What Eric Doesn't Get

Wish I had time to explain what Eric Schmidt's hits and misses when the Google CEO claimed that Pittsburgh "an ideal environment for start-ups." (See the Post-Gazette interview here.) A la the Princess Bride, that phrase does not mean what you might think it means. More, perhaps, later.

From the Sublime to the Ridiculous: Fantabulous Post-Summit Media

The Pittsburgh of this New York Times post is recognizable to many, warts and all, but this CNN travel report on Pittsburgh's glam self is just too over the top. Time for a moratorium on stories about Pittsburgh's reinvention. Everyone move along; there's nothing more to see here, at least for a long while.

Pittsburgh Bathes in Media Warmth

The G-20 media machine that ate Pittsburgh served up a scrumptious buffet in the Financial Times today. As Jim Russell put it, the Financial Times Hearts Pittsburgh. And as Jim also puts it, there is nothing new here, but it's a nice package. There are quotes from a number of usual suspects. Even the Allegheny Conference won't be offended by mine.

The stories:

Face of the city: Civic foresight aids shift to cafe culture

Industry: No longer ‘hell with the lid off’

Rennaissance: Thriving on diversity instead of its mills

New industries: More than eds and meds

The Story Behind Pittsburgh's Revitalization, Part X

[Part I is here] [Part II is here] [Part III is here] [Part IV is here] [Part V is here] [Part VI is here] [Part VII is here] [Part VIII is here] [Part IX is here] [Part X is here]

Part X is here, the final part, the one post to explain it all: How did Pittsburgh reinvent itself?

I've already answered that question in large part. Pittsburgh didn't reinvent itself at all. Reinvention has happened. The difference between those two statements is important, and that difference is the theme that I want to touch on here and use to close this series. "Pittsburgh," if that name means "the government, business, and educational leaders of the city and region," didn't decide upon and execute a strategy of economic diversification and real estate development. Some cities are born to diversification; some cities have diversification thrust upon them. Pittsburgh is one of the latter.

The people of Pittsburgh, over a long period of time and in fits and starts involving people who were already here, people who moved in, and people who have since moved on, invested time and money in things that they were and are passionate about. Some of that is scientific and technological research; some it is the arts; some of it is starting and growing businesses; some of it is building institutions; some of it is building buildings; some of it is nurturing communities and families. Some of it is an intense desire to get rich; some of it is an intense desire to give back. That collective energy is no longer tethered to the fact or the mythos of the steel industry. The literal tethers largely disappeared by the mid-1980s. The metaphorical and emotional tethers have been fraying for some time. That collective energy is now tethered instead to the idea of a new Pittsburgh, built on the foundations of the old Pittsburgh. Revitalization is bottom up, not top down.

As usual, I have more help than I need in making this case from writers who are paid to serve up at least bits and pieces of the big picture. The Post Gazette recently pointed out the transformative impact on Pittsburgh's economy of women entering the workforce in large numbers. That's a classic piece of bottom-up data, and the overall impact of the development is undeniable yet undeniably incremental. It is no surprise that the recent Wall Street Journal gloom-and-doom perspective on Pittsburgh simply does not account for the phenomenon; the change in the demographics of the local workforce is something that happened while a lot of armchair commentators weren't looking.

As important as the raw number of women in the workforce is something that's missing from the PG story but in greater evidence today than ever before: The number of women in leadership positions around the region, in government and especially in business and in not-for-profits. I don't think that it's a coincidence that Pittsburgh's recent flourishing has been accompanied by a very visible diversification in the offices of the CEO, president, and executive director. More women in leadership positions mean that fewer histories are keeping talented people from bringing their skills to the public table. That's a good thing.

The other piece of essential evidence here is Pittsburgh's start-up and entrepreneurial economy, which often focuses on high tech ventures and which is starting to mature, at long last. When CM's Luis von Ahn sold his company to Google the other day, there was a distinct lack of "rats! there goes another future savior of Pittsburgh" crying in local boosters' beer. That's progress, whether or not Google takes the technology to California. (I have no idea what will happen, but my guess is that Google bought the company in part to keep it here.)

The poster child cited most often as the engine behind the gradual emergence of Pittsburgh's start-up scene is Innovation Works, the state-supported early investment fund and business mentoring organization. The Economist, for example, called out IW for its role in Pittsburgh's economic resurgence. IW, though, is a great example of the wrestling between top-down and bottom-up when it comes to Pittsburgh's future.

As welcome as IW's success in recent years has been, and as welcome as contributions from the many other economic development organizations often are, it's important not to overstate either their role in getting the region to this point or, more important, their roles going forward. If Pittsburgh's entrepreneurial / high-tech community is going to have real traction, if it is going to scale, then IW and its counterparts either should become comparatively unimportant, or they should find new missions, or both. What Pittsburgh should want, and what Pittsburgh needs for its nascent "revitalization" to take hold and grow on its own, is for the entrepreneurial economy to become self-sustaining: ideas, entrepreneurs, and capital find each other without federal, state, or local government-sponsorship. This doesn't happen by magic; it takes work, and folks in Pittsburgh who want to see this happen need to build -- and in some cases, are starting to build -- the infrastructure that will support it. The entrepreneurship community needs to become more authentically bottom-up, and less supported from the top down.

I described what I mean by all of this in some earlier posts this year:

The tech and start-up community in Pittsburgh should focus on building and sustaining what I called an "entrepreneurship commons." That commons is related to but distinct from something else of great importance, what I called Pittsburgh's entrepreneurship "Darknet." I gave some illustrations in those post and the comments. Both of those things stand in contrast to something that I criticized when I rained on the entrepreneurship parade. I decried the fact that entrepreneurship-oriented organizations in Pittsburgh are driven by public funding imperatives (that is, top-down imperatives) to focus on short-term employment gains, or what I called "retail economic development," rather than on building structures for success, or what I called "wholesale economic development." (Remember, the retail/wholesale distinction here is a metaphor.) Companies come and go; jobs come and go. Those are facts of the 21st century marketplace, and Pittsburgh isn't immune to them. Pittsburgh needs to focus on ensuring that there is a steady supply of new firms and plenty of opportunities to create and grow them. An entrepreneurship commons can do that. And an entrepreneurship Darknet is a network that leverages the value implicit in a commons in order to build new firms -- without reliance on or celebration of innovation brokers such as IW. No offense to my friends there, but Pittsburgh would be a healthier economy if its tech firms didn't need to celebrate IW as much as they do. A thriving entrepreneurial economy is a more thoroughgoing bottom-up economy than the entrepreneurial economy on display in Pittsburgh today.

Women in the workforce and a steadier drumbeat of entrepreneurship signal similar things: The growing and occasionally unnoticed acceptance of the new. The story of Pittsburgh's revitalization, going forward, really is the same story that has been and will continue to be repeated over and over in cities around the world: Identifying and building value from new people and new ideas -- which will come along, like it or not. The question is whether they are stifled or unleashed. Pittsburgh is full of both kinds of new, and increasingly they are unleashed. They aren't numerous or visible like they are (people and ideas) in New York, but Pittsburgh doesn't need them at that scale, and they are far more numerous and visible than they were even a handful of years ago. There is grumbling in some quarters that the newcomers can't and shouldn't find their way around a town where "turn left where the Isaly's used to be" still carries both metaphorical and literal significance. So, yes, knowing where the proverbial bodies are buried is still important in Pittsburgh.

But not as important as it has been in the past. Some of us have started to unlock the secrets, and we're happy -- more than happy -- to share. If you want to know where the Isaly's used to be -- seriously -- check this link. Use it in good health.

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The Story Behind Pittsburgh's Revitalization, Part IX

[Part I is here] [Part II is here] [Part III is here] [Part IV is here] [Part V is here] [Part VI is here] [Part VII is here] [Part VIII is here] [Part IX is here] [Part X is here]

I am into the home stretch with this ten-part series on Pittsburgh's current revitalization, its causes and cures. Today's installment briefly takes up a couple of technical points, which means I'll skip over Chris Briem's blast at Friday's downer of a Wall Street Journal column about Pittsburgh's past masquerading as Pittsburgh's future. I'll save a comment on that piece for Part X.

Instead, the more fortuitous timing is the Post-Gazette's item about the tour of Pittsburgh that County Exec Dan Onorato gave to the National Association of Counties. The focus of the tour and explanation for Pittsburgh's rise from the ashes was Hazelwood and the close-in Mon Valley: The Waterfront Mall. The Southside Works. The light office space in Hazelwood. Former industrial space -- former homes of major US Steel, LTV, and Jones & Laughlin steel works -- eventually cleared, and still later reborn as corporate office space, housing, and shopping.

(A question for Pittsburghers: I thought that J&L was bought by LTV in the late 1960s, so that the PG is misleading when it talks about LTV as the South Side works and J&L as the Hazelwood works. But maybe my history is wrong? Or maybe the J&L/LTV distinction survived in terminology despite the ownership change?)

The point that I want to address is the role of land use and redevelopment policy in Pittsburgh's revival. The tour that pointed to the Waterfront, the South Side Works, and Hazelwood makes the implicit argument that official economic development policy and economic development organizations have played key roles.

The view here is that the argument has a point. Earlier in this series, I expressed skepticism of the argument that Pittsburgh's government has somehow orchestrated the revitalization of Pittsburgh. There is no doubt that official land use and redevelopment policy has had a mixed record in Pittsburgh over the last decade and more. Successive plans to renovate parts of Downtown Pittsburgh, particularly the Fifth & Forbes corridor, and failed investments in new department stores Downtown, make that point pretty clearly. There is also the matter of one Bernardo Katz, and the less said about him, the better. Current efforts are far from uniformly successful. Pittsburgh's city government has been ham-handed in punishing skeptics of its development plans, especially when those skeptics occupy public offices that have a role in reviewing those plans. The lead economic development agency in Pittsburgh, the Urban Redevelopment Authority, was distracted by a weird corruption scandal that nearly ate the whole of government.

But the URA is out there, bureuacracy and all, plugging away. In a city whose unofficial motto might be "Don't just do something, stand there" -- that's the theme of the WSJ article -- the URA has been moving around, buying property and helping to package it for development. The Waterfront development in Homestead isn't a URA project (that mall owes its existence instead to the state-level TIF ("Tax Incrementing Financing") program). But the office developments along the Monongahela River? URA. South Side Works? URA. Housing and commercial development elsewhere in the city? URA. Not all of it is URA-assisted, by any means, and complain about tax subsidies and political favoritism (and we should, and we have), but without URA efforts Pittsburghers wouldn't see a lot of the amenities that they now look to as evidence of the city's current bright status.

There is a line of criticism that argues that local government shouldn't be involved in real estate development, as the URA has been. The private market is a better guide to private investment, it is said, and who knows how great Pittsburgh might be today if the URA weren't around. Sometimes that's true, sometimes that's not true. I'm usually not impressed by "what-if" stories. Private development capital hasn't exactly been beating down the door in Pittsburgh until relatively recently, and even in recent years the pattern of private investment has been hit-or-miss (even in the suburbs) and often it's been driven by TIF incentives). Even a policy of "let the market decide" is still a deliberate policy choice.

I mentioned tax policy. There are at least three tax notes worth mentioning in connection with Pittsburgh's revitalization:

One is the overall real estate tax assessment system in Allegheny County, which is a mess and which remains in limbo in the wake of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court's decision that the system is unconstitutional under state law. When that system restabilizes, its effect on property markets here will be interesting to watch. If you own property in Pittsburgh, its effects will be much more than interesting.

Two is what's called the land tax, or land value tax, or a split-rate property tax system, a system that is often associated with Henry George: real property is taxed a two rates, one (lower) rate for improvements; a second (higher) rate for the land itself. For decades, Pittsburgh taxed undeveloped land at a much higher rate than it taxed developed land. The goal of a land tax is to discourage land speculation and holding under-developed property, and to encourage development of raw land (d'oh!). There is some evidence that the split-rate system encouraged construction in Pittsburgh, especially commercial construction, during the 1980s and early 1990s. The split-rate system was abandoned after the county-wide reassessment in 2001. There are those who advocate a return to some form of land tax in Pittsburgh. I'll leave the debate on the merits to the tax experts, though a land tax alone wouldn't cure all ills. It is curious that the major recent flowering of development in Pittsburgh has come after the return to the single-rate system. In an earlier post in this series, I pointed out that new development in some areas comes with zero development in others. To me, that suggests that the virtues and vices of a land tax system have less to do with tax rates themselves than with how the system is administered. A tax system needs to be consistent from place to place (and parcel to parcel), and it also needs to be set at the right level to begin with. Neither may be true in Pittsburgh today.

Three is Pittsburgh's tax lien system. The city has had a large number of vacant and abandoned properties in the neighborhoods, and liens on those properties have stood in the way of selling them and getting development moving. A couple of years ago, the city started to buy back the liens, in effect getting taxes out of the way of improving the neighborhoods with private capital. The huge number of affected properties means that this project has a long way to run, but the fact that it got started at all is a positive sign.

There is more. Pittsburgh's neighborhood-oriented Community Development Corporations have flourished over the last decade; Pittsburgh's high deed transfer tax punishes those who buy and sell homes, discouraging turnover. But this post has hit the main points. Leaving development solely to the private market means that the process is subject to abuse; the market is deeply flawed. Guiding it through government hands means that the process is subject to abuse; government is deeply flawed. It's impossible to say that all of these activities and policies are manifestations of a master strategy for Pittsburgh. Instead, I think that it's better to say that lots of individual and local efforts, project by project and neighborhood by neighborhood, have accumulated over time to the point where Pittsburgh is able to stand back and point with justifiable pride to a quilt of relative prosperity. No matter which way one might like to turn in justifying the "best" way of structuring the process -- should government agencies and policies stay, or should they go? -- "planning" and "planners" have been important parts of it.

The Story Behind Pittsburgh's Revitalization, Part VIII

[Part I is here] [Part II is here] [Part III is here] [Part IV is here] [Part V is here] [Part VI is here] [Part VII is here] [Part VIII is here] [Part IX is here] [Part X is here]

Most of the posts in this almost-complete-ten-part-series on The Story Behind Pittsburgh's Revitalization, or How Did Pittsburgh Become the "It" City All of a Sudden, have had a good news/ bad news flavor. Pittsburgh has some undeniable economic and cultural momentum. It looks mah-vel-ous, to borrow Billy Crystal's brilliant Fernando Lamas parody, especially on a bright and warm blue day like today. I've been arguing that there is still a long road ahead. Lots of problems and challenges remain. Pittsburgh's progress comes at a price, and a lot of that price still has to be paid. There is no such thing as a free lunch.

As the end of the series approaches, I'm going to let out my inner optimist, so that I can finish with a bang, not a whimper.

Today's topic: Is Pittsburgh hip?

And the short answer is: It never was and it never will be, at least so long as anyone thinks that "hip" is defined by a New York or Los Angeles aesthetic. (Of course, those are two completely different things.) But -- good news ahead -- in the last few years Pittsburgh seems to have attracted and supported a younger, more progressive social, cultural, and political "scene" than anyone might have thought possible as recently as ten years ago. It's wrong to put too much emphasis on surface phenomena like the Whole Foods market in East Liberty, which gives a patina of cool to part of a single neighborhood. But below the surface, there is definitely something happening.

Ten years ago, the region was gripped with public fear of "brain drain," anxiety that the area's adolescents and recent college grads would leave Pittsburgh and take the brightest ideas and most passionate energy with them. That anxiety was almost entirely misplaced to begin with; young people in America are fated to move around. Leaving home and leaving their native region seems to be an American birthright. Pittsburgh is a more rooted (some would say, "European") city than many of its peers, but it never had any realistic hope that its experience over the long run would be different.

Pittsburgh's true anxiety was and to some extent, remains that no one from other parts of the country and the world wants to move here. More dynamic cities, places where "hip" really means something, are places where population churn is a fact of life: People go, people come. New ideas are constantly being imported as well as exported. The concept of the Pittsburgh "Diaspora," both natives and non-natives around the globe who are bonded psychically to Western Pennsylvania, has emerged to focus attention on the need to cultivate the economic value of Pittsburgh's international network. That link goes to Jim Russell's Globalburgh blog. Local Pittsburgh official-dom has recently joined this important bandwagon: the Pittsburgh Council for International Visitors was recently rebranded "Global Pittsburgh." Actual and would-be Pittsburghers can come home again, and even if they don't, their investment dollars can.

That's the smart money; what about the smart people? Population trends overall have not changed dramatically in Pittsburgh. The city's population continues to decline; the regional population stays mostly flat. Age distributions, however, are changing slowly, and the city of Pittsburgh remains surprisingly and importantly a key location for regional employment. The state as a whole may be getting slightly younger, and in Pittsburgh at the margins and in some particularly visible parts of the region, there seems to be movement: In arts, culture, and politics, there is an emerging tier of 20-something leaders who embrace what I call the "best of Pittsburgh's past" - the neighborhoods, the older racial and ethnic communities, even steel -- yet want to build something new on top of it. Residential and retail neighborhood revival in places like Lawrenceville, the Mexican War Streets, and parts of the Southside, the Strip, and even Downtown are emblematic of the new younger tone of Pittsburgh. The start-up economy in Pittsburgh -- the topic of Part IX of the series, coming next -- is slowly but surely leveraging this younger talent. Note yesterday's news: Carnegie Mellon's computer science rock star, Luis von Ahn, sold his company to Google. That is two great birds with one stone, a data point that shows that young + hip can meet big + rich, right here in the Burgh. (I don't want to set the bar too high; you don't have to be Luis von Ahn to make magic happen here.)

Social enterprises in Pittsburgh are on the march, combining not-for-profit social ambitions with for-profit strategies. The Sprout Fund, for example, finances people with big ideas yet small budgets. I can't catalog all of the landmarks in this space, but they include relative newcomers with a big impact such as Brillobox and pieces of the Pittsburgh establishment that continue to push the envelope, such as The Warhol. Podcamp Pittsburgh deserves a special shoutout for constantly supporting social media ventures in Pittsburgh that model best practices for the rest of the US. Even the Pittsburgh Urban Magnet Project (PUMP) seems poised to finally escape its long-standing image as a boring place that serves the pinstripe suit set.

Rich Florida hypothesized years ago that cities of the future would rise or fall with the fortunes of young "creatives" of the type that animate the enterprises I've linked to above. His hypothesis was criticized intensely, primarily on the ground that a bustling sector of young "creatives" may be the result of emergent economic activity, rather than its cause. This post doesn't take a stand in that debate. The point is that a growing "creative" class is a signal that is positively associated with an urban economy on the move. Pittsburgh appears to have that going for it.

The Story Behind Pittsburgh's Revitalization, Part VII

[Part I is here] [Part II is here] [Part III is here] [Part IV is here] [Part V is here] [Part VI is here] [Part VII is here] [Part VIII is here] [Part IX is here] [Part X is here]

Where did Pittsburgh's revitalization come from? This is the seventh installment in a promised ten-part series. Today's topic: The uneven distribution of Pittsburgh's contemporary economic success.

The happy part of Pittsburgh's revitalization story focuses largely on some bright and shiny and pretty successful real estate development (and redevelopment) projects around the region. These don't tell the whole happy story, but they tell it simply and easily: A new casino and two relatively new sports stadiums on the North Side of Pittsburgh. New office towers, some renovated bank space, Market Square under reconstruction (again!) and a nearly-complete sports arena Downtown (well, we'll say that the arena is Downtown even if it isn't, really). The Southside Works mall/office/residential complex and the UPMC Sports Medicine Complex on the South Side, both occupying recovered steel mill space. The Waterfront mall in Homestead, punctuated by relics of the former Homestead steel works. New construction, especially medical research and hospital construction, in Oakland; a new Children's Hospital in Lawrenceville to go with newly chic Butler Street there. Lots of new, neat stuff in East Liberty: medical research, hotels, restaurants, grocery stores, hardware, lofts. New development in Pittsburgh doesn't seem to be concentrated in one place. And the suburbs are getting into the act: Ross Park Mall in the North Hills now has a Nordstrom, of all things. (Which makes Pittsburgh, at long last, as cool as ... Providence.)

There is more to say about precisely how this development and redevelopment came about; I'll save that for an installment on urban planning and land use policy.

Here, my caution is that enthusiasm for all this new stuff should be tempered by recognition of just how much of Pittsburgh -- city and region -- remains essentially untouched. There is a structural problem at work: Pittsburgh's 20th century prosperity was driven by the fact that Pittsburgh possessed a nearly unique combination of access to raw materials, transportation, energy, and financial resources. Because of the location of those things, however, Pittsburgh's economic might was distributed across the region -- up the river valleys, in particular -- rather than being concentrated in one place, such as Downtown.

When the steel economy crashed, those valley communities were the hardest hit. As the region's economy has slowly re-emerged and parts of it have been re-developed, there has been little reason, in purely economic terms, to focus on them. In a manner of speaking, the money was sucked out of one part of the Pittsburgh region; new money is being injected elsewhere. That proposition holds in the broad, overview sense in which I've been writing; as to any particular town or neighborhood, the details may vary.

Combine that proposition with a history of racial and ethnic diversity that has left Pittsburgh composed almost exclusively of a white majority and black minority population, and you see the overall landscape that I described in this post not long ago. I'll re-post the relevant part of that observation:

"There are two Pittsburghs today. There is the city and region that is the object of some guarded optimism courtesy of tech and arts and higher ed and health care that supports emerging economic development. Call that First World Pittsburgh. And there is the fading Steel Valley region with no advocates, but plenty of pure pessimism and worse. Call that Second World Pittsburgh. Our "Manifesto" is nominally addressed to both, but in reality our limited ability to affect First World Pittsburgh is diminishing rapidly when it comes to Second World Pittsburgh.

Couple those "two Pittsburghs" with these two Pittsburghs. Today's Post-Gazette headline says it all: "Pittsburgh's 'Livable' label called lie for blacks." The story and the meeting that it covers follow on this report from the University of Pittsburgh that describes the bleak condition of Pittsburgh's African-American population. There are clearly not two but three Pittsburghs. Call this Third World Pittsburgh, burdened by poverty and crime and no obvious way out.

Second World Pittsburgh and Third World Pittsburgh, the closing of Duquesne High School and the condition of the African-American community, are symptoms of a single problem. Describing it fully would take volumes, and my relative ignorance of Pittsburgh's history puts me at a disadvantage that is deeper than usual. The core problem, however, is simple: Pittsburgh's industrial economy shifted sharply downward shortly after WWII, at right around the same time that that city's African-American population was swelling with newcomers. Structurally, lots of new people arrived; yet jobs were on the way out. What we see today is the product of long-time systematic inattention to that combination. First World Pittsburgh largely takes care of First World Pittsburgh.

What to do? ... Our Manifesto and Diaspora projects have to include them as part of their agendas, naively optimistic as our group may sometimes be. The Diaspora should be metaphorically as well as literally geographic; the Manifesto needs to address all of Pittsburgh's Worlds. No number of new startups in Oakland will compensate for the disappearance of the Steel Valley, or the inequities described by Larry Davis and Ralph Bangs at Pitt."

The comments to that post added some important elaborations: There are "Suburban Pittsburgh" and a "Central Pittsburgh" subdivisions of what I called "First World Pittsburgh." The two groups share positions of power but do not identify with each other; their alliance is tenuous at best. And we might recharacterize "First World Pittsburgh" yet again, as "Traditional Pittsburgh," those who long primarily for the prestige that the city enjoyed in its golden age; "Corporate Pittsburgh," those who associate Pittsburgh with the benevolent dictatorship that governed the region during and after the first regional renaissance; and "New Pittsburgh," the Young Turks who are at the forefront of new efforts in arts, tech, and real estate -- and who are impatient for "Traditional Pittsburgh" and "Corporate Pittsburgh" to get out of the way.

No matter how you divide up the community, it is clear that "Pittsburgh," like many cities, is an amalgam of cultural and economic interests that are in conflict as often as they are aligned. It is tempting and even sometimes right to see Pittsburgh's revitalization as the product of the convergence of these interests, and to see flaws in the revitalization project as the products of a failed infrastructure of cooperation. Even the struggling Steel Valley is sometimes characterized by micro-versions of these same conflicts. Head out to Braddock, where the force and face of "new," mayor John Fetterman, struggles against the town's old guard. There was a time in Pittsburgh when an infrastructure of cooperation existed, and it worked well, across public and private lines, and city and county lines. But the region was a simple place then, economically and culturally. It was relatively easy for all of the oarsmen to pull together.

That is no longer true. There aren't enough resources to go around. Pittsburgh's "renaissance" today celebrates the effect of the resources that have been put to work. But there are those communities that go without. At times, the conflict between New and Old (or Traditional and Corporate, City and Suburb) masks the deeper problem that some (many?) former steel communities, and some neighborhoods in the City of Pittsburgh itself, are sliding more deeply and inexorably into ineradicable poverty.

New Innovation and Entrepreneurship Program at Pitt Law School

My employer, the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, has taken its first concrete steps toward meaningful participation in the entrepreneurship economy in the Pittsburgh region. Pitt Law is now the home of something called the "Innovation Practice Institute," or IPI, a center for programming for our law students and eventually (I think) for practicing lawyers.

As I understand it, the goal of the IPI is to train new lawyers (and re-train existing ones, possibly) with an eye to the different needs and new dynamics of the emerging company marketplace, particularly in Pittsburgh. There will also be substantial attention given to educating lawyers in the new economics of the legal profession.

The director of the IPI is Pitt Law alum and local entrepreneur Max Miller. Initial funding has been provided by the Innovation Economy program at the Heinz Endowments.

I'm posting this note today because the IPI now has a live website, which you can find here. The website also identifies the IPI's initial, impressive roster of partners.

The Story Behind Pittsburgh's Revitalization, Part VI

[Part I is here] [Part II is here] [Part III is here] [Part IV is here] [Part V is here] [Part VI is here] [Part VII is here] [Part VIII is here] [Part IX is here] [Part X is here]

This ten-part series is devoted to the topic: How did Pittsburgh get revitalized? If there is a sense that the city and region have an esprit and momentum today that was lacking in Pittsburgh even ten years ago, where did those things come from? So far, I've written about historical factors, livability, sustainability and the environment, Pittsburgh's "character," and politics.

Today's topic is sports, and the relationship between Pittsburgh's sporting successes -- and failures -- and the city's and region's sense of themselves. Certainly, when the Pittsburgh Steelers and Pittsburgh Penguins win championships, Pittsburgh residents and ex-pats share an intangible collective sense of pride in the city itself, as if they had something directly to do with what happened on the field or on the ice. The same feeling extends to professional baseball, though a dwindling number of living Pittsburghers remember the championship seasons of 1979 and 1960, or the near-misses of the early 1990s.

In other words, today's aura of Pittsburgh success owes no small debt to the recent successes of its professional athletes. It also owes no small debt to long-ago athletic successes. The Pirates won the World Series over the Yankees in 1960 under circumstances so miraculous that fans still gather on the anniversary of the deciding game to relive the deciding moment. The Steelers won four Super Bowl championships during the 1970s, and the Pirates won again in the 1979, at a time when it might be said that the city had virtually nothing else going for it. Pittsburgh was the City of Champions then, as some say it is again. But then the point was simply survival. Without the Steelers and Pirates of the 1970s, and the Penguins of the early 1990s, I wonder whether there would be have been much to revive in the late 1990s. [Updated: Chris Briem and Martin Andelman try to refine the timing of the region's industrial decline relative to the success of the Steelers, a mapping that my original post left vague. The Super Bowl years concluded before the region really imploded, but after reading both of their posts it seems likely that Pittsburgh had already absorbed a sense of economic foreboding as the Steelers came to prominence -- even if that foreboding had not matured fully in economic terms. As regional mythos, Steelers invincibility gradually took the place of steelworker invincibility.]

If you live here or grew up here, you don't need me to tell you any of that. Today is the opening game of the Steelers' campaign to make Pittsburgh "Seventh Heaven" (in recognition of the team's anticipated seventh Super Bowl victory), and like many residents, as I type this entry I'm wearing my jersey.

If you're an outsider getting caught up on the mechanics of Pittsburgh's renewal, then it's likely that the hold that sports have on this area is not a complete mystery. The fan support should seem familiar. All but two of the G20 nations that will descend on Pittsburgh later this month compete today or have competed previously at the top levels of international soccer, and the passion of Pittsburgh sports fan is matched, if at all, only by the passion of football supporters for local clubs around the world. To a G20 visitor, the meaning of a Steelers jersey on game day, and the value of Steelers supporters to the aura of the city, translates roughly into the meaning of a ManU jersey for Manchester, or a Barca jersey for Barcelona.

But the sport itself, and the implications of the sport for the region, require some untangling.

On the implications:

Pittsburgh's present aura is enticing, but in the abstract, it doesn't mean much. Does the aura translate into economic good fortune? Not as directly as you might think. To the extent that professional sports have a direct bearing on the economic fortunes of a city, the balance of payments decidedly favors team ownership and the athletes themselves. The Steelers don't create wealth; they redistribute wealth. To a team owner or player (or broadcaster or other rights-owner), the obsessive loyalty of fans is highly lucrative. For us fans, being fantastically and obsessively loyal is expensive. Being a supporter sucks up time. It can suck up relationships. It sucks up money.

If you're a Steelers fan, ask yourself how much money it would take to persuade you to give up all affectations of your support for a year. No watching or listening to games. No tailgating or parties. No talking about games with buddies. No reading about games or the team online. No black-and-gold stickers or clothing or beer mugs. $1,000? $5,000? No amount, because the sacrifice would be just too great? In economic terms, if not in actual cash, that's the transfer of wealth from you to the Rooneys and to the team's staff and players, and that's the amount of wealth that you might otherwise save for your future or invest in the region -- via your job, your family, or your hobbies. Is Pittsburgh better off with all of that wealth going to a football team? (To a lesser extent, to an ice hockey team? To a baseball team?) Lots of people would answer "yes"; Pittsburgh is an ecstatically tribal place, and Steelers support is simply and importantly a bonding ritual. Without it, who knows whether the city would hang together as an integrated cultural entity. (It is difficult to imagine the same tribal/economic case being made for fan support of major soccer clubs elsewhere, though the distinction may be one of degree rather than one of kind.) But consider the "no" answer, and consider how well off the region might be if all of that money were invested elsewhere.

And on the sport:

G20 journalists trying to decode the meaning of football in Pittsburgh might plausibly ask -- in fact, they should ask, and will ask -- what about football in Pittsburgh? The kind that the rest of the world understands, the kind played with your feet ("foot"ball), with a round ball? It's a curious thing that a city that aspires to a global presence has no professional soccer team to speak of. How many genuinely global cities can you think of that do not? Even in the US, whose First Division soccer league is hardly a major sport by American standards, New York, DC, Chicago, Houston, Columbus (Columbus?) -- all of them have pro teams. Los Angeles has two. Pittsburgh? None. Or nil, in soccer-speak.

Pittsburgh has a long and glorious soccer history, much of which is unknown to most residents. Its oldest, most prestigious, and most successful soccer club, Beadling, has been in operation roughly as long as American football has been played in Pittsburgh, more than 100 years. Today, Beadling fields boys' and girls' youth teams and men's and women's adult teams. Harmarville Soccer Club placed two players on the 1950 US World Cup squad that shocked England.

But efforts to sustain modern pro soccer in Pittsburgh have struggled in the face of an indifferent media, the absence of appropriate venues, and a fan culture that is saturated with American football, ice hockey, baseball and, increasingly, college basketball. During the 1980s, the Pittsburgh Spirit played "indoor" soccer in Pittsburgh. Beginning in 1998, the Pittsburgh Riverhounds brought the outdoor game back to the region, but the Hounds have struggled financially and now compete in the Second Division of the United Soccer Leagues -- the third division of American pro soccer. The Riverhounds are semi-pro -- at best.

Under the surface, however, the growing visibility of international club soccer in American media -- even in Pittsburgh -- means that in today's Pittsburgh I am far more likely to see a European club jersey being worn on a sidewalk in Oakland, or even Downtown, than I was 10 years ago. There is a lively and internationally flavored soccer scene among pickup games in Schenley Park and among the over-30 and over-40 soccer leagues in the region. Many Pittsburghers are dismissive of soccer. The notion that football and ice hockey are authentic Pittsburgh sports, and soccer is not, remains lodged in the regions' collective sporting consciousness even if it is historically inaccurate. Someday, it is possible to imagine, Pittsburgh's sporting culture will catch up to its global ambitions, and the revitalization of Pittsburgh will be not only an American story but a fully international story.

The Story Behind Pittsburgh's Revitalization, Part V

[Part I is here] [Part II is here] [Part III is here] [Part IV is here] [Part V is here] [Part VI is here] [Part VII is here] [Part VIII is here] [Part IX is here] [Part X is here]

What's the story behind Pittsburgh's revitalization? Today's topic: What do Pittsburgh politicians and politics have to do with it? In general, what role has local government played?

It's a timely topic in part because of this recent post at Pop City: "Five Things that Allowed Pittsburgh to Turn the Corner." John Denny, who does PR for investment firm the Hillman Company, identifies the following five: RAD (the Regional Asset District that collects and distributes taxes to fund certain cultural services in the region); home rule for Allegheny County; the Life Sciences and Digital Greenhouses; river and trail restoration and access; and creation of the County's Department of Human Services.

I think that this is a good list in its focus on institutions rather than on individual people - or on "grit," but it is a decidedly "old school Pittsburgh" list in its focus on government and top-down organization as drivers of change in Pittsburgh. That's no surprise. The Hillman Company and the Hillman name are two of the most respected institutions in the entire region and icons of the Pittsburgh establishment.

So, while there is no doubt that each of the items on that list has played an important role in Pittsburgh over the last 10 years, it's also true that the story in each case is full of misses as well as hits. The current recession has exposed the flaw in the RAD formula, as recipients of RAD funds fight over a smaller pool of funds. Home rule gave us a strong county executive, but in practice that office is susceptible to exactly the same kind of local politics soap opera that characterizes the Mayor's Office and City Council. I will talk about the Greenhouses in a later post in this series, on Pittsburgh's tech economy, but a case could (and will) be made that the Greenhouses have stood in the way of authentic entrepreneurship, rather than facilitated it. Calling out progress on Pittsburgh's waterfront is a right thing to do, but the job is far from complete and, as the recent mini-flap over trail access at the new casino showed, government sometimes has to be prodded to do the right thing. The County's Department of Health Services, for all of its good work, is not in a position to address deeper structural problems that I once described as "Second World Pittsburgh" and "Third World Pittsburgh." More on that, too, in a later post in this series.

In general, it's just as easy to see Pittsburgh's government -- city and county -- as obstacles to revival as it to see them as facilitators. People outside of the region encounter the Mayor for the first time and are inclined to see him as the embodiment of a young, forward-looking city. It doesn't take much scrutiny to dispel that notion; even many of Luke Ravenstahl's supporters welcome his leadership precisely because it so explicitly echoes the way that Pittsburgh politics has operated for decades, via appeals to traditional urban Democratic constituencies and via backroom deals. But I don't want to bash-and-run; in recent months, it strikes me that the Ravenstahl is very slowly learning how to exercise the levers of power. The recent showdown with the Pennsylvania Legislature over Pittsburgh's underfunded pensions is one example; facing down County Executive Dan Onorato over the cost of security for the G20 summit is another.

Moreover, the Mayor's office is only part of the vast mosaic of government institutions, most of them formal, some of them informal, that play important roles in the region. "Fragmentation" is the local watchword, as partisans of city/county integration have noted for years. The City of Pittsburgh has 89 officially-recognized neighborhoods, or maybe 90. The county has 130 municipalities. Then there are the dozens (hundreds?) of other taxing bodies here. The overall population of the region has remained more or less stable while the population of the city has diminished dramatically. That redistribution of population has not been matched by a reallocation of public resources. Whether or not that reallocation should be somehow proportional is a separate issue. The point is that the demographic shape of the city of Pittsburgh and the surrounding region has changed fundamentally; how governments deal with those things largely has not. Real, productive, disciplined broad-based inter-governmental cooperation is necessary to get things done, but it's rare. Inter-governmental cooperation has produced little more than a handful of policies and projects that have moved Pittsburgh forward over the last 10 or 20 or 30 years.

Aside from the overlapping authorities, there are the same questions of priorities and sheer competence that afflict local government in just about every American city. The city of Pittsburgh operates under the Pennsylvania equivalent of municipal bankruptcy. Its pension liabilities alone are huge, and there is still no meaningful plan to address them, for reasons explored in detail by Chris Briem. Yet Pittsburgh's City Council talked itself into a twist recently over approval of an electronic billboard. Yes, there were meaningful questions lurking in that case about bureaucratic competence and perhaps even corruption -- but in public debates, those questions remained mostly buried. Pittsburgh's government has enthusiastically embraced gambling, and ten years ago it overrode the will of the local population in dedicating public funds to construction of stadiums -- beautiful facilities, for sure -- that house a professional sports team (the Pittsburgh Steelers) and an organization that calls itself "the Pittsburgh Pirates" and has the gall to compete in Major League Baseball.

Pittsburgh's suburbs are often little better. My own town just barely manages to keep the lid on the seething melodrama that lurks underneath the calm public surface of its Commission and School Board.

I could go on (what about the Pittsburgh/Philadelphia rivalry that plays out in the capital? what about the gubenatorial ambitions of the County Executive? what about the broken real estate tax assessment system?), but this is plenty.

There was a time, decades ago, when Pittsburgh's political leaders were beloved, when they mastered the art of public/private partnering, when government and business built and rebuilt the city and the people prospered. That time is long gone. John Denny's list in Pop City highlights some recent successes. It is certainly plausible to characterize them as meaningful contributions to Pittsburgh today, even while I've pointed out that there is more to the story. But as an explanation of how Pittsburgh "turned the corner," in his phrase? I think that there is much more to explain.

The Story Behind Pittsburgh's Revitalization, Part IV

[Part I is here] [Part II is here] [Part III is here] [Part IV is here] [Part V is here] [Part VI is here] [Part VII is here] [Part VIII is here] [Part IX is here] [Part X is here]

Part IV was going to be about politics in Pittsburgh, but the tidal wave of G20 media has started to crash on the shore around me, so I'm interrupting the series to take a topic out of order.

I want to challenge some Pittsburgh orthodoxy, something is that is spreading like a virus -- the bad kind -- through well-intentioned journalists who do what well-intentioned journalists sometimes do: Write the story they want to write, rather than write the story that's really there.

The story that they want to write, but the story that gets in the way of the truth, is a simple tale of hard work. Pittsburgh owes its current success to the hard work and grit of Pittsburghers themselves, who stuck with their beloved city through thick and thin. Pittsburgh and Pittsburghers are the tortoise to the hare of places like Florida and Arizona. There is a culture of hard work and modesty here, combined with an unrivaled passion for and loyalty to the city, that was forged in the steel era and drives the city forward today.

That theme -- that "character" matters most of all, and Pittsburgh's character has never really changed -- is most clearly on display in this recent love letter to the city, from Forbes.com ("Pittsburgh? Yes, Pittsburgh: Why the city on the Ohio River is the perfect G-20 host"). (A footnote: the author of that piece is a young and successful Pittsburgh expat. She is Mt. Lebanon High School Class of 2000!)

What's the problem? It is this: I doubt that Pittsburgh's "character," whatever it might be, is the cause of Pittsburgh's current condition.

I'm increasingly skeptical that Pittsburgh today has this "gritty" character that lots of people assign to it. Maybe it does, especially in some neighborhoods and communities, and especially among people who have lived here a long time. I know a lot of "gritty" people here. I also know a lot of enthusiastic and energetic movers and shakers, in the arts, in the neighborhoods, in politics, and in entrepreneurship -- and they aren't "gritty" at all. Many of them didn't grow up here and don't have family here and wouldn't know the inside of the region's steel history if they were hit on the head by a bust of Andrew Carnegie. Instead, these people have the same kind of passion and spirit and talent that you find in arts advocates, neighborhood organizers, emerging political leaders, and entrepreneurs anywhere. Eventually, I might make the case that Pittsburgh isn't succeeding today *because* of its historic gritty character -- assuming that this gritty character survives -- but *despite* it. Maybe. Count that as a hypothesis to be explored.

I understand why the "gritty character" story survives. It's a very American way of combining political/economic/cultural success with a morality tale: The good people, the folks who put their heads down and planned for the future and avoided the flash and dash, have come out on top. (And we Pittsburghers, of course, are the good people, especially when we're contrasted with Clevelanders or Baltimoreans.) Never mind that over the course of the last 100 years in Pittsburgh, many of the people responsible for organizing and leading Pittsburgh's major successful economic, cultural, and political institutions either weren't very nice (or even "gritty") and would struggle to achieve characterization as "the good people." In the morality tale, the workers and a small number of selfless capitalists and politicians are usually "the good people."

Never mind that putting Pittsburghers' collective heads down and planning for the future and avoiding the flash and dash ended up driving the city over an economic cliff in the 1970s and early 1980s and did precious little to bring things back to life over the succeeding 25 years. I do not suggest that Pittsburghers are not good or hard working or that our steelworker forebears didn't struggle mightily to achieve success for their families and for the region. They are, and they did. But I am skeptical of the morality tale that says that Pittsburgh is where it is today because good people wanted it and worked hard for it.

Let me suggest that if Pittsburgh really does want to continue to embrace its alleged "gritty" character, it might start by turning the directional arrow around. Pittsburgh's gritty character, if it has one, may not be the *cause* of Pittsburgh's alleged revitalization. Instead, Pittsburgh's character may be the *effect* of Pittsburgh's alleged revitalization. In truth, of course, there is probably some of both things at work, but the *cause* part is already out there in the public mind. Let me write briefly about the *effect* part, which doesn't get a lot of play.

In the Forbes.com story I linked to above, Council Member Bill Peduto is quoted: In the wake of the steel industry's collapse, "Pittsburgh really had no choice .... It was diversify or die."

There are a couple of ways to read that statement. I'll give Bill Peduto, who is a smart person, credit for the better version. The lousy version is this: Pittsburgh somehow *decided* to diversify its economy, and we all see the results today. "Eds and meds" were strategic investments in the 1950s that were seeded in anticipation of the end of steel. (I wrote about the key investments in Part I of this series.) But that's the lousy version, because it makes the implied statement that Pittsburgh somehow planned for the end of steel. And the historical record is quite clear: Pittsburgh didn't. Pittsburgh didn't diversify. [Harold Miller's Post-Gazette column yesterday made a related point: As late as 1980, "UPMC didn't even exist, and that Carnegie Mellon and Pitt were merely good regional universities."] Pittsburgh didn't want steel to stop, least of all the steelworkers who, as I wrote before, negotiated for better and better packages for themselves as steel sank inexorably towards its end. (I'm advised to include a link to John Hoerr's history of steel.) The region was perfectly happy to continue to rely on steel, until the market forced it to stop.

The better and more accurate way to read Peduto's statement is this: Pittsburgh had economic diversity thrust upon it. And, over a very long period of time, Pittsburghers threw off the psychological shackles that kept the population hoping and waiting for the big thing that would save the city. As Harold Miller points out, steel never completely left Pittsburgh; it's still here, though in a vastly smaller and different form. Pittsburghers -- including a growing number of vocal non-gritty, non-Pittsburghers who moved here and like it, like me -- eventually learned to stop worrying and love economic diversification. They really had no choice. Fortunately for the region, some key "eds and meds" investments had been made way back when, and those investments were waiting for more attention.

Having done that -- gradually accepting the reality of a new-ish economy -- Pittsburghers decided that they were not sad sack losers for letting steel slip away, at least not when someone from the outside world came to ask about the region. To those folks, whether they came calling in the late 1980s or late 1990s or late 2000s, Pittsburghers decided they were gritty after all. The city is still here; therefore it has grit. Pittsburgh's character today is its reward for not having melted away, like the Wicked Witch of the West, when steel had the cold water of mini-mill production poured on it.

But when Pittsburghers talk to each other? No grit. Pittsburghers are notoriously proud of their city, but they are also notoriously insecure about it. Readers of the blog will remember my characterization of Pittsburgh as an "Oreo" cookie: "Tough and proud when Pittsburgh takes on the outside world; chewy and marshmallow-ish when it comes to self-scrutiny." That's what finally persuades me that Pittsburgh's character is an over-drawn stereotype. The grit doesn't stick.

Next in the series: Politics (I promise).

Après the Cupcake: Pittsburgh's Deluge?

A couple of years ago, I fostered a silly little idea, or perhaps I just helped to foist it on a Pittsburgh public that was willing to digest this sort of thing: The emergence of Pittsburgh cupcakeries CoCo's and Dozen signaled the rise of a Floridian "Cupcake Class" in Pittsburgh, "[p]eople with the time, money, and taste to consume small portions of upscale baked goods." Longtime readers will remember that the Cupcake Class (the term itself was coined by Chris Briem) was my answer to the Custard Class, a long-ago Pittsblog comment on the relative absence of dynamism and diversity in the dessert economy.

The alleged point of the Cupcake Class was this: So long as Pittsburghers loved their fancy cupcakes, the city was on the path to prosperity. Rich Florida himself got in on the action, making a somewhat serious argument that linked cupcake demand to the supply of "creatives" that move cities in new directions. Unfortunately, that somewhat serious argument builds on the work of economist Robert Lucas, who is decisively skewered today by Paul Krugman's summary of the failures of economic theory.

Krugman has nothing to say about cupcakes, but the economics of cupcakes -- and of the Cupcake Class -- remain in the forefront of media minds. There is something about $4 pastries that focuses our attention -- or that sells newspapers. The Post-Gazette was nearly breathless in its coverage of Dozen's recent Downtown expansion. And the paper cooed its way to publishing a flattering recent account of the tulip cupcake mania that still grips New York City. I have no doubt that a G-20 journalist somewhere is writing about Pittsburgh's cupcakes as a sign of the city's renaissance.

Slate.com is now in on the action, and it more or less gets the point: the cupcake bubble must end; the cupcake crash is coming. Cupcakeries are one-trick ponies, and as everyone has jumped into the post-Sex and the City/Magnolia pond, the market has changed. The value proposition starts to change. Successful cupcake bakers are expanding (rather than innovating) in order to stay ahead of the pack, and they are at risk of losing their edge. It's one thing to market cupcakes-baked-with-love-in-the-back-of-the-store; it is something else entirely to market cupcakes-baked-with-love-at-some-faceless-facility-and-trucked-to-the-store. Why would the Cupcake Class go for that? When cupcakes are commodities, why not buy them from Paddy Cake or Giant Eagle? With the recession, $4 cupcakes are being repositioned as "affordable luxuries," but that's the discredited rhetoric of homo economicus, people making rational judgments about when and how to spend. As The Economist pointed out recently, even branded consumer goods are taking major hits right now. People are trading down; affordable "luxuries" are still luxuries. The cupcake bubble will pop. The cupcake fad will pass.

Does that mean anything for Pittsburgh? Slate.com is offering the truth behind the Cupcake Class (I wrote about it once before): This isn't a story about a city's emergent success with income distribution or "creatives." It's a story about entrepreneurship and what it takes to build a durable company out of a clever idea. Cupcakes come, and cupcakes will go. If Pittsburgh's cupcakeries are going to stick around -- and of course, may they live long, and prosper -- then they have to find more things to bake and sell than $4 pastries. The good news is that in Pittsburgh, it looks like this is actually happening.

Is Pittsburgh a post-cupcake city? We're ahead of the national curve? That, not "Pittsburgh has $4 cupcakes," really would be news that a G-20 journalist could sink some teeth into.

The Story Behind Pittsburgh's Revitalization, Part III

[Part I is here] [Part II is here] [Part III is here] [Part IV is here] [Part V is here] [Part VI is here] [Part VII is here] [Part VIII is here] [Part IX is here] [Part X is here]

The story of how Pittsburgh got this way – how it began to be revitalized (note the passive construction) – continues. Today: Green Pittsburgh, or Sustainable Pittsburgh.

If you have read Parts One and Two of this series, you’ll note a couple of themes:

First – While Pittsburgh is unquestionably brighter and hipper and on the move relative to its own recent history and relative to its peer cities, a great deal of the story remains to be written. Pittsburgh is a city in progress.

Second – There is no one source or cause for Pittsburgh’s recent emergence. Cities are dynamic things that emerge in any form from lots of sources – the economy, the environment, the infrastructure, the history, and other things. Right now, in Pittsburgh a lot of these things seem to be converging. But none of these paths is ever perfectly smooth. There are lots of "Go" signs around Pittsburgh right now, but there are also many "Caution" signs, and more than a few signs signal "Stop," or even "Go Back!"

Still, Pittsburgh has acquired a reputation for embracing Green-ness, or for Sustainability, in the jargon of the moment. The city and region are environmentally hip. Let’s break down the sources and prospects of the phenomenon. The conclusion is this:

It isn’t easy being Green.

Architecture: The green meme in Pittsburgh got started with the new Convention Center (site of the G20 summit), which was and remains among the largest LEED-certified buildings anywhere, if not the largest. It helps a lot that the building is not only green, but cool – hip, neat, a really distinctive addition to Pittsburgh’s Allegheny River waterfront and to the view from PNC Park. There are dozens of LEED certified buildings in the region and more on the way. In fact, one local PR firm sent me a G20 themed press release the other day that highlighted its client’s involvement in a large number of these. There is hope that the new Penguins hockey arena (officially, the "Consol Energy Center") will be certified LEED Gold. The Pittsburgh City Council recently approved a bill that requires that all publicly-financed development in Pittsburgh to be certified "green." The LEED-driven, build green bandwagon is gathering steam in a big hurry. In general, of course, smart and sustainable building practices are a great idea, and in Pittsburgh they seem to have captured the attention of a lot of the right people. But it's important to recognize that the goal isn't LEED certification itself; LEED standards have weaknesses, and LEED can be just a buzzword.

Air: Sometimes it seems like every time a "livability" survey puts Pittsburgh at the top of the chart, an "air quality" survey puts Pittsburgh somewhere near the bottom. In 2008, an American Lung Association survey named Pittsburgh as home of the worst levels of short-term particle air pollution in the US. Ouch. At least some of these readings are flawed; critics of the ALA study point out that measurements in Pittsburgh studied air quality not far from the huge US Steel coke plant in Clairton. Measurements in the Downtown neighborhood or in more heavily populated areas would, we argue, show Pittsburgh in a better light. How clean Pittsburgh seems today depends a lot on the relevant baseline. Compared to Pittsburgh's air in the middle of the 20th century, Pittsburgh's air today shines as day compares to night. Literally. But compared to what might reasonably expected in a modern metropolitan area, the air in Pittsburgh is adequate at best, and fragile, at worst. In 2003, when a massive power outage across much of the Northeast US stilled coal-fired power plants in the Ohio Valley, the skies above Pittsburgh -- downwind -- were noticeably clearer. A new "waste coal" fueled power plant is in the planning stages at Beech Hollow, just south of the Pittsburgh International Airport and upwind from Pittsburgh's densely-populated South Hills suburbs.

Water: Pittsburgh's riverfront location is the source of enormous pride, and all three major rivers today are marvelous multi-use sites: recreation and industry share the space. Even after the collapse of the steel industry cleared the riverfronts of most of the steel works, Pittsburgh's rivers remained almost exclusively "working" rivers, too crowded and polluted for recreational boating and with limited access for the general public. The riverfronts were dedicated largely to industrial use, lined by railroad rights of way, highways, abandoned industrial sites, and some legacy building materials suppliers. In 1995, Pittsburgh missed an opportunity to expand access to its rivers by building the new Allegheny County Jail on a prime parcel of riverfront property, adjacent to the Liberty Bridge. The region's view of its rivers appears to have changed dramatically over the last 15 years. Partnerships among local government (including former mayor Tom Murphy), real estate developers, and river access advocates have produced recreational trails along much of the riverfront Downtown, with more in development. The Great Allegheny Passage, a hiking and biking trail that connects Pittsburgh and Washington, DC, is complete nearly to Downtown Pittsburgh. Summer weekends and home football games at Heinz Field bring out large flotillas of recreational boaters. Fishing on the rivers is so good that in recent years Pittsburgh has twice played host to major bass fishing tournaments. On the North Side, Heinz Field, PNC Park, the Carnegie Science Center and related development have given a major visual and economic shot in the arm to the city. (The stadiums, of course, were subsidized with public money from existing taxes and state-supplied "loans" after local voters overwhelmingly defeated a proposal to supply public funds via a new tax.) Offices, educational facilities, and R&D space have brightened the site of the former J&L Steel Works along the river in Hazelwood; the South Side Works shopping mall and condo and office development has done the same on the opposite shore.

But major railroad rights of way still impede public access, especially across much of the South Side.

Energy production: Coal is king in Western Pennsylvania, which reflects the same truth on which Pittsburgh's steel and iron industries were founded: There is a lot of coal here, even after more than a century of mining. (There is also a lot of natural gas.) The new hockey arena has been christened the "Consol Energy Center" after the region's largest coal producer. That development recognizes the ongoing importance of coal to the region. But a host of clean energy alternatives are being explored here; Pittsburgh has a legitimate claim to being a center of 21st century energy research. Check out 3 Rivers Clean Energy for more, and a summary.

Waste and sewage: The Pittsburgh Water & Sewer Authority has been caught up in some serious financial troubles by virtue of who it chose as advisors in bond deals, but in this post the topic is where Pittsburgh's waste goes, and in what condition. And the answer is: In the rivers, down the rivers, and all too often -- raw. Industrial pollution of the rivers is no longer a major problem in Pittsburgh, but untreated sewage is. Pittsburgh's sewer systems are antiquated and inadequate, leading to ugly and expensive backups in homes and neighborhoods during heavy rains (the Shadyside and Oakland neighborhoods are often particularly hard hit), and ugly and expensive deposits downstream from the Point. In 2007, the Allegheny County Sanitary Authority (ALCOSAN) settled a claim by the US Environmental Protection Agency over countywide untreated sewage discharges (billions of gallons per year), a settlement that obligates ALCOSAN to spend roughly $3 billion by 2026 to fix the problems and bring the Pittsburgh region into compliance with the federal Clean Water Act. That is $3 billion that the county's ratepayers will have to absorb over the next 20 years. Truly clean water in Pittsburgh is a long way off.

Transportation: Both public and private transportation systems in Pittsburgh are creaking under the dual burdens of age, lack of funds, and the pressure of politics that trump sensible planning. Unlike many Americian cities, Pittsburgh has no true beltway for automobile traffic (the color-coded "belt" system, evident on some road signs, is not a system of highways and is largely ignored by residents), which means that freeway traffic ("parkway" traffic to Pittsburghers) travels from the periphery of the region into the heart of Downtown before making its way in a new direction. Poorly engineered approaches to Pittsburgh's major bridges, drivers who pause before entering tunnels, the lack of a grid system (and the accompanying absence of easily accessed alternative routes), and limited public funds for road and highway maintenance make rush-hour Pittsburgh traffic worse than its modest population otherwise might suggest. The public transportation system is likewise fragile. The Port Authority, which now operates buses, the city's two remaining Inclines, and a single light rail line, was a product of Pittsburgh's first Renaissance in the late 1950s and early 1960s. But declines in public support have produced successive rounds of service cuts. The light rail system is being extended from Downtown to the North Shore neighborhood at an extravagant cost -- driven by rules associated with its federal funding source -- while many Pittsburghers contend that better planning would have used the money to relieve congestion in the corridor between Downtown and the Uptown and Oakland neighborhoods. The brightest spot in the local transportation landscape today may be bicycles, which have found help in recent city administrations and among advocacy organizations. Between its hilly landscape; narrow, old streets; and drivers and cyclists historically unused to sharing streets with each other, Pittsburgh is a notoriously bike-unfriendly place. But with new bike lanes being installed on some major city boulevards, especially in the Strip District, and with the opening of additional riverfront bike and hiking paths, more cyclists are hitting Pittsburgh streets. Peaceful coexistence may be on the horizon.

Next (yes, there's more!): Politics.

Ghosts in Pittsburgh

Beginning on September 11 and continuing on Fridays and Saturdays through Halloween, "Haunted Pittsburgh" is offering a walking ghost tour on Pittsburgh's South Side. Pittsburgh may be haunted by demons of its industrial past after all!

Check out www.hauntedpittsburghtours.com for more details, including information about "ghost dinners" on Wednesdays at the Gypsy Cafe on the South Side.

Haunted Pittsburgh is brought to us by the ghosts in the machine: Tim Murray, known to some as one of the (zombie?) brains behind Carbolic Smoke Ball, and his colleague Michelle Smith. Back in July, in the dead (!) of summer and while I was out of town, the Trib ran a story that explained it all.

Cities are Not Computer Brands

I love Eve Picker's passion for making Pittsburgh better. I love her willingness to put herself out there, to invest her time and her money in her vision.

But her recent "utterly opinionated" post -- "Pittsburgh = Apple" (borrowing from a Coro fellow who was born in Cleveland) -- is wrong, wrong, wrong.

Eve makes the following metaphorical claim, drawing on what she believes to be the secret to Apple's (relative) success:

First, there is Steve Jobs:

A purposeful, visionary man, he did not allow anyone to bend him from the course he was determined to take. Just ten years ago I remember having altercations with PC users. They were arrogant and certain that PC was the only way. But I kept buying MacBooks and iBooks, seduced by their beauty and their supremely perfect design and functionality. I clung onto the hope that Apple Inc. would one day conquer the world as good Design and Vision should.

And then there is Pittsburgh:

If we want Pittsburgh = Apple, we must map our vision and relentlessly, unforgivingly, pursue it. It should be a vision of immense creativity and beauty. Let people laugh on the sidelines. Let people scoff at why we were selected for the G-20. We should ignore them and steadfastly move towards our vision so that Pittsburgh too, one day, will conquer the world.

But, but, but:

Apple hasn't conquered the world. It has persuaded much of the world that Apple is cooler than Microsoft, but Steve Jobs' alleged unwavering devotion to Design and Vision hasn't kept Apple in the game. What kept Apple in the game? iTunes. And what is iTunes? A beautifully executed but entirely opportunistic move by a company that was just starting to recover from the brink of extinction. Steve Jobs isn't a single-minded visionary. He is a magnificently nimble chameleon. If Pittsburgh really wants to take a cue from him, it should be on the lookout for other companies cities missing the competitive boat, big time, just as the music industry missed the pay-per-download model that was theirs for the taking in the late 1990s. Instead of innovating, the labels sued Napster, and now they're toast, watching Apple (which invented a business to go with the iPod) and now the videogame industry have them for lunch. By the way: Good luck with the whole gaming thing, Steve. That's the biggest entertainment market of the 21st century - far bigger than slick handheld computers. The iPhone may be the next big gaming platform. Will Apple let that happen?

But, but, but:

Cities aren't computer brands. There is no way for the Pittsburgh "we" to manifest unwavering devotion to anything. This is related to my point in earlier posts: Whatever neat stuff has happened in Pittsburgh over the last decade, that neat stuff doesn't mean that "Pittsburgh" has reinvented itself. There is no "Department of Reinvention," no place or person or committee that you can point to or apply to for its magic reinvention dust. Cities, American cities most of all, are fantastically fragmented, open, dynamic places. They are, in the jargon of the computing world, open systems, platforms where anyone and any group can plug in and get their application running. Pittsburgh isn't Apple, from this point of view; Apple, as brand and technology, is a closed system. The Apple icon represents Apple as czar, telling people what they can and cannot do. Want to build an application that runs on a Mac? On an iPhone? You have to get Apple's permission. (Sorry, Google!) No one in Pittsburgh (or in any city) has that power, and no one should. (Cities faithful to master planning czars are, on the whole, pretty soulless places.) Pittsburgh might be Windows instead, a platform with its APIs available to anyone who wants to build something new to run on the machine. Does that make Pittsburgh sleek, virus-free, drool-inspiring, and sex-on-a-chip? Absolutely not. But that can make Pittsburgh interesting, challenging, and diverse, the way that cities are, with the potential to grow and change in unexpected ways -- some of them great, some of them lousy, some of them just weird. "I'm a Mac" is a brilliant ad campaign because it validates the vanity of the Apple-owning choir. I love the I'm a PC campaign even more, because you just never know what you're going to get next. ("I have a beard?" What's with that?) And yes, I know how the ads were produced.

But, but, but:

Pittsburgh isn't really Windows, of course. (Pittsburgh is bankrupt, and Microsoft is cash-heavy - but I digress.) Windows, like Apple, is a brand as much as -- probably even more than -- it is a machine, and Pittsburgh is a brand far less than it is a process, or a work in progress. Once upon a time, Windows was an abusive monopolist, supplying the technology that powered the world. (Wait - didn't Pittsburgh do that once?) More important, even today, Windows the machine is still controlled from Redmond. Microsoft lets others build applications, but MS defines the core, and persuading others that Microsoft has to be allowed to define the core -- because Microsoft has to ensure the quality of the overall experience -- is what makes Windows the brand that it is. Windows is an open system compared to Apple, but just like Apple, at the end of the day Microsoft has a stifling control fetish that's wrapped in the concept of the brand. We're love slaves either way.

No, if Pittsburgh were a computer system, it wouldn't be a brand at all; it would be a changing technology. It would be Linux (yes, I know that "Linux" is a trademark), an operating system that's genuinely open, where anyone with a bit of skill can open up the core and tinker with it, make changes to it, add to it, extend it, change it for their own benefit. Linux isn't easy; it's not slick; you have to sweat a bit to make the relationship work. No one thinks that Pittsburgh is, will be, or should be slick. Pittsburgh doesn't come easy, and it never will. And lots of people think that Pittsburgh is clunky and/or geeky - in a good way.

The open source metaphor for a big city doesn't mean chaos. If you know software, then you know that open source methods can support giant, robust, effective, and competitive products. Linux, like any open source software program, comes with a set of governance rules (a license), and there's a crew of keepers of the Linux flame who make sure that the core functionality of different flavors of Linux remains intact. Pittsburgh isn't and shouldn't be Houston, which is the Wild West (or Wild South) of the land use planning world. But the control fetish is absent; the keepers of the Linux flame are there to ensure that the core remains open for everyone, not to ensure that the brand remains the brand. No one is a Linux love slave. If you don't like the relationship, then change it. Or to quote one of my favorite pop philosophers, "If you don't like the news, go out and make some of your own." The same goes for Pittsburgh. Ironically, of course, this is precisely what Eve herself has been doing for the last few years, with some spectacular results.

Pittsburgh doesn't need the style of Steve Jobs, in other words. It needs the stewardship of Linus Torvalds.

The Sobering Truth About Pittsburgh?

The Angry Drunk Bureaucrat is stone-cold sober yet still slashes his way (I've always assumed that ADB is a man) to an essential sixty-second visitor's guide to Pittsburgh's past and present.

As an expose of the underbelly of the alleged Pittsburgh renaissance, that post is pithier (and truthier) than anything I've ever seen or read. Some excellent movie quotations capture its spirit better than anything I could offer myself:

Crocodile Dundee: "That's not a knife. THAT's a knife."

Col. Nathan Jessep: "You can't handle the truth."

Vinny Gambini: "You were serious about that?"

The only problem with it is that real visitors will have no idea what ADB is talking about. Which means that the post really captures the point of Pittsburgh.

The Story Behind Pittsburgh's Revitalization, Part II

[Part I is here] [Part II is here] [Part III is here] [Part IV is here] [Part V is here] [Part VI is here] [Part VII is here] [Part VIII is here] [Part IX is here] [Part X is here]

What's behind Pittsburgh's revitalization or alleged "renaissance"? That's the question that I'm exploring in this series of posts. There is no doubt that Pittsburgh, as both city and region, looks cleaner and brighter and has a hipper and more positive cultural tone than it did even a decade ago. Its problems are far from behind it, but Pittsburgh has undoubtedly come a long way. And compared to the state of the city 20 or 30 years ago, the changes are even more dramatic.

It's important to scratch the surface of this story, however. This post is about the now-vaunted "livability" of Pittsburgh.

PR supplied by the local G20 partnership sums up the recent news this way:

Chosen as the most livable city in the United States for the fifth year in a row - and the 29th most livable city worldwide by The Economist, Pittsburgh offers economic stability, culture, educational opportunities and natural beauty to residents. Forbes.com also named Pittsburgh as one of the most livable cities in America, noting the city's low cost of living, crime rates and unemployment.

Pittsburgh's reputation for livability depends on two key, related factors: its "economic stability" and its "low cost of living." I put those phrases in quotation marks because they are quotations, not because they aren't true. They are true, and they are important. But they are weaknesses at they same time that they are strengths. Livability is a great thing; Pittsburghers are justly proud of the recognition of the city and region as a measure of just how far both have recovered since the collapse of steel. But "livability" based on "economic stability" carries some big risks.

Why?

First: Pittsburgh shines today partly because its peer cities continue to suffer so badly. By comparison with places like Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, and St. Louis, Pittsburgh is doing pretty well overall, and by comparison it was doing pretty well overall even before the recession that began last year. Pittsburgh's proud place is partly a version of the old joke in which a volunteer is called to step forward from a lineup -- and all but one member of the line take a large step backward. Pittsburgh took its big step backward back in the 1970s and early 1980s and since then has crept forward -- perceptibly but ever so slightly. In the main, its peers have taken those big backward steps more recently. But Pittsburgh has yet to make a substantial move forward.

In that context, Pittsburgh's "stability" may be a recipe for complacency rather than progress. Through a painful and unplanned process of natural "rightsizing" of population, economic activity, and resources, Pittsburgh may have reached some "optimal" scale and be content to remain just the way it is. Is Pittsburgh complacent today? I don't think so -- but there are as many "complacency" ingredients in the contemporary social and political mix as there are "progress" ingredients. The last Pittsburgh politician to push an aggressive "progress" agenda was Mayor Tom Murphy. He was responsible for at least as many spectacular failures (Downtown redevelopment) as successes (attention to the riverfronts), but the city ultimately rejected him. His successors survive in power via popular support for an approach better characterized by the maxim, "Don't just do something; stand there." Which Pittsburgh largely does.

Second: Because "livability" depends significantly on stable property values, it owes much to the relative lack of dynamism in the local real estate market over the last several decades. While markets in places like Southern California, the desert Southwest, and Florida have gone through repeated boom and bust cycles, much of Pittsburgh's market has just motored steadily and quietly on. Western Pennsylvania doesn't smile on speculators, on the whole. Mortgage lending here never got out of hand; foreclosure rates in Western PA are lower than they are in much of the rest of the country. Right now, and from the perspective of real estate values, many homeowners in Pittsburgh are reaping the benefit of the region's inherent good sense. (The property tax system here is a separate question.)

But low and slowly moving real estate values also owe their stability to the fact that demand for real estate is relatively low, and relatively fixed. In this second sense, "livability" means that Pittsburgh is highly livable for the people who already live here, because not that many people are aching to move in. If demand were higher, real estate values overall would move higher -- and Pittsburgh's livability ratings might well decline. Business Week magazine recently ranked the nation's cheapest real estate markets -- places where it may be cheaper to own than rent. Pittsburgh was ranked #2. #1? Detroit. Not exactly a community that's en fuego from a "revitalization" standpoint.

Moreover, to the extent that there is meaningful demand for real estate in Pittsburgh, that demand is distributed unevenly across the region. Like most urban areas, Pittsburgh features its share of upscale, even outright rich communities. And some communities in the city and the region feature real estate that is astonishingly cheap by national standards -- partly because the surrounding economies are all but defunct, partly because of punitive tax laws that discourage sale and development. In this context, "livability" isn't necessarily a good thing -- because of the structure of Pennsylvania's tax laws, cheap real estate translates into poor public services. The Post-Gazette said it well the other day in its report on real estate appreciation across the county: "'House rich' got richer, poor got poorer."

The bottom line is that "livability" is of limited value as a measure of Pittsburgh's revitalization. Pittsburgh has some really interesting choices ahead. Downtown Pittsburgh may be safe and walkable and far more full of interesting things to do, places to live, and sights to see than it was 10 or 20 or 30 years ago. Many of Pittsburgh's neighborhoods are livelier than they have been in a long time. All of that is a great thing, and Pittsburghers are justifiably proud. But low demand is a sympton of things that are worrisome: demand is linked to growth, to wealth creation, and ultimately to the other (expensive) things -- infrastructure reconstruction, for example -- on which the region's continued "revitalization" depends. Even stability -- staying the way that Pittsburgh is now -- requires change. It requires money; it requires investment; it requires new people and new capital to replenish the well as other people and capital leave, as we know they will and do. If these things remain low, Pittsburgh may remain "livable" but struggle in other respects.

Next: Pittsburgh's Green Revolution