Wear: Bright colored clothing (so motorists don't have to guess where we are...)
* Bring: Gloves, comfortable shoes; some trash bags if you have them handy. Maybe a broom?
* After: We'll be returning to 5707 Walnut for a cookout and a keg of beer, courtesy of Fanatics Bar in Squirrel Hill.

Carpe diem.

Pittsburgh Hipper Than San Francisco?

If Pittsburgh is going to obsess about meaningless statistics, then we should obsess about the good ones: Pittsburgh is America's Third Bloggiest City, after Boston and Philadelphia, but ahead of such tech meccas as Seattle and San Francisco. The sponsors explain:

"Well, the figures represent the total number of place-based blog posts in March and April per 100,000 residents in the cities’ metro areas. So to arrive at this list we just took the total number of place-based blog posts in a city’s metro area, and divided by the number of people living in that area.

As far as why Boston and not NYC or SF, we see two possible factors influencing the list:

1. The demographics of a city’s metro area strongly shape its blogginess quotient. Cities like New York may have areas, like Brooklyn, that are very blog-dense, but if they also have big areas where blogs are sparse (like the Bronx), that will lower their overall post-to-resident ratio, making them less-bloggy cities. Chicago, Los Angeles and New York all scored lower on the list for this reason - they had lots and lots of local blog posts, but the sheer number of people living in those areas blew that number away. If your metro area has 19 million people in it, you’ve got to do a lot of blogging to get on the bloggiest cities list.

2. Blogginess in a city is reflective of growth, civic activism, and a writerly population. Boston, as the bloggiest city, has a hot economy, is notorious for local political activism, and has a university every other block, which all combine to push it’s post-to-resident ratio up-up-up.

When you factor these two things together, you get a list of mid-to-large-sized cities with neighborhoods in flux, active local political scenes, and residents with the inclination to write about these things. The result is the bloggiest cities in America list. Here’s the full top ten:

1. Boston
2. Philadelphia
3. Pittsburgh
4. Washington, D.C.
5. Portland, OR
6. New York
7. San Francisco
8. Seattle
9. Chicago
10. Los Angeles"

Works for me! Read the whole thing here.

Nobody Asked Me, But . . .

I've been all over this great land of ours over the last month, from the Pacific Ocean to Lake Michigan to the Atlantic and home. A few random thoughts on things that I missed but wish I hadn't -- and some that I'd glad I did:

The Post-Gazette launched a new website. Dull. And even more difficult to read than the version it replaced. It's a missed opportunity. I prefer the Post-Gazette Then.

Bill Peduto and friends launched "Reform Pittsburgh Now," one Web 2.0 website to save us all. Take the photo down, BP. It's not all about you. The enterprise has a real 2001 reverse-Oreo feel to it, fluffy distributed social engineering on the surface, concentrated political rhetoric on the inside. Want to use the Net to transform Pittsburgh politics? Think BitTorrent. What we've got is Napster 1.0.

Bacn? This is going to be Pittsburgh's legacy to tech culture? We can do better.

Regionalism and the brain drain. I keep waiting for someone in the MSM to write publicly about the multi-party political power-swapping soap opera going on just beneath the surface of things like Mayor Luke's close brush with ethics. Tim McNulty called one move by the Mayor "chillingly old-fashioned," which sounds to me like code for "cynically manipulative." Does the Post-Gazette dare to pick up its own gauntlet? Instead, the same heads deal the same threads.

In better news, Sam thinks that the Diaspora/Manifesto idea -- which is gradually morphing into something more robust called "Global Connect: Pittsburgh" -- may have a little traction. In Erie. Thanks for the shout out, Sam. Can Pittsburgh out-renew Erie?

Pitt's Bytes 8.20.07

I was on the road again most of the last week; about all I know about Pittsburgh right now is that we sure have had a lot of rain lately! More soon, I hope.

Pitt's Bytes 8.13.07

I was out of town for much of last week, so the mailbag is mostly empty. I did trip over an interesting RFP (Request for Proposals), however. I'll call it "The Vision Thing."

The Allegheny Conference and the Pittsburgh Regional Alliance and the Convention Bureau and associated other movers and shakers have worked on and off over recent years to create a new Pittsburgh "brand" (what an awful word for a city!) via slogans and marketing campaigns. Most of these things have been ridiculed out of existence, partly because the very idea of doing this sort of thing is just short of ludicrous, and partly because the slogans and campaigns have been related only marginally to what we find in the city and the region today.

They're at it again. The Vision Thing is back. The ambition is a mite more realistic. Will that make a difference? Should it?

From the folks at ImaginePittsburgh, celebrating the upcoming 250th birthday of the city (click on the link to their homepage at your own peril; it comes with an irritating sound file), itself brought to us by the usual powers-that-be, an RFP: "The Pittsburgh Region Re-Imagined."

Pittsburgh is poised for yet another re-birth as the region simultaneously celebrates its 250th anniversary and navigates its decades-long transformation from its seat of the industrial revolution to the edge of other greatness. It was Ralph Waldo Emerson who penned that “each generation must write its own books,” and so it is: this generation of “Pittsburghers” endeavors to write a third chapter to the Pittsburgh region’s renaissance.

In some ways, the writing has already begun. Researchers, journalists, and ratings gurus beyond Pittsburgh have declared the Pittsburgh region to be among the most artistic, most literary, most recreational, most family-friendly, most civically-engaged anywhere. It’s celebrated for its unlike-anywhere-else neighborhoods and towns; for its world-class universities and medical centers; for its historical spots as well as cutting-edge industries; for its not-to-be-surpassed entrance and vistas; for its organized and dedicated regional leadership. [Don't miss that last phrase!] . . .

Applicants should propose to create visual (and possibly printed) materials that present the Pittsburgh region as-it-is as well as what the Pittsburgh region might be – substantiating both with fact-based scenarios and projections. Importantly, the work product resulting from this project may be used to engage regional leaders and the broader public in conversations regarding the future of the Pittsburgh region. Indeed, should the Pittsburgh region undertake comprehensive regional visioning, the resources produced by the selected applicant will likely be used to position and provoke civic dialogue – in-person, on-line, and otherwise – among tens of thousands of citizens. As such, the resultant work product should unmistakably convey current trend projections and straightforwardly forecast scenarios for the region’s future prosperity so that any citizen could quickly understand and easily participate. The resultant work product should thus not amount to branding campaign materials or business recruitment pieces.

The project requirements likewise tries to convey a sense of realism:

1. Do not conduct any original research. Utilize currently available information, data sets, presentation materials, etc., to present a scrupulously accurate and highly informative “picture” of the Pittsburgh region today as well as scenarios for its future progress. . . . .
2. Think big. The Pittsburgh region extends far beyond the borders of Allegheny County, including thirteen other counties in southwestern Pennsylvania and several counties located in West Virginia, Ohio, and Maryland. . . . . [Let's call this the Pittsburgh city-state]
3. Embrace all multimedia. Applicants who propose to publish only a report – even a wellcrafted, absorptive one – will not succeed. Only those applicants who propose to knit together a story and a vision – utilizing not only the written word but also perhaps film, photography, images, video, electronic arts, etc., will receive serious consideration.
4. Be broad. Frame the region’s potential not only in terms of economic development but also on such matters as environmental conservation, governance, social equity, public health, education, fiscal policy, safety, taxes, the arts, land use, etc.
5. Think globally. Compare the Pittsburgh region to other regions around the world using benchmarks and other indicators. Describe the extent to which the Pittsburgh region can compete with leading regions elsewhere by offering the best mix of economic vitality and lifestyle amenities.
6. Be critical. Do not sugarcoat the region’s adversities, and do not exaggerate competitive advantages. Document the base case and describe realistic scenarios.
7. Be highly compelling and provocative. Prepare products that tell the Pittsburgh region’s remarkable story, capture the imagination, and inspire forward-thinking discussions.

So what's going on here? You can't create Renaissance III with a marketing campaign, but you can try to frame a public conversation about the future by concentrating the conversation and managing it from the top down. The opposite tack, I suppose, would be to follow distributed bottom-up efforts to do the same sort of thing. In, say, a seven-point Manifesto for a New Pittsburgh. The two approaches will co-exist; the Web guarantees that. The question is who owns Pittsburgh's future? The RFP makes clear that ImaginePittsburgh owns your work. Coordinate with the Manifesto, and you own your own work.

Immigration Churn

Be sure to check out Chris Briem's recapitulation of regional immigration statistics in Sunday's Post-Gazette "The Next Page." Chris and I have been wondering whether anyone ever actually drew up a sketch of Border Guard Bob.

Not coincidentally, the PG has a full-color advertising driven "Diversity" section in Sunday's paper. (Foolishly, the content is not available in searchable form, and equally foolishly, it is presented in a Flash container that prevents cutting-and-pasting, i.e., that makes quoting in blogs a little more difficult.) The best piece in the section (best because it is the least forced) is a profile of Scott Township, which somewhat unexpectedly has become a beachhead for South Asian immigration. The article starts on page 6. A neat point:

Scott's unexpected status as immigrant beachhead does provide hope that metropolitan Pittsburgh can shed its label as one of the least international big cities in America. Its drop from melting pot status began after 1940, when the foreign-born population peaked at more than 12 percent and then continuously fell, hit a low of 2.4 percent in 1990 before inching up to 2.6 percent by 2000, the first increase in at least 50 years. It rose some more, to 3 percent, by 2004, but that increase was still the lowest among the nation's top 25 metro areas, trailing such places as Denver, Minneapolis, Cleveland, and Cincinnati.

The reason Pittsburgh's immigration rate is so alarming to followers of the local economy is what it portends: slow growth. As Pittsburgh's work force grows older and in need of replacement and as the region continues to lose population [but see Briem, above], economic development experts predict that an area unattractive to immigrants will have a hard time filling positions if the economy grows at even a marginal rate the next 10 to 20 years.

Author Gregg Zachary, who studied Pittsburgh's immigration challenges and last year reported on diversity in American cities, concluded Pittsburgh's pro-immigrant groups "are languishing, if not defeated." Civic leaders "have done little to tackle the widespread sense among foreigners that Pittsburgh is not an attractive destination."

The special section complements the upcoming DiverCITY festival, and I've already expressed my skepticism about that point. Focused media coverage of diversity and immigration is a better idea than panels-and-concerts. The former, if done right, at least does a little something to project the region's interest in change and growth beyond the boundaries of Western PA. (Making the section all but unfindable on the Internet means, however, that the media is not being done right!) The latter seems designed primarily to bathe various local egos.

Still an Outsider After All These Years!

The following comment came in recently, and it calls for its own place in a post:

Please discuss Steely McBeam the new Steelers mascot. Why can't we let big steel go? What's your perspective as an outsider?

As to Steely: I won't demean the blog by posting a picture of this lunacy or a link to any of the news stories describing it. ("Steely McBeam" is the new name for a steelworker-inspired 3D "mascot" for the Pittsburgh Steelers.) Football is a simple game. It calls for simple measures. As a great but flawed man once said of a different sport, but in a related spirit, "'This is a very simple game. You throw the ball, you catch the ball, you hit the ball. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, sometimes it rains." Think about that for a while." Someone in the Steelers organization should take that to heart.

But that's the easy part.

The harder part is calling me an outsider. By the bizarro rules of Pittsburgh culture, I *am* an outsider, because I'm not a native. I wasn't born in Pittsburgh. I've lived in the area only for nine years. No member of my family was living in the area when Maz and the Pirates beat the Yankees; no member of my family worked in a mill. I don't know where Isaly's used to be. (But I'm learning.)

So, yes, I get that. Native Pittsburghers are tribal, and they have their rituals, and you can "convert" if you adopt the rituals (I, too, mute the TV and listen to local radio on Sunday afternoon in the Fall), but you will never acquire a native-born belief in their true power and significance. Still, it grates on me that those people who are natives -- many of whom no longer live in the area, of course -- so obsessively impose and re-impose their tribalism on newcomers. Instead, try this. If you care about the future of this area, no matter where you live or where you were born, you're a Pittsburgher. "Insiders" take note: Accept our interest! We come in peace.

Corporate Pittsburgh Does Diversity

The Downtown Pittsburgh business community is putting on a cultural show: The DiverseCITY Pittsburgh Festival happens at FirstSide Park, Downtown, on August 16-19 -- the end of next week. This isn't exactly ethnic-and-minority-neighborhoods-and-communities-get-invited-to-do-what-they-do-best; the Festival has a Mission Statement, and the mission is about business: "The Mission of the DiverseCITY Pittsburgh Festival is to celebrate the diverse cultures and ethnicities in the Pittsburgh region while enhancing our national image as a city that embraces all." Drill down a little deeper: "The Greater Pittsburgh Diversity Festival is a not-for-profit, volunteer organization whose mission is to promote and pay tribute to Pittsburgh and the surrounding region’s cultural heritage, while enhancing the region’s image, and the strength and growth of local business by attracting visitors to the city."

I smell the aroma of Pittsburgh-as-usual. Still, there will be some terrific music on hand: Buddy Guy - the Wailers - Mavis Staples - Del Castillo. I hope the weather is nice!

Hands Across the Burgosphere

The Diaspora at work:

The Burgher came up with a cool idea; the resulting widget -- Hands Across the Burghosphere -- appears today in the right column.

Pitt's Bytes 8.6.07

Not much here today . . . I got home today after spending most of last week visiting family in the SF Bay Area. I'm full of great food (dim sum at Yank Sing in SF; Zachary's stuffed pizza in Oakland; In-n-Out burgers -- get 'em animal-style) and stunned, as always, by the Menlo Park / Palo Alto residential real estate market, which is beyond surreal. I was underwhelmed, again, by the not-so-engaging central business districts of both places. The heart of the Silicon Valley is beautiful, but it has no soul. . . . The PTC's next Face to Face is Wednesday, August 8 at Six Penn Kitchen. The schedule is updated here. . . . The Strategic Research Institute is planning a major Stem Cell Research Conference in Pittsburgh on October 29 and 30. The announcement is here. . . . I'm on to Chicago later this week for a conference . . . now there's a town with heart *and* soul.

Out of the mainstream, into the fire

I haven't read or seen Pittsburgh coverage of the Pirates' acquisition of pitcher Matt Morris. In San Francisco, local media are taking pity on the man.

If professional baseball used a relegation system comparable to systems used in professional soccer (everywhere outside of the U.S.), what league would the Pirates be competing in today? Triple A? Double A?

And while I'm thinking of sports and soccer, I'm reminded for no particular reason of this nugget from the Post-Gazette, back in June:

Sunday's CONCACAF Gold Cup final in which the United States defeated Mexico, 2-1, attracted 41 percent more television households in the United States than the Stanley Cup final clincher -- and that was just for the soccer game's Spanish-language telecast. The game earned a 2.5 fast national rating on Univision. That translates to 2.83 million households. Anaheim's series-ending 6-2 victory vs. Ottawa for the Stanley Cup June 6 received a 1.8 rating on NBC.

And still, there is no Spanish-language TV in Pittsburgh. Univision was the #2 broadcast network nationwide for adults 18-34 (all adults, not just Hispanic adults) during the last sweeps period.

Do you want fries with that?

Just because the comment thread on the last post is getting pretty long, here's something different:

I'm in the SF Bay Area today. Here's a link to Yelp reviews of Giordano Bros., a North Beach restaurant that sells "Pittsburgh style" sandwiches.

Giordano Bros. site

Urban Aspirations

For Pittsburghers who dream of making Pittsburgh as dynamic and diverse as more worldly cities, be careful what you wish for. Catching up on my reading yesterday, I came across two sobering articles:

Toronto: Nice but broke / Canada's aspiring city state

It is lauded for its cosmopolitan feel and quality of life. But it also suffers from budget problems and creaking infrastructure just when—for the first time in a century—its status as Canada's pre-eminent city is being challenged. The contender is Calgary, in Alberta, the western base of the country's booming energy industry. Though its population is only 1m, it is growing fast. Calgary is building new schools, hospitals and roads and luring corporate head offices.

In contrast, Toronto's economy is under pressure. Its manufacturing industry shed 100,000 jobs in the past five years, because of a strong currency and competition from China. Not all the news is grim. The Toronto area still attracts two of every five immigrants to Canada. Private wealth is pouring into new museums, theatres and art galleries. And Toronto is still Canada's financial centre. Yet few would now describe it as “New York run by the Swiss”, as did Peter Ustinov, a British actor and writer, in a double-edged quip in 1987.

Toronto's prospects turn in part on sorting out its finances. It faces a deficit of about C$575m ($550m) this year on current spending of C$7.8 billion. The problems date from the 1990s, when the federal government eliminated its own deficit partly by cutting funding to provinces. Ontario responded by passing responsibility for social housing, welfare and other social programmes to the cities, which struggled to pay for them out of property taxes.

San Francisco: City in a bottle / The strange half-recovery of California's prettiest city

The city's finance and insurance industry has moved or made redundant 15% of its workers, and now employs fewer people than during the recession of the early 1990s. Outside a few niches, manufacturing seems to be in terminal decline.

The face of San Francisco is changing, too. Like other big cities, it is being abandoned by blacks; more unusually, Hispanics are also leaving. Long a childless place, it is becoming ever older. During the boom years of the late 1990s, the city sucked in young people. Since the bust, some of them have aged and others have left, not to be replaced. The Association of Bay Area Governments reckons the population of twenty-somethings in San Francisco fell by 38% between 2000 and 2005.