Not Pittsburgh Politics

Items I've noticed while focusing on other stuff recently:

New Girl Elaine LaBalme discovered that Cleveland really is a nice place. For all of the passion behind the Pittsburgh/Cleveland rivalry, and for all of the short-term benefit that Pittsburgh derives from performing "better," economically-speaking, than other Rust Belt cities, in the long term Pittsburgh is better off if its counterpart cities (Cleveland, Baltimore, Buffalo, Detroit) are doing well, too.

That's a tall order, I know.

Speaking of Detroit: "It Takes a Village to Open a Bistro," from the New York Times. I would love to read counterpart stories of community enterprise in Pittsburgh.

Eve Picker has boarded the in-migration train. Indeed: As I've written here for some time, as Harold Miller has written on his blog and at the PG, and has Chris Briem has argued at Null Space (and don't forget Jim Russell at Burgh Diaspora), Pittsburgh's real population problem is not that our young people leave. It's that not enough new people move in.

And read this account of yet another debate about Pittsburgh branding.
Because Pittsburgh has reinvented itself, say some, should Pittsburgh have a brand? Does it need a brand? Can Pittsburgh be its own brand? Why isn't Pittsburgh selling its reinvention? Audrey Russo of the PTC makes a critical point: You can't have a brand if you don't have a product. (Well, modern marketers think that you can sell a brand as a brand, but that sort of thing just brings big money to a few people and a lot of trouble to everyone else.) Her quote: "There's cynicism that we haven't been bragging about our achievements ... But in all fairness, there's nothing to brag about yet."