After the Allegheny Conference is Gone

The Allegheny Conference has a new CEO, Dennis Yablonsky. (I've said it before: What is it with nonprofits in Pittsburgh having "CEOs" and "Presidents"? What's wrong with Executive Directors? But I digress.) He's a person of unquestioned distinction and ambition. According to his interview in yesterday's Post-Gazette, the ACCD now aims for "growth." It's hard to argue with that.

Fortunately, there is a more substantive agenda:

1. An energy strategy for the region.
2. More efficient mass transit between Downtown and Oakland.
3. Renovation of the region's water and sewer systems.
4. Brownfield cleanup and redevelopment.

This is a good list. But.

Imagine Pittsburgh ... without the Allegheny Conference. Imagine the resources that go into the ACCD today ($12 million per year, give or take) being distributed instead upward -- to planning activities at the County level and downward -- to grantees and new (and some existing) businesses in the energy and infrastructure fields.

Mass transit is a different and probably hopeless problem for the region. North Shore Connector, see.

It is not a bad thing at all for Southwest Pennsylvania to have a regional planning czar. It is a strange thing for Southwest Pennsylvania to continue to outsource its regional planning to a 501(c)(3), with minimal accountability and transparency to area residents, businesses, and governments.

Sign, Sign, Everywhere a Sign

Blocking out the scenery, breaking my mind.

It's not a stretch to say Pittsburgh's skyline, the stuff of postcards, is
starting to look a bit like the Vegas strip. Neon everywhere.

I suspect that I'm one of the few people in the area who likes the proliferation of corporate signage atop Downtown Pittsburgh towers -- aside from the managers of those companies themselves, who are paid to like it. I like the energy, the novelty, and the fact of each sign, the change of signs, the growth of the number of signs. It's different and a bit unsettled and unsettling. I like the fact that the signs make explicit something that is otherwise widely understood but often just implicit, that Downtown Pittsburgh is a fundamentally commercial and corporate community.

I am a fan, in other words, of Brown and Venturi.

What would it mean with one less paper in town?

Via Governing and Time is news of a study out from Princeton looking at what happened to the local political process in Cincinnati when one of its major papers, the Cincinnati Post, shut down. The punch line... with one less paper: "fewer people went to the polls, fewer people ran for office and incumbents were more likely to be re-elected. "

Pittsburgh Likes Street View

Well, the Borings don't like Google Street View, but some really creative folks at CMU like it enough to make art with it. Leave it to Pittsburgh to show the world that if you can't trust Google, then, well, you can't trust Google.

Street With A View introduces fiction, both subtle and spectacular, into the doppelganger world of Google Street View.

On May 3rd 2008, artists Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsley invited the Google Inc. Street View team and residents of Pittsburgh’s Northside to collaborate on a series of tableaux along Sampsonia Way. Neighbors, and other participants from around the city, staged scenes ranging from a parade and a marathon, to a garage band practice, a seventeenth century sword fight, a heroic rescue and much more...

Street View technicians captured 360-degree photographs of the street with the scenes in action and integrated the images into the Street View mapping platform. This first-ever artistic intervention in Google Street View made its debut on the web in November of 2008.

Here's a clip:



Full details here.

To Detroit, From Pittsburgh

Former PG editor and Pittsburgh Regional Indicators chief John Craig posted an op-ed in yesterday's Washington Post on ... what Pittsburgh can teach Detroit about surviving an economic collapse. John isn't quite as optimistic about Pittsburgh as I am, but many of his themes overlap with my own.

A taste from the piece:

So when I think about the lessons the Steel City's 30-year economic transformation may hold for Detroit, another town built on an industry beaten by competition and confronting bankruptcy, I have to say that the first and hardest lesson for the Motor City is this: Fundamental change will be much longer in coming than you can imagine. You'll survive. The automakers, bailed out or not, will shrink and adapt to a new future and a new reality. The city will remake itself in whatever ways it can. But there'll be no "getting over" your past, only moving beyond it.

Organizing and managing contraction is not an activity we Americans know much about. But you're stuck with the job, Detroit, and it will go better for you if you're clear-eyed about who you are and where you've come from.

When an industry evolves in the way that metals manufacturing did in northern Appalachia starting in the 1830s, it becomes a way of life that touches every aspect of public and private activity. Its influence can be undone only after decades, if ever. This is something that the residents of the Pittsburgh area have not adequately understood. We overlook obvious evidence of decline and abandonment that still lingers from our troubled time. We ignore disturbing data on poverty, health problems and environmental risk, much of it out of sight in small towns and more rural counties.

Read the whole thing (free registration required).

PG cutting more than journalists

Sam M. is still out there and passed a note that gets to the future of media. The Tri County Courier Express notes that the Post-Gazette is cutting back distribution across a broad swath of central Pennsylvania where they used to have a presence. I'll add my own plug for Sam's recent book, but also maybe we can get Sam back into his less remunerative blogging enterprise.

It may be an obvious business choice for the PG at this point, but it is more than symbolic in what it means. Lots of efforts out there are trying to redefine what people think Pittsburgh, the region, really is. From one project I am involved with on Pittsburgh Indicators which broadly looks at 22 counties.... to the still nascent Regional Visioning Project which Mike has already talked about which looks to an even wider definition of 'Pittsburgh'.

One semi-formalized definition of the Pittsburgh region that is created by the Department of Commerce are large Economic Areas (EA) which are typically much larger than Metropolitan Statistical Areas we normally talk about. One of the criteria used for defining EAs are the circulation patterns of local media sources. I am told that the working definition of Pittsburgh for the Regional Visioning Project started with what people thought the coverage area is for KDKA radio's flamethrower 50K watt transmitter. I suspect there was a time when KDKA was indeed a major news source well beyond Pittsburgh proper. Hard to believe that is still the case. Now even the PG will not fill any of that role it seems

In the end, the consolidation of media coverage is happening on a lot of levels. Redefining Pittsburgh is only going to be harder if the broader region.... not only across Pennsylvania, but WV, OH and even into MD... does not have the connections they once had to Pittsburgh proper. It may be that we are actually growing more apart than together driven by the other forces at hand.

*******
Update March 31. It seems it is not just the counties farthest from Pittsburgh proper that are losing their Post-Gazette. KDKA is reporting that daily home delivery of the PG is being cut from several closer-in counties that include some within the definition of the MSA.

Can Pittsburgh Save Detroit?

The post title is the title of the CNN report on Pittsburgh that was supposed to run on last night's Anderson Cooper 360 but didn't, depriving me of my 5 minutes of national media fame. Natasha Richardson died yesterday, and the AIG bonus brouhaha took up most of the rest of the hour.

The CNN report lives in text at the AC360 website, under the same title (and be sure to read the comments), even though neither I nor Pittsblog get a mention. I thought that I'd walk through my interview and its context, because Anderson Cooper moves on to the New York area tonight and to Miami (I believe) on Friday. "Can Pittsburgh Save Detroit?" doesn't fit those story lines, so my mug may just stay in the can.

The background:

The possible collapse of Detroit-centered American automobile manufacturing has put Detroit at the front of national conversations about de-industrialization and urban failure and renewal. The buzz has it that Pittsburgh went through this process and has come out the other side, successfully. CNN called me on Monday to ask if I would be part of a segment, shot here on Tuesday, that would look at Detroit from Pittsburgh's perspective. (CNN found me via this blog. I'm not sure how they found this blog, though perhaps it's because I was quoted in a similar story last year in the Detroit Free Press.) The story pitch: Pittsburgh is doing pretty great. How did it happen, and what lessons should Detroit learn? The producer planned to shoot my piece of it at the Waterfront. Massive steel mill becomes shopping mall. How better to illustrate an American story of urban renewal?

On Wednesday afternoon, we did meet at the Waterfront, and we spent an hour or so taping an interview. The piece was shot on a strip of grass right next to the Courtyard by Marriott, by the Gantry, just west of the Homestead bridge. The camera guys wanted to have the river and the bridge in the shot. The reporter (oops -- in TV speak, the correspondent) was Randi Kaye. (No, I didn't meet Anderson Cooper or even talk with him.)

The payoff:

While I can't know how much of the interview made it into the segment that CNN originally planned to show last night, the gist of what I said added up to this:

1. Pittsburgh had its economic and spiritual heart ripped out in the late 1970s and early 1980s when steel collapsed. This isn't any secret. Close to 40% of the local economy disapppeared more or less overnight; hundreds of thousands of people left the city.

2. Thirty years on, Pittsburgh's economy is doing OK, but the "reinvention" of the region and city is hardly complete. It's well-known that the "eds and meds" mantra isn't enough. Pittsburgh is primed for more diversification; it needs other sectors to succeed, too. There are significant pockets of the region that have not benefited much or at all from economic development efforts. The Waterfront/Homestead relationship is itself evidence of certain blindness, rather than evidence of great success. The Mon Valley is still suffering terribly. Some neighborhoods in Pittsburgh experience serious problems today. I mentioned the Hill and Homewood, which represent different stories, and they aren't alone in their struggles. The CNN team focused on certain indicators of prosperity: raw numbers of jobs, major real estate development projects, and the relative stability of the real estate markets. A short TV segment isn't the place to correct the record in all respects, but these aren't necessarily the things that I would focus on.

3. Still, there is an optimistic buzz in a lot of quarters here that wasn't present even a decade ago. I talked about three reasons for what's happened over the last 30 years, but especially over the last decade.

First, Pittsburgh and Pittsburghers share a history of success and faith in themselves that is unbelievably powerful. The region has consciously built on its impressive past. Pittsburgh's sports successes have played a huge role in preserving Pittsburgh's pride in itself, though the word "Steelers" wasn't uttered on camera. When I tour people around Pittsburgh, I sometimes describe the Steelers as a metaphor for local culture. It's a run-first, throw-second kind of region, strong on fundamentals, low on flamboyance. This year's Steelers partly proved me wrong, but the exception seems to prove the rule. My bet is that the Steelers will have to run more successfully next year. This isn't Philadelphia.

Second, the Pittsburgh region has world-class raw materials that rival those of any urban center in the country. I use "raw materials" to refer to the foundations of what others call the "eds and meds" economy. Pittsburgh has unbelievable research institutions in Pitt, UPMC, and CMU. There are other super colleges and universities in the area, but those three grow knowledge at the highest level and across a wide range of disciplines. (Read Harold Miller's post about this, extending his Post-Gazette piece from last weekend -- it's good stuff.) Pittsburgh has other raw materials of note: capital, talent, and a well-trained and hard-working labor force. That mixture creates a tremendous infrastructure for success.

Third, getting the economic train to move down the infrastructure track takes initiative, and over the last decade Pittsburgh has witnessed the emergence of an impressive (and still emerging) tier of leaders, mostly working from the bottom up rather than the top down. "Leaders" doesn't quite capture these folks. They are champions, individuals who identify a need, marry it to a passion, and run with the combination. They create their own weather. A handful of champions does not a vibrant place make; those people need to be networked and institutions and organizations need to take root. That's happened all across the region, whether you look at economic development organizations, neighborhood groups, social entrepreneurs, Downtown and Strip District real estate developers, or arts institutions. Few of these are brand new, but there is a vitality and sense of connectedness that you can see and feel and that was missing until a very short time ago. "City of Champions" now refers to more than our sports teams.

Ten years ago, when I moved to Pittsburgh, in an instant I could sense the history and the raw materials; I couldn't see any energy. Five years ago, when I started Pittsblog, I was a very small part of a larger movement that sensed that Pittsburgh was poised to get moving, and I wanted to lend my voice to that movement. Today, stuff is happening. I'm bullish on Pittsburgh.

All of that said, two questions remain:

First, what about all of Pittsburgh's serious problems?

The political system here is essentially broken at almost every level. It has been essentially broken for many, many years. (There is nonetheless a romantic attachment in Pittsburgh to the arguable successes of certain former mayors. As a non-native who sees only what lies before me, I view that romance with measured skepticism.) The city is still under Act 47 supervision, even though it is not technically bankrupt. The mayor of Pittsburgh touts current major construction projects as evidence of a Renaissance III (the casino, the PNC tower, and the arena, all of which the CNN team cited, too), when major construction is drying up. Allegheny County is still slowly losing population (the silver lining is that when deaths are added in, it's clear that Allegheny County is slowly but surely getting younger). The mainstream business community still suffers from a top-down obsession and excessive big-company risk-avoiding conservativism. But a national TV interview that is set up as a Pittsburgh promotion is not the place to go Luke-bashing. (I can do some bashing here: Why are Pittsburgh powers promoting Pittsburgh's success on a real estate "wins" list that includes Detroit (#5 to Pittsburgh's #7)?)

Second, can Pittsburgh save Detroit?

Obviously, no, and I don't know enough about Detroit to say anything intelligent on the question. Every city has its own narrative. Detroit has history, resources, and champions; it may not have them in the same proportions as Pittsburgh does, and it may have (and lack) other things. Detroit has a special history of political corruption and race relations, for example, that contributes in distinct ways to its economic struggles. I doubt that the Detroit economy ever was as concentrated in a single industry as Pittsburgh's was concentrated in steel. The auto industry has repeatedly been the beneficiary of federal financial assistance. Pittsburgh in the 1970s and 1980s? Not. Detroit's auto industry may or may not collapse as steel did in Pittsburgh, but both industry and city will be changed. (Again, this isn't news.) Whatever happens in Detroit, the city -- like Pittsburgh -- will be transformed. That transformation will take decades. And its success will ultimately depend, as Pittsburgh's does, on a grass-roots commitment to invest in the future of the city, financially and socially. Randi Kaye asked me if I had advice for Detroit. I said the only thing that makes sense to me, even though it's intuitive and anecdotal: Hang in there. That's what Pittsburgh did.

Pittsblog on CNN - Update

CNN's Anderson Cooper 360 may not run the Pittsburgh piece tonight. Apparently something called "AIG" is causing a heap of trouble, so the news will be about that. Maybe the Pittsburgh piece will air later in the week.

Life is so uncertain.

New Pittsburgh Foundation Blog

The Pittsburgh Foundation has a new blog, or, rather a "Community EForum."

The fact that one of Pittsburgh's leading foundations is edging cautiously into the blogosphere is a good thing, so welcome!

Unfortunately, it is not at all clear that the Foundation is making the best of use of this Internet thing. There seems to be some real blogging going on -- that's good -- but the site makes noises about building some kind of "community" at the Pittsburgh Foundation blog. That's bad.

No one wants to be told to be a communitarian at the Pittsburgh Foundation or anywhere else. Communities take time and a lot of hard work. You can't manufacture them with blog posts and comments.

Just blog. Post. Say things that foundations are not expected to say. Have opinions; bring news. Read other blogs. Link to them. Rinse. Spin. Repeat.

American Idol for Pittsburgh Entrepreneurs

Belly up to the Idea Karaoke for entrepreneurs

The Idea Funding Café, a recently launched social networking website that wants to connect entrepreneurs and investors, will host its first Idea Karaoke night on Tuesday, March 31st at the SouthSide Works Cinema.

...

"I’ve gone to a lot of networking events, but they honestly seem a little dry,” says Jason Tapolci, CEO of ABG Capital and creator of Idea Funding Café . “How can we expect Pittsburgh's innovators to cultivate their ideas if we don't provide them with a safe, comfortable, and most importantly fun environment for them to present and learn?"

Keynote speaker R.F. Culbertson, professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Tepper School of Business, Donald H. Jones Center for Entrepreneurship, will speak on the dos and don'ts of entrepreneurship. The evening will be a learning forum with an American Idol-like presenter format, Tapolci says.

...

The evening will kick off at 5:30 p.m. and the cost is $40 to registrants and $50 at the door. Proceeds will benefit Hair Peace Charities. The event is sponsored by ABG Capital and Focus Pittsburgh Consulting Group.

To register, drop an email to events@ideafundingcafe.com

American Idol meets entrepreneurship? Do I hear nominations for the role of local Simon, local Paula, and local Randy? I could picture RF as Simon, but as for the others?

[Spotted via Pop City]

Pittsblog on National TV?

If Pittsblog gets mentioned on national television, will Google's servers be able to handle the avalanche of traffic that follows?

CNN's Anderson Cooper 360 is producing a segment on Pittsburgh's ability to keep its (economic) head while Rust Belt cities all around us are losing theirs. The producers tracked me down for an interview. I'm told that the segment will run tomorrow night, Wednesday, March 18. Or not. Life is so uncertain. But I am now told that it will definitely air on Wednesday, 3/18.

Raining on the Entrepreneuship Parade

Two recent news items suggest that the local entrepreneurial picture could use some re-balancing:

The Institute for Entrepreneurial Excellence at Pitt announced (here is the full press release):

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania- February 23, 2009 - While corporations look for handouts and major firms around the globe teeter on the edge of collapse, the entrepreneurial firms of Western Pennsylvania are proving that businesses can thrive in a difficult economy with the help of innovative strategies, flexible strategic plans, and organizations like the University of Pittsburgh Institute for Entrepreneurial Excellence (IEE). In 2008, the Institute helped the region’s entrepreneurial business community raise more than $44 million in loans and investments. ...

The IEE is dedicated to leading economic growth and revitalization in our region, one business or entrepreneur at a time. For every dollar invested in the IEE, it raises approximately $49.11 in loans and investments for Western Pennsylvania businesses. The IEE’s efforts reach thousands of businesses that provide more than 50,000 jobs and $9.5 billion in annual revenue.

I don't want to single out the IEE. A current profile of Innovation Works by Pop City notes:

Since 2000, Innovation Works has invested about $40 million in start-ups, which have used that financing to leverage $550 million in additional capital. IW portfolio companies have created nearly 5,000 jobs, positions that typically pay roughly double the average wage in Pennsylvania. Most significantly, of all the local companies that received venture financing in 2008, about 70 percent were in the IW portfolio.

Notes on these things:

One, I think of myself as a friend to the local entrepreneurial community and at times, even a cheerleader. But that doesn't mean that skepticism isn't warranted sometimes. And this is a moment for some skepticism.

Two, statements touting millions of dollars and thousands of jobs created (or "reached") should be recognized for the PR puffery that it is. The IEE "reaches" 50,000 jobs? IW companies have created 5,000 jobs? As if the IEE and IW are responsible. These organizations have their role, but they are investors and counselors; they aren't running these companies themselves.

Three, what's more, the PR focus on job creation may understate and even undermine the real role that these organizations (and others in that space, such as PLSG and Idea Foundry) can play in the local economy. They focus on job creation because they get money from state and federal governments, and state and federal legislators want to see results -- especially employment-related results. What that means is that the organizations do retail economic development: A small company comes in, gets some support (strategic advice, a little money), then goes on to be a larger company and, in a perfect world, hires a bunch of people.

Jobs are essential, and they are getting more essential by the day. But politics of state financing aside, it's an error for new company brokers and advisors like IW and IEE to focus their efforts primarily on job creation. A better role for them would be wholesale economic development, creating platforms or environments where local supply can meet -- and grow -- local demand, and vice versa. Here's an example from last year: The Pens partnering with the Tech Council last year to help to "future-proof" the new arena via technologies under development in the region:

The Penguins and the Pittsburgh Technology Council kicked off the initiative last month [this is Spring 2008] when the team discussed the types of innovations it was looking for as part of a Web-cast. More than 400 companies viewed the presentation, and about 70 submitted 200-word descriptions detailing ways their company could provide the kind of technology the team wanted.

That's balancing retail economic development with wholesale economic development.

More on the Future of the News

I gave a little pep talk at the Public Square Project/PittPoint workshop last week (the City Paper covered the first in the series), and I came away thinking:

1. I have no idea whether this model of "citizen journalism" will work.

2. But it can't work if the game plan is to edge into the conversation as a polite "complement" to existing traditional media. Whatever its potential, citizen journalism and enterprises like PittPoint can't really test the waters without eventually seizing the failing newspaper bull by the horns and saying, we have no idea what the results of the revolution are going to be, but we're part of it.

In other words, it is increasingly clear to me that the current forms of the Post-Gazette and the Tribune-Review and local and regional newspapers -- daily, print newspapers -- are dying. I don't know how long the P-G has to live. If the P-G in its current form lasts more than two or three years from today, I will be surprised, and it will last longer than many other newspapers.

Read Clay Shirky, "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable":

Print media does much of society’s heavy journalistic lifting, from flooding the zone — covering every angle of a huge story — to the daily grind of attending the City Council meeting, just in case. This coverage creates benefits even for people who aren’t newspaper readers, because the work of print journalists is used by everyone from politicians to district attorneys to talk radio hosts to bloggers. The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole. This is true, but irrelevant to the problem at hand; “You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model. So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?

I don’t know. Nobody knows. We’re collectively living through 1500, when it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it. The internet turns 40 this fall. Access by the general public is less than half that age. Web use, as a normal part of life for a majority of the developed world, is less than half that age. We just got here. Even the
revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen.

...

Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.

When we shift our attention from ’save newspapers’ to ’save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work.

We don’t know who the Aldus Manutius of the current age is. It could be Craig Newmark, or Caterina Fake. It could be Martin Nisenholtz, or Emily Bell. It could be some 19 year old kid few of us have heard of, working on something we won’t recognize as vital until a decade hence. Any experiment, though, designed to provide new models for journalism is going to be an improvement over hiding from the real, especially in a year when, for many papers, the unthinkable future is already in the past.

For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new
experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need.

While you're at it, also read Steven Johnson's speech at SXSW, which covers much of the same ground, but less provocatively.

Pittsburgh Misses the Cut; PSP Workshops On Tap

Check out Time magazine's list of the ten daily newspapers that are most in danger of folding or going all-digital.

Pittsburgh isn't on the list. But the P-G's news hole is looking mighty small.

Meanwhile, Pittsburgh's Public Square Project is hosting workshops for new citizen journalists. Come, get a little training, write a better blog, help restore democracy in America.

The next one is this Thursday evening, March 12. I've agreed to show up and give a pep talk. Maybe I'll meet you there?

Franco Harris for Pittsburgh Mayor?

I asked recently for names of real Pittsburgh leaders, and a voice responded: Franco Harris.

After Ravenstahl beat DeSantis in Nov. 2007, I wondered whether the future would bring Pittsburgh an African-American mayor. I was far from the only one.

Now we have African-American mayoral candidate Franco Harris -- Dok Harris, son of the Steeler, but a Franco Harris nonetheless.

I'm not going to endorse anyone, but folks who are disgusted and/or disappointed by the Ravenstahl administration should think long and hard about which candidate gives them the best shot at winning. Dok Harris is young and inexperienced, but he is a smart guy and (check me on this, please) a Pittsburgh native. If he can raise money, it will be an interesting campaign.

Endowments and Universities

Like an awful lot of people, starting but hardly ending with Chad Hermann (who adds a second note here), I was startled by the recent disclosure that both Pitt and Carnegie Mellon invested large chunks of money with people who turned out to be, in effect, thieves.

Investing foolishness is investing foolishness whether it happens on campus or off, and I have no insight into the processes that led to these deals.

It is likely wrong, however, to point the finger of blame exclusively at university money managers and their consultants. Universities were under extraordinary financial pressures long before the events of the last year. At both state and federal levels, long-term trends point to declines in public financial support for research universities in particular. Outside higher education, it's often difficult to know what taxpayer support buys the taxpayer, because most people equate the mission of the university solely with educating undergraduates. Universities do a lot more than that (Pitt and CMU both run world-class research programs, and there is a lot of first-rate research at other universities in the region), but on the whole universities do a miserable job of explaining to the public what they do and why that is a good thing, on balance.

If the endowment funds are that critical to the mission, then that is yet another reason to be careful with them -- but universities can't raise the money they need if they simply stick it in the endowment equivalent of passbook savings accounts. Note, however, that a lot of the anger about misuse of endowment funds could be avoided if public financial support for higher education were more substantial to begin with. That's not a cost-free or uncontroversial solution. The point is that there is a larger context for what happened here.

It is equally wrong to suppose that this sort of thing wouldn't happen if universities were run more like businesses. There are well-managed universities (really) and there are badly managed universities, and managing big chunks of a university like a business can be a very smart thing. But managing the entirety of a university like a business is foolish. (If you care about some academic work, I can send you a paper that I've written that talks about the history of these things, but the takeaway point is that universities were never designed to operate like businesses and wouldn't produce the research-related benefits that they produce (which are substantial; see above) if they were. There is a great quotation from the first Ghostbusters movie -- "I've worked in the private sector. They expect results!" -- that makes this point better than I ever could.)

By the same token, it's just about impossible to say that universities do or should exist entirely on the not-for-profit side of the line. Since World War II, research universities (and especially what used to be called "Research I" universities, and Pitt and CMU are both in that class) have been part of a structural bargain with the federal government and private industry. The government would fund basic research in universities; private industry would not invest in basic research but instead would develop and commercialize that work. During the 1970s, it seemed that the university-to-industry transfer process wasn't working quite as well as originally intended, so federal law was changed in 1980 to accelerate it. The fact that universities have become more commercial and patent-hungry isn't an accident; it's part of the institutional structure that was constructed during the last 50 years. That means that universities are in the business of business in part, but only in part, and by design.

Over the last 20 years, the feds have pulled back a bit on their end of the bargain, creating much of the financial pressures described above. But the feds aren't out of the research business entirely, and Pitt (for example) is a major beneficiary of NSF and NIH funding.

Again, none of this excuses poor or lazy due diligence when hiring consultants or placing endowment funds. It does put the problem in a broader context. When it comes to finding the money that they need, universities today are in something of a damned if you do, damned if you don't position. And they are no less susceptible to thieving scam artists than any of the rest of us.

Back to Pittsburgh's Nature

I went to the Home Show at the Pittsburgh Convention Center on Saturday. By far the most interesting exhibits had to do with home economics -- and with the economics of food, in particular -- rather than with building or remodeling or designing. Even if Pittsburgh's economy is more or less holding its own right now, plenty of people are growing their own, if they can, and supporting local farmers, regardless. Links of note:

Pennsylvania Buy Fresh, Buy Local

Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture

An upcoming Farm to Table Conference

Afterward, I wandered through the Strip District and got my first in-person look at the new organic grocery on Smallman Street (at 23rd Street), Right by Nature.

While I'm at it, here are some links to collections of CSA farms -- Community Supported Agriculture. The spring season is just around the corner. Link 1 Link 2 And here's a list of local farmer's markets and farm stands.

Paging China Millman.

Will Old People Save Pittsburgh?

For now, at least, Pittsburgh's economy seems not to be suffering quite as much as economies in other Rust Belt cities. Why, precisely?

Chris Briem can supply details (and better hypotheses), but I was struck by this piece from the current Economist. Out in California, relative economic calm is associated with communities that are, on the whole, older than the norm:

Nowhere in California is immune to recession, but the oldest areas are proving most resistant. Of the ten counties with the lowest unemployment rates, nine, including Santa Barbara, contain an above-average proportion of people aged 65 or older. Youthful Los Angeles has shed almost a quarter-of-a-million jobs in the past year. Slightly older San Diego has lost a few thousand, while considerably older San Francisco has lost none. A map of the state’s retirees (see above) could almost double as a map of economic resilience.

Allegheny County's population is notorious for skewing older. In the conventional (dare I say Floridian?) wisdom of the last decade, that fact is often cited as an obstacle to growth. There is much more to be said on the topic, but is it possible that Pittsburgh's stodginess is now its greatest asset?

New Citizen Media Project in Pittsburgh

It's shovel ready:

While Market Square is being prepped for a $5 million makeover, a new local nonprofit is aiming to train a new generation of republicans. Small "r," for emphasis.

"The Public Square Project" is going to take aim at transparency in local government by making information and decision-making more accessible and comprehensible to "regular" citizens.

First up is a project called "PittPoint," which wants to train citizen journalists. This month, PSP is sponsoring a series of training workshops for aspiring investigative reporters. The schedule is online here.

Kudos to my friend Ryan Hopkins, who is pushing this effort into the limelight. Bram Reichbaum, Chris Potter, and ADB can do only so much.

Doug Heuck Was Homeless

Twenty years ago, current Pittsburgh Quarterly publisher and then Pittsburgh Press reporter Doug Heuck lived on the Pittsburgh streets for two weeks, then wrote up his experience for the paper.

Checking the Pittsburgh Quarterly's website for the Spring 2009 issue, I noticed a link to Doug's series: "I Am Homeless."

Here's the whole thing.

China Millman Is Everywhere

Ground round:

China Millman is starting a column to cover Pittsburgh's expanding coffee beat.

On the one hand, this is as sure a sign as we've seen in years (at least since the emergence of the Cupcake Class) that Pittsburgh remains several years behind the nation's cultural cutting edge.

On the one hand, maybe it's a good thing after all that Pittsburgh lags like this. We've watched coffee booms and coffee busts, and we've learned other regions' lessons. No over-caffeination for the Burgh.

One Down, Many to Go

The newspaper death watch:

Denver's Rocky Mountain News has closed.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is for sale.

The San Francisco Chronicle may be sold or closed.

Media owners would rather fight than switch. (The link is to a NYT story about newspapers challenging blogs and aggregators that link to their content.)

Onward and Upward in Pittsburgh?

I've been traveling even more than usual recently, but touring the country gives me more opportunities than usual to collect nuggets of insight about Pittsburgh from distant colleagues. And the news, on the whole, is pretty good. Five years ago, among my colleagues in intellectual property and technology law Pittsburgh had more or less no reputation. Now, the word is good. Pittsburgh has a booming biotechnology economy. Pittsburgh has recovered and rebuilt itself. Pittsburgh is a happening place.

That's what I hear, anyway.

Coming home yesterday, I would be forgiven for thinking that it's all true.

According to China Millman, Pittsburgh is finally getting some recognition as a foodie town (even though we don't necessarily know it ourselves). (Remember my informal motto: China Millman is Everywhere!)

According to Harold Miller, even rising unemployment shows off Pittsburgh in a good light.

According to the Mayor, the major construction projects now underway Downtown and on the North Shore suggest that another Pittsburgh Renaissance is upon us. Real estate developers are guardedly optimistic about the Downtown condo market.

The future's so bright, we have to wear shades!

But there are clouds.

I'm speaking later this month at a symposium on "digital entrepreneurship" at WVU in Morgantown, and my theme will be building infrastructure -- technology infrastructure, economic infrastructure, services infrastructure, legal infrastructure. Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania have a long ways to go on all of those fronts.

And there is the matter of $800 million or so in pension liabilities.

This is a real challenge for Patrick Dowd as he challenges Luke Ravenstahl in the upcoming mayoral primary. The angels aren't singing in Pittsburgh, but things here don't seem so bad compared to a lot of places, and in a lot of ways, things feel relatively good. "Things" captures those vague feelings you can get when you read about new restaurants and the fact that the Penguins may make the playoffs after all and deserve that new arena that's employing a lot of construction workers. "Things" aren't really so rosy, but Dowd can't be Mr. Doom-and-Gloom and hope to pull off an Obama-esque upset.