Renal Success

I first blogged about Renal Solutions, based in Warrendale, PA, more than three years ago. I wrote:

What we can do is look around for ways in which we can make the city and the region better, and we can celebrate ways in which others are doing the same.

Today's suggestion is from the business sector, courtesy of a friend: A company in Warrendale, PA called Renal Solutions, which could use a sexier name but which is apparently making some nice progress on the biotech front.

Today, Renal Solutions announced that it has been acquired. The acquiror, according to a press release on the company's site, is "Fresenius Medical Care AG & Co. KGaA. RSI will continue operations as a wholly owned subsidiary of Fresenius Medical Care, the largest integrated global provider of dialysis products and services. [RSI President and CEO] Peter DeComo will continue to lead RSI operations in Warrendale, PA and Oklahoma City, OK." The total purchase price is $190 million.

This is a great success story for the region. Congratulations to Peter and to RSI (and to Draper Triangle Ventures, the local venture firm that backed RSI).

Maintain Speed Through Tunnels

I'm trying to keep my annoyance over "The Pittsblog" in check while not giving the guy -- clearly a guy -- too much unneeded publicity. On top of everything else, "The Pittsblog" can't spell.

Much better for my psyche tonight is this site that aggregates views from PennDOT cams along Pittsburgh's parkways.

Spotted via a Pittsburgh-based Facebook group aptly titled "Maintain Speed Through Tunnels."

Jobs in Pittsburgh

At a meeting earlier this week I heard that the Pittsburgh Tech Council is in the process of a website revamp. Great news! After meeting a Pgh newcomer on an airplane earlier this month (he's taken a job with Westinghouse and moving his family here from Connecticut), I went to the Tech Council site to see what kinds of jobs are listed. Answer: I don't know. To search, I have to create an account. That should be optional. [Updated 11/28: As Jim points out in the Comments, anyone can search, even without registering. My bad. Still, the fact that I made this mistake makes me wonder whether I'm alone, and whether improved site design would improve access to the resource.] If I were a student, I could search for internships without registering. That's good. When I look at the list of internships, I can click links to see the full-time jobs being offered by companies offering internships. So there's a back door into the full-time job listings, at least for some companies. But the current site is a muddle, and it projects the wrong impression -- that breaking into the Pittsburgh job market is tough.

That impression needs to change. Pittsburgh employers and regional service organizations need to make it easy to find jobs and apply for them. In fact, and contrary to the popular image of Pittsburgh as a dying city, there are new jobs in Pittsburgh -- lots of new jobs. Good jobs. Westinghouse is hiring. Allegheny Technologies/Allegheny Ludlum is hiring. Kennametal is hiring. (Yes, I know that the company is located in Latrobe.) US Steel is hiring. And those are only the companies that I know about from face-to-face conversations. If your company is looking to hire, feel free to add a link in the Comments.

But Pittsblog comments are no way to run a region. There must be a better way to get this word out. There's work to do in Pittsburgh. (Feel free to adopt this as a slogan, if you like it.)

The Tech Council can only be part of a solution. Flipdog, now part of monster.com, has a Pittsburgh jobs board. And I only spent 15 minutes this morning looking around the web. Thoughts?

Pittsblog Confusion

Pittsblog -- this Pittsblog, the one that you're reading right now -- has been around for close to four years.

Yesterday, a new and different Pittsblog, "The Pittsblog," appeared on the scene. Here's a link. I don't know who this is. Judging from the subject matter so far, the blog appears to be interested in Pittsburgh professional and college sports and nothing more. That's a topic that I only rarely cover here.

What's to be done about the identity in names? There is no great legal principle at stake. In the interest of avoiding confusion in the Pittsburgh blogosphere, however, I'll suggest that the newcomer -- whoever it is -- find a different moniker and URL. I don't want to be confused with him/her; he/she doesn't want to be confused with me; and most important, new and returning Pittsblog readers want to be sure that they're getting the Pittsblog content that they're looking for.

Thanks to Pittsburgh

Is it possible to be optimistic and pessimistic about Pittsburgh at the same time? It's not only possible; it's absolutely necessary. "Believe in it? I've seen it done!," as the joke goes, or as the White Queen said in Alice in Wonderland: "Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

On the eve of Thanksgiving 2007, how about six reasons to give thanks to Pittsburgh -- that is, to be optimistic and pessimistic at the same time?

Painting with a broad brush:

One: Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. History and tradition are fabulous things, and respect for them is increasingly rare in American society. Pittsburgh has both in abundance. Perhaps too much abundance. "Respect for tradition" is too often equated with "inertia" and "complacency." Pittsburgh is a nice place. Can't it get better?

Two: Raw materials. Specifically, intellectual raw materials. Pittsburgh has them. It has technical and artistic innovation and creativity coming out of the metaphoric ears of labs and studios all over town. What Pittsburgh lacks is (to hear some describe it) a broad-based established business and marketing infrastructure for taking novelty and building products and companies, and/or (to hear others) a cultural norm within that infrastructure that prizes and rewards risk-taking. Has Pittsburgh overinvested in basic research?

Three: Success. Pittsburgh is in many ways a victim of its own (historical) success. A century ago Pittsburgh was filled with risk-takers of most sorts, who succeeded brilliantly and built giant industrial enterprises. So well, in fact, that today it's difficult to imagine any pursuit other than sustaining or replicating that success. Sports and business have a lot in common on this score. Our cultural institutions still happily feed off the charitable proceeds of Pittsburgh's past. Both business and cultural institutions might consider competing on contemporary terms, rather than competing against historical benchmarks. How about this? Instead of worrying about graduates of Pittsburgh universities who relocate to other regions to start their careers, why not compete aggressively to recruit top university grads to relocate to Pittsburgh from other regions? If a Wisconsin alum is more capable and a better fit than a Pitt alum, then go get the Wisconsin alum. Right?

Four: It's cheap to live here, and it's going to stay that way. Sure, real estate taxes are insane, but across the region as a whole, the cost of living in Southwest Pennsylvania is pretty low, and and it's not rising quickly if it's rising at all. That's great if you're already here. It's not particularly appealing if you're looking to move in, if you have a choice of destination (Pittsburgh or somewhere else?), and if you're evaluating your options from the standpoint of building assets. The low rate of increase reflects low demand. After you, then who?

Five: The Laurel Highlands are beautiful and accessible. Too bad about the air quality. Bill Peduto's green building initiative is a step in the right direction. How about the carbon footprint of the city's (and county's) existing buildings? What are Pitt, CMU, and UPMC doing to reduce the environmental impact of their operations?

Six: The Pittsburgh Diaspora. From the ruins of the 1980s, Pittsburgh has an underappreciated jewel: The good will of Pittsburghers -- both natives and emotional offspring -- everywhere. Smart trademark owners know how to monetize good will. How can Pittsburgh extract real value from the Diaspora?

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

Grrrr

I went out of my way the other day not to pile criticism on the Allegheny Conference for Community Development, after the Trib published a pretty scathing review of that outfit. Why stir up additional trouble on the eve of the ACCD's annual meeting.

Then the ACCD's chair, James Rohr of PNC, essentially declares at that meeting that Pittsburghers should stop talking about change and the future of the region. Things are just fine the way they are! Dan Fitzpatrick in the P-G writes up the details.

Jim Rohr reminds me of Kevin Bacon, in the movie Animal House. There's a moment toward the end of the film, during the parade/riot scene, when Bacon -- who has a minor role as a freshman ROTC and fraternity recruit -- stands in the middle of the sidewalk and screams, "All is well! Remain calm!"

And the onrushing horde of townspeople crushes him. Literally. Flat as a pancake.

Where is Pittsburgh's Senator Blutarsky?

Pittsburgh Trademark Dispute

Local restaurant icon Eat 'n Park is in the news with a claim that a New York-based cookie company is infringing Eat 'n Park's trademark rights in the smiley cookie. WTAE posted its story on the dispute on YouTube.

If this history of the smiley face is correct, then Eat 'n Park may be biting off more than it can chew. The New Yorkers are using an image -- a smiley face without a nose -- that's been in broad public use for many, many years, and that has nothing to do with the restaurant.

ACCD, ACDC, and Other Acronyms

Pittsburgh's mayoral ballots have barely been counted and already the "out with the old, in with the new" refrain has found another target. Chris Briem shines his light on the Trib's lengthy critique of the Allegheny Conference on Community Development on the occasion of the ACCD's upcoming annual meeting. The message of the story is that the ACCD has outlived its original mission. Now, Pittsburgh needs nimble, progressive urbanism focused on job creation, not big city ideas led by big business people. (None of that is news; in the past, I've written as much myself. Here's the link.)

I wish, however, that the Trib had focused less on staff titles and the ACCD's budget, and less on the implicit suggestion that the ACCD fiddled while Pittsburgh burned, and more on the content of the Conference's current priorities. The questions should be: What are those priorities? Do those priorities represent things that the ACCD can pursue more effectively (and more cost effectively) than other individuals, governments, or organizations in the region? Maybe the answer is no; maybe the answer is yes, but those are the questions to which answers are worth nailing down.

The ACCD gets into trouble, I think, at least in part because it doesn't effectively sell itself. After I published my ACCD critique two years ago, I heard from a lot of people -- including some quoted by the Trib -- who wanted to congratulate me for hitting the nail on the head. Over time, I started to hear a smaller and quieter suggestion that the ACCD's more public intiatives (such as the Pittsburgh 250 campaign, of which I'm skeptical) don't represent the bulk of its activity. It may be that both points of view are right, but it's difficult for me, as an outsider, to assess them. I don't mean that the Conference should hire a marketer. Rather, I wish that the ACCD would do more to pull back the curtain. Here's the ACCD site list of the Conference's current initiatives. Given that summary, which is all over the place, I'd wonder, too, about how staff time is being spent and how the ACCD budget is being allocated. Maybe the ACCD should change how it goes about its -- and the region's -- business. Let the people know what's happening, and let them participate in Pittsburgh's future. Can the ACCD do that? Will it?

I'm not optimistic, but I'd be delighted to be proved wrong.

I'm equally skeptical today regarding Pittsburgh's populace as a whole. Ruth Ann Dailey's column today picks up the "change is good, and change is inevitable, regardless" theme from the mayor's race, and while she doesn't call the Allegheny County Democratic Committee to account, she might as well have accused the party of standing in the way of the future. "Change is, well, inevitable. The election's biggest question was how fearlessly, or capably, we'd embrace it. That's still the big question." In a manner of speaking, that's right, but only in a manner of speaking. Are the 60+ percent of voting Pittsburghers who opted for the mayoral status quo prepared to accept "inevitable" change? Here and there, perhaps, but on a large scale, I just don't see it. I read the election result as a broad endorsement of the "no meaningful change" agenda. Pittsburgh is mostly just fine as it is.

For individuals and institutions that do (fearlessly) embrace change -- that is, who are willing to trade a bit of social and cultural bird in the hand for some speculative economic two in the bush -- the lesson to draw from the ACCD/ACDC combo is that neither local government nor local business bigwigs nor the 7th and 14th Wards can make change happen, or make change succeed. At least not in their standard modi operandi. Where the earth is moving in Southwest PA, it is moving on account of new players, and old players with new agendas. For better and for worse, keep your eyes on the universities, on UPMC, on the foundations, on high-tech manufacturing, and on the startup community. Keep your eyes on economic development competition from the suburbs. Keep your eyes on nonstop flights to and from the West Coast. In short and in sum, keep your eyes on Pittsburgh's newcomers.

The Sausage Factory

I had a long and pleasant conversation last Thursday afternoon with a writer freelancing for the Chicago Tribune, regardin a post-election story about Pittsburgh's Mayor. As is customary in journalism, all of that got boiled down to a couple of pithy quotations in the story, which was published today (link here). I'm not really sure what one of them means. There are common quibbles with the piece -- Does Pittsblog really keep watch over the city's politics? And I wonder why the writer didn't mention my day job? -- but at least my name is spelled right.

Pittsburgh Looks Forward

Luke Ravenstahl's victory in the Mayor's election was no surprise. As it must, Pittsburgh looks ahead. Will Mark DeSantis remain publicly invested in the vision of a New Pittsburgh that he tried to articulate during the campaign, and again last night? If you want to review that vision, it's online. In his entry today, Chad Hermann posts the full text of DeSantis's eloquent concession speech. Let's hope, for Pittsburgh's sake, that DeSantis isn't one-and-done. Whether or not he has the stomach for another run in two years, Pittsburgh needs his voice.

What will the 35-percenters do? Will DeSantis's supporters gravitate back to Bill Peduto -- the long-standing voice of the Eastern neighborhoods, or align with the emerging Patrick Dowd? The revolution, such as it is, needs a face and a voice. If DeSantis isn't it, who's up next? And will that person be able to find backers willing to invest in building a political organization that doesn't rely on Pittsburgh's long-standing party apparat?

Someday, Pittsburgh will look back. Will city and regional residents of the future look back on the election of 2007 as just another example of Democratic dominance? Or will they think that Mark DeSantis and his supporters energized a sustainable politics for a New Pittsburgh? Will 2007 be regarded as a turning point, or as another bump in the road for the Democratic juggernaut?

The same old themes -- Old Pittsburgh / New Pittsburgh; Democrat / Republican; young / old; authentic Pittsburgher / carpetbagger; immature juvenile / mature adult -- can get overplayed in these reviews. Pittsburgh can use some new themes. On NPR this morning, I listened to a report about the first African-American to be elected mayor of a major American city: Carl Stokes, in Cleveland, 40 years ago.

And I wondered what it would take for Pittsburgh to elect an African-American mayor.

UPDATE (11/10/07): What he said.

Planning Myths?

Many thoughtful Pittsburgh observers, including one momentum-building candidate for Mayor of Pittsburgh, argue that the Pittsburgh *region* needs more attention *as a region.* I think that's right, but it's important to be clear regarding what that means. What Southwest Pennsylvania could use is more regional *coordination,* not necessarily a central regional planner. "Central planning" is just as problematic as a regional concept as it is as a local urban concept.

Here's a link to a recent paper that uses "central planning" as a something of a rhetorical straw man -- but may be on to something nonetheless. Randal O'Toole, Debunking Portland: The City that Doesn't Work. O'Toole is out of the Cato Institute, which is a well-known Libertarian think tank, so if you wonder about his bias, there it is. Whether the bias matters is a different question. Here's the abstract for the paper:

Though many people consider Portland, Oregon, a model of 21st-century urban planning, the region's integrated land-use and transportation plans have greatly reduced the area's livability. To halt urban sprawl and reduce people's dependence on the automobile, Portland's plans use an urban-growth boundary to greatly increase the area's population density, spend most of the region's transportation funds on various rail transit projects, and promote construction of scores of high-density, mixed-use developments.

When judged by the results rather than the intentions, the costs of Portland's planning far outweigh the benefits. Planners made housing unaffordable to force more people to live in multifamily housing or in homes on tiny lots. They allowed congestion to increase to near-gridlock levels to force more people to ride the region's expensive rail transit lines. They diverted billions of dollars of taxes from schools, fire, public health, and other essential services to subsidize the construction of transit and high-density housing projects.

Those high costs have not produced the utopia planners promised. Far from curbing sprawl, high housing prices led tens of thousands of families to move to Vancouver, Washington, and other cities outside the region's authority. Far from reducing driving, rail transit has actually reduced the share of travel using transit from what it was in 1980. And developers have found that so-called transit-oriented developments only work when they include plenty of parking.

Portland-area residents have expressed their opposition to these plans by voting against light rail and density and voting for a property-rights measure that allows landowners to claim either compensation or waivers for land-use rules passed since they purchased their property. Opposition turned to anger when a 2004 scandal revealed that an insider network known as the light-rail mafia had manipulated the planning process to direct rail construction contracts and urban-renewal subsidies to themselves.

These problems are all the predictable result of a process that gives a few people enormous power over an entire urban area. Portland should dismantle its planning programs, and other cities that want to maintain their livability would do well to study Portland as an example of how not to plan.